CityLab’s series on metro Atlanta’s cityhood movement follows how new cities have been forming across that region, mostly from unincorporated areas—land that falls under county governance, but doesn’t belong to any particular city. In most other regions of the U.S., unincorporated domains are usually found in rural or exurban areas. But in metro Atlanta, these unincorporated parts are often heavily urbanized communities that barely differ from the cities they neighbor. One of the newest and most controversial cityhood cases involves a city south of Atlanta in Henry County—Stockbridge. Some of its wealthy communities are looking to break off to form a new city called Eagle’s Landing.The boundaries around these new cities are often drawn along race and class lines, usually encompassing neighborhoods of majority-white populations that also represent the wealthier portions of a county. This describes DeKalb County, the focus of most of CityLab’s cityhood series, where since 2008, communities of wealthier and whiter gentries have incorporated into cities, allowing them to shelter some of their tax revenue for their own use.The segregation that, in many ways, defines metro Atlanta’s topography makes it easy for communities to indulge in this kind of municipal sorting. Most of DeKalb County’s whitest and wealthiest neighborhoods are in its northern stretches, and that’s where most of the new cities have been formed. The majority-black city of Stonecrest, which formed last year, is in what’s considered “South DeKalb,” which is where most of the county’s black families reside.
