Transplant Wars: From Bankhead to "Upper Westside"

I drove through Atlanta's Bankhead neighborhood for the first time three years ago when Westside Park (now renamed Shirley Clarke Franklin Park after the city's first female mayor) opened to the public. The overwhelming, putrid smell of the nearby wastewater treatment plant hung in the air, and I dodged more than a dozen potholes on the way in. Still, none of it deterred me. After two hours of exploring the park, I decided it was the perfect place to walk my dog Mya and enjoy the outdoors without having to drive 30 minutes to the Atlanta Beltline or hearing "on your left!" every two minutes from the overzealous cyclists on the Silver Comet Trail.  

Over the next few years, I watched the changes happen quickly. New luxury apartment buildings and townhome communities carved up slices of Atlanta's tree canopy block by block. The old-school diner on the corner, The Olympic Flame, that first opened in 1970 was replaced with Midtown Social,  a sleeker, more modern restaurant. A Starbucks appeared at the intersection across from Dollar Tree. MARTA buses sped past a new Publix, a Regions Bank, and two shopping plazas. Even on side streets, single-family homes were bulldozed to make way for upgraded builds with minimalist designs and rooftop decks. Although, the most pervasive sign was the rebranding. 

The name "Upper Westside" began to appear everywhere—on digital billboards, apartment buildings, murals, and street signs. The new name, covering the neighborhoods that stretch from Georgia Tech to the former industrial warehouses and demolished public housing communities, includes the neighborhood that for Black Atlantans had long been known simply as Bankhead. With every visit, the signs of Beltline-era gentrification became harder to ignore. I found myself asking the same questions each time I drove through: Who is pushing this transformation? What are the long-term plans for this area? And more importantly, how are the people who have long called Bankhead home navigating what feels like their erasure?

What's in a name? 

To understand what's happening now, it's important to understand where Bankhead is geographically and what kind of neighborhood it has always been. Bankhead sits on Atlanta's west side, just northwest of downtown. The area  is anchored by Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway (formerly known as Bankhead Highway) and is bordered by historically Black neighborhoods including Grove Park, Knight Park/Howell Station, and the industrial corridors leading into what is now called "West Midtown."  Its major thoroughfares, including  Northside Drive, Marietta Boulevard, and Bolton Road, funnel traffic into the area, providing access to the Mercedes-Benz Stadium and the Atlanta University Center Consortium (AUC). Though infrastructure like The Bankhead MARTA station and the city's western rail terminus made the neighborhood accessible for people and capital, it, like Atlanta's other gentrifying areas, experienced decades of disinvestment.

The name "Bankhead" itself refers to US Route 78 or Bankhead Highway,  an early cross-country auto trail established in 1916 that stretches from Washington, D.C. to San Diego, CA.  Originally named after Alabama senator and Confederate Army Soldier John H. Bankhead, who advocated for expanding the nation's public roadways, the Atlanta stretch of the highway was renamed Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway in 1998, in honor of the civil rights attorney who fought segregation in Georgia,  by freeing Martin Luther King Jr. and others from protest-related incarceration stints, and suing the University of Georgia for denying admission to its first Black students, Hamilton E. Holmes (for whom the westside MARTA station is named) and Charlayne Hunter. The renaming served to shed the area of its tarnished name and high-crime reputation, associated with it being home to the city's largest public housing complexes.

This historically Black neighborhood was shaped by generations of residents who built community in the absence of institutional support. Black Families bought homes on the westside when discriminatory lending practices and white terrorism limited where they could live. Churches, schools, and corner stores became essential infrastructure where the city had fallen short. 

By the 1950s, Bankhead saw steady residential growth, including the construction of street-adjacent bungalows and the Bankhead Courts public housing complex. But that momentum began to shift in the decades that followed. In the 1960s, many white residents relocated to newly developed suburbs in a type of mass exodus known as "white flight."  Fueled by postwar housing desegregation and federal policies that made suburban homeownership more accessible to white families, Bankhead was left with fewer resources and declining investment. 

Despite setbacks, Black families have remained, working to stabilize the neighborhood even as public and private support steadily disappears. Over time, Bankhead's reputation as underdeveloped and unsafe became about the people who lived there and the conditions they were left to navigate. As one of the birthplaces of Atlanta's trap music genre and culture, the stories told in T.I., Shawty Lo, Young Dro, and other artists' music attest, the area was indeed The Trap; however, it did not necessitate the mass displacement of its residents to "improve" the community. 

Grove Park Renewal Executive Director Justin Bleeker acknowledges that criticism of Bankhead's gentrification is justified in an article from Canopy Atlanta. "We're working against 400 years of momentum toward segregation that has kept Black communities, and many communities of color, out of homeownership," he says. "Homeownership rates do need to increase."

