Recent Stories

The primary goal of Neighborhood Nexus is to foster a data-driven decision-making culture here in the Atlanta region. What follows is one example of how data and information from Neighborhood Nexus were used to make key decisions that will have lasting ramifications for hundreds of thousands residents in DeKalb County.

One of the most significant changes of the past decade is the changing geography of poverty. Once confined to dense urban centers and remote rural locales, poverty has spread forcefully into the suburbs. But, it's not like poverty has disappeared in the urban core - it increased slightly, in fact, and the heaviest concentrations are still found within a relatively small swath inside the City of Atlanta (See Map 1, attached to this post). But that small increase in the urban core was dwarfed by the increases found in the suburbs.

One of the primary drivers of the Atlanta region's growth over the past 20 years, or so, has been the in-migration of non-white populations, including those born abroad. In fact, between 2000 and 2010, more than 90 percent of the one million-plus new residents added came from non-white populations. The Atlanta region simply is not a bi-racial place anymore, although many of those old settlement patterns persist today.

As the housing bust continues to ripple through Atlanta, Carroll Heights (a neighborhood in NPU-H) as been affected by vacant and foreclosed homes.