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Business|It Was Supposed to Connect Segregated Neighborhoods. Did It Gentrify Them Instead?
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/02/business/atlanta-beltline-success-displacement.html
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The Atlanta Beltline turned a mostly derelict 22-mile loop around the city into a wildly popular — and profitable — urban park. It also contributed to displacing longtime residents.
Visuals by Audra Melton
Jane Margolies explored several miles of the Beltline on foot and bike for this article.
Sept. 2, 2025Updated 9:59 a.m. ET
Even in its unfinished state, the Atlanta Beltline is a wondrous thing, threading under graffitied highway overpasses and rising over bridges.
Since the first section opened in 2012, the $900 million project has transformed nearly 13 of the 22 miles of what was mostly a derelict railway corridor, looping around the Georgia capital’s center.
That first completed section, known as the Eastside Trail, is now a wildly popular 2.4-mile esplanade, with green spaces, restaurants, shops, hotels and office buildings. Big companies like Intuit have moved into buildings overlooking the trail, and the electric car company Rivian is expected to join soon.
With more than 2.5 million visits a year, the Beltline has generated over $9 billion in private investments for the city, according to Atlanta Beltline Inc., the public development authority building the trail. And the project, which has about 11 miles of smaller trails that shoot off the main loop, has offered Atlantans accustomed to driving everywhere a taste of a less car-dependent way of life.
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When a 1.3-mile section on the West Side opened this summer, stitching together two completed trail segments, many residents were excited about the changes that might bring to the area. Arthur Toal, a project manager at the Georgia Institute of Technology, said he was thrilled on a recent afternoon to be able to ride his electric skateboard on a newly paved portion from his home in Howell Station to Washington Park, another West Side neighborhood, without having to cross traffic-choked roadways.