That history makes the neighborhood's current transformation feel especially jarring. Today, as Atlanta's growth accelerates and land becomes increasingly valuable, Bankhead has become a site of intense redevelopment.  

The park that changed everything

In  2021,  the city opened  Shirley Clarke Franklin Park (previously called Westside Reservoir Park), a $44 million, 280-acre green space built on the former Bellwood Quarry. This quarry has been the film site of many popular movies and television shows, including The Hunger Games and Stranger Things. The project was widely celebrated, and for good reason. As Atlanta's largest park, it worked to connect the Mayor's office, Atlanta Beltline's, and Watershed Improvement planning priorities to increase the city's greenspaces, improve access to clean water, and introduce a major public amenity to the city's west side. Renaming the park after Mayor Shirley Clarke Franklin, who helped secure the land in 2006, added symbolic weight to the investment. 

The park's name, while historically significant, is deeply ironic, as Franklin is heralded for her tenure as the CEO and Board Chairman of  Purpose Built Communities in the early decades of the 21st century. Spearheaded by real estate and finance titans Tom Cousins, Warren Buffett, and Julian Robertson,  Purpose Built's model combined federal HOPE VI poverty eradication and public housing demolition priorities with Atlanta's development ambitions, to replace East Lake's "severely distressed" public housing communities with new mixed-income communities that relocated thousands of residents without guaranteeing a right of return. Demolishing the infamous East Lake Meadows public housing demolition "revitalized" the community around Cousins' East Lake Golf Course renovation project, which now hosts major PGA tournaments. The Atlanta-piloted Purpose Built model of "poverty reduction" has been replicated in 28 cities across the nation.

Urban planning research has shown that new green spaces can increase surrounding property values and accelerate real estate speculation. This is a phenomenon sometimes referred to as "green gentrification." As urban scholar Winifred Curran explained, environmental improvements can make neighborhoods more attractive to higher-income residents, often at the expense of existing communities.

In Bankhead, that shift was immediate. The proximity to downtown, access to MARTA, and adjacency to rapidly developing West Midtown made it especially attractive to investors. Not long after the park's opening, Microsoft announced plans to build a 90-acre campus nearby. Though the project was later paused amid company layoffs, the signal had already been sent that Bankhead was no longer being overlooked. And once a neighborhood becomes valuable, it becomes vulnerable.

The mechanics of displacement

Bankhead's gentrification pattern is consistent with Atlanta's Beltline-adjacent neighborhoods that rapidly gentrified before the completion of the Westside portions of the trail, and the Shirley Franklin Park completion. Long-time Georgia Tech and Georgia State urban studies professor Dan Immergluck found that the Beltline trail's construction sparking massive real estate price hikes preceded the construction of the trail itself, as speculators drove home and property values to premiums in trail-adjacent neighborhoods as far back as 2003. This, he argues, is largely due to the incentives for redevelopment permitted in the Beltline redevelopment zone and the lax regulatory environment around mega urban revitalization projects, as the oversight and accountability for displacement and other inequitable outcomes pale in comparison to the cultural and economic capital the projects catalyze.  In his seminal book on Atlanta gentrification, Immergluck connects these development patterns to Atlanta's long history of racialized planning and public administration practices that directly contributed to Black neighborhoods like Bankhead's underdevelopment and gentrification.  

In just five years, home values in and around Bankhead surged by more than 300 percent. Homes that once sold for under $150,000 now list for $400,000 or more. New construction exceeds $500,000, with some properties approaching $700,000. In some cases, the increase has been even more stark. A home that sold for less than $50,000 under a decade ago has since been relisted for over $300,000.

At the same time, income growth has not kept pace. In 2021, the median household income in Bankhead was around $37,000. Recent estimates place it between roughly $49,000 and $62,600. This increase still doesn't match the pace of rising housing costs. Today, the median home price sits near $390,000. To afford a home at that price, a buyer would typically need to earn an income of roughly $102,000 or more—assuming a 30-year fixed mortgage, current median interest rate of 6.75%, and a down payment between $0–$20,000. That's nearly double, and in some cases triple, what many longtime Bankhead residents are earning.

At the time, Atlanta City Council member Antonio Brown emphasized the need for accountability: "We have to make sure we're holding developers accountable for being inclusive, especially when coming into low-income Black and Brown communities." But even as incomes rise on paper, the people who have lived in Bankhead for decades are still being priced out of the neighborhood they sustained through its most under-resourced years.

Displacement rarely arrives as a single, dramatic event. More often, it unfolds gradually through policy, pricing, and pressure. In Bankhead and Atlanta,  it looks like rising property taxes that outpace fixed incomes, use of eminent domain, increasing insurance premiums (due in part to climate change), and landlords declining to renew leases in order to sell to developers and people with higher incomes. It also looks like rent hikes that don't correspond with improvements in living conditions.

