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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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The recession and the housing crash hit Atlanta hard, but since 2012 recovery has seemed imminent. Is it? Dan Immergluck, a professor of city and regional planning at Georgia Tech, decided to investigate how and whether greater Atlanta housing was recovering. He used home price estimates from Zillow and compared three-bedroom houses in every zip code in the metro region. Home prices in zip codes Immergluck calls "the favored half" had rebounded to where they were at the market's peak. In other zip codes, homes are still worth only about half of what they were in 2001. Immergluck found that one of the primary differences between neighborhoods that have recovered fully and those that have recovered only partially is their racial demographics. Majority-African-American and Hispanic zip codes are recovering more slowly than majority-white zip codes with similar housing stock. Immergluck says the nature of the housing crash might explain the uneven recovery. In the years before the housing bubble burst, minorities were more likely to have had subprime loans and were more likely to have lost their houses. In some neighborhoods, the result was large swaths of homes lost to foreclosure, depressing the value of houses around them.
