Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta by Dan Immergluck (review)

Reviewed by: Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta by Dan Immergluck Nabeela Farhat Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in Twenty-First Century Atlanta Dan Immergluck. Oakland, California: The University of California Press, 2022. xiv and 328 pp., figs., notes, and index. $26.95 Paperback (ISBN 9780520387645). Red Hot City: Housing, Race, and Exclusion in the Twenty-First Century Atlanta is an informative book for those interested in urban growth, racial and economic inequality, and politics in contemporary urban America. By using Atlanta, Georgia as a case study, Immergluck offers a comprehensive analysis of the complex interplay between causes and consequences of racialized gentrification, housing segregation, and flawed urban policies within the diversifying urban core. He explores possibilities for local policymakers to create a socially equitable city that has seen rapid demographic and economic change in recent decades. This book consists of five chapters — excluding the introduction and conclusion — and runs a total of 322 pages. In the introduction, Immergluck familiarizes the city of Atlanta as a racially and economically diverse city and illustrates the summary of what is expected in each of the remaining five chapters. In doing so, he lays out the four themes of the book: racial and economic restructuring of Atlanta, the failure of the local government to capture growth in property values, the vital role of the state government in development at the local level, often to the detriment to the most vulnerable, and the presence of inflection points in which planning and policy choices repeatedly favored exclusion and displacement over equity and inclusion. The first chapter Building the Racially Segregated Southern Capital walks through the historical developments that lead to the complex evolution and restructuring of the city of Atlanta. Immergluck provides a well-documented discussion of Atlanta's urban regime, state, and federal programs that helped orchestrate racially exclusionary policies that led to the racialized gentrification, racially exclusive suburbs, and economic exclusion of low-income families. Using maps, Immergluck illustrates the racial and demographic transition of the populations over the decades and shines a light on the expansion, inequality, and politics in the red-hot core of Atlanta. Chapter two The Beltline as a Public-Private Gentrification Project discusses the Beltline, a 22-miles ring of proposed trails and light rail around the core of the city, which was planned to be a corridor to connect the southwest and northeast side through transit. The project aimed to reshape the city physically and demographically, but it was a product of a coalition of institutional actors working towards a vision of an affluent and white city population. Thus, Immergluck dives into the details of how this project became a key contributor to the gentrification of the city. [End Page 154] Chapter three Planning, Subsidy, and Housing Precarity in the Gentrifying City refocuses on the rapidly growing city, highlighting the wider patterns of gentrification and the flawed policies that failed to take advantage of the enormous growth of land values for public benefit, particularly during the 2010 to 2019 period. Immergluck's analysis raises three significant concerns about the public finance system. He delves into the issue of development authorities competing for tax breaks with big commercial developers, the unfairness in property tax appraisals, and policies that limit property tax for wealthy homeowners. Immergluck concludes that the prioritization of capital, excessive subsidies, and under-taxation of commercial properties prevent the public sector from benefiting from the city's economic growth. Consequently, the city's less fortunate residents are missing out on the bulk of the benefits, especially affordable housing. Chapter four Subprimed Atlanta: Boom, Bust, and Uneven Recovery looks at the region as a whole — the city and the suburbs. Immergluck provides empirical and theoretical insights into the aftermath of federal deregulation and yield-hungry capital markets that led to predatory subprime lending, foreclosures, and vacant properties in Black and Latinx neighborhoods. He provides a depth of information on the severely constrained response by the local government and weak federal policies, particularly the Department of Community Affairs (DCA) ineffectiveness, which epitomized the fall of Black homeownership and exacerbated the increasing racial wealth gap. Chapter five Diversity and Exclusion in...