That experience echoes what others in the neighborhood have described. "We're seeing communities that have been disinvested in for decades suddenly become attractive, but the people who stayed through those hard times aren't the ones benefiting from that investment," a housing advocate told Atlanta Civic Circle.

Without strong tenant protections and with limited affordable housing options nearby, many residents are forced to relocate farther from the city center. That distance comes with its own costs, such as longer commutes, reduced access to public transit, and separation from long-established communities.

Pick up Bankhead, gentrified Brooklyn is calling

What's happening in Bankhead isn't an isolated case. It is part of a broader pattern that has reshaped several Atlanta neighborhoods over the past few decades. A recent report from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition found that six Atlanta neighborhoods—including Old Fourth Ward, Kirkwood, and Edgewood—have flipped from majority-Black to majority-white between 1980 and 2020. During that same period, the city lost roughly 22,000 Black residents. Even in neighborhoods that have not fully "flipped," the shifts are undeniable.

The pattern is both consistent and familiar. It's a cycle that has played out well beyond Atlanta. Neighborhoods like Bedford-Stuyvesant and Williamsburg in New York, Shaw in Washington, D.C., and the Mission District in San Francisco have all experienced similar transformations. According to reporting from Atlanta News First, U.S. Census data shows that Atlanta, Washington, D.C., New York City, Philadelphia, New Orleans, and the San Francisco Bay Area are among the most impacted by neighborhood racial turnover and displacement.

Who benefits from revitalization?

Residents are not inherently opposed to development. Many have long wanted investment in their neighborhoods, such as better infrastructure, safer streets, access to grocery stores, and resources that were historically denied. Development, in itself, is not the issue. What residents question is who that development is designed to serve and whether they will be able to benefit from it or be pushed out by it.

Calls for property tax relief, stronger affordable housing mandates, and meaningful community input have grown louder in recent years. Residents can attend city council meetings and voice their opinions; however, an opinion doesn't always lead to actionable steps, nor is it always a sustainable way to get your voice heard. `

"They tried to 'meeting' us to death and make us give up," Tim Freeman, a local mechanic, told Canopy Atlanta. "You can't keep going to this stuff. Ain't nobody paying you. But most of them that are coming to present, they on payroll for somebody." 

Atlanta's local tenant advocacy organization, The Housing Justice League, indicted the city's growing gentrification-related inequity, lack of accountability for harmful development, and mass displacement in 2017 in their prophetic report Beltlining: Gentrification, Broken Promises, and Hope on Atlanta's Southside, which forecasted a dim future for the city's Beltline-adjacent communities like Bankhead.  Their report, which advocates for the poorest Atlantans, highlights the way both the Beltline and public housing demolition exacerbated the housing and gentrification crisis. As Bankhead residents prepare for Atlanta Housing Authority's redevelopment of the former Bankhead Courts land area, the report's warnings about uneven revitalization efforts remain applicable. 

As Atlanta's growth accelerates, many residents say those efforts have failed to keep pace, leaving them with few protections against rising costs.  Today, the city continues to position itself as a hub for business, technology, and innovation, actively courting corporations and large-scale investment. That strategy has brought visibility and economic growth, but it has also sharpened tensions, especially between the local residents and the transplants that development and gentrification are intended to attract. 

That disconnect plays out in everyday ways. Longstanding calls to expand MARTA and address worsening traffic are often deprioritized in favor of new food halls, luxury developments, and commercial redevelopments. 

For these reasons, Atlanta's gentrification era has catalyzed a war between the redeveloped city for transplants and the rapidly disappearing one legacy residents call home. The question remains: Who wins when the gap between the Atlanta being marketed and the Atlanta people are actually living in is at a disadvantaged default setting? 

What remains

Every week I load my dog in the car and drive to Shirley Clarke Franklin Park. Mya's furry head and drooling tongue hang happily out the window. As I cruise, I  accelerate slowly.  I'm always more concerned with observing the differences I see with the new businesses and the notably less pot-holed roads. 

I noticed the tire shop repainted its sign. The city extended the sidewalk where it used to abruptly cut off into the grass, and the Atlanta Beltline has now extended the trail into the neighborhood. On the backroads, a new roundabout (instead of a four-way stop) improves traffic flow into the park. I still see homeowners holding on as "For Sale" signs multiply, and new townhome construction rises around them. 

Whether they and the other legacy residents who built the neighborhood will be part of that future depends on the choices being made now by developers, policymakers, and the city itself. Their presence is a reminder that neighborhoods are not defined by buildings or property values, but by the people who carry the history of their city proudly forward with the communities that sustained it.