Rich Mintz  

I follow the news from the city I lived in from 1999 to 2007, and a couple of things I’ve read recently, such as this short piece from the Economist’s American politics blog, have got me wondering whether Atlanta — like Phoenix and Las Vegas — may have hit its growth ceiling in the current recession, and whether the Atlanta of, say, 2030 might not be somewhat smaller than today’s.

I’m not talking about the city of Atlanta (2008 pop: 537,000), the municipality at the heart of the metro area, which has absorbed rapid growth over the past decade (due to both densification and immigration) and can presumably absorb plenty more on its ample vacant land. I’m talking about the Atlanta metropolitan area (oops, the “Atlanta-Sandy Springs-Marietta MSA”) — the agglomeration of 20 counties, covering an area the size of Massachusetts, that is home to 5.4 million people.

Much of that land — and virtually all the land outside the Perimeter, except along traditional rail and road corridors like US 41 — was rational to develop only in an economy that counted on three things: unlimited cheap gasoline married to an unlimited willingness to build new highway mileage; endless real estate appreciation, leading to endless speculative residential construction; and a core city of Atlanta that was perceived as unsafe, tax-hungry, and crumbling. The recession’s taken care of the first two; and the third has been taking care of itself, as the city has spiffed itself up, embraced its advantages, and started living within its means. (When I left for good, the city of Atlanta was a much nicer and better-kept place to live than when I arrived eight years earlier, and the progress has continued.)

Geographically speaking, Atlanta is in an arbitrary spot. It is located where it is because of the decisions of railroad-builders and local boosters more than a century ago. Unlike most American cities, it is not on a river, not on the fall line, not on a traditional trade route. And it’s so far up in its watershed — in the Piedmont of the Appalachians — that even something as basic as water can by no means be taken for granted.

When I was in high school, the late Father John Gill, who taught me 9th-grade European history — and was also a California history fetishist, and our chaplain, and probably one of the most interesting adults who took me seriously before I moved away for college — said that if we wanted to make a mint, we should all study riparian law. He was thinking of California (where it’s also true), but his advice would have been useful in Georgia, too. The endless squabbling with Florida and Alabama over water rights — in which, the Economist writer points out, all of Georgia downstream of the Atlanta metropolitan colossus inherently sides with Florida and Alabama — may well be resolved in the favor of those downstream, which would make it difficult to sustain a population the size of Atlanta’s indefinitely without major civil engineering projects.

The City of Atlanta — the hole in the doughnut — will likely be fine. Dense enough to justify infrastructure investment, it’s also proportionally wealthier now than it was in the 1970s and 1980s, so a solution will be found to serve the water needs of 600,000, or 800,000, or a million. But at least two or three of the remaining four million in the metro area are living unsustainably, and as foreclosures hollow out their neighborhoods and job losses devastate the county tax bases, there’s going to be a lot of shrinkage in the doughnut itself. And it looks like the go-go days of a decade ago are probably gone for good.

In the long term and even the medium term, that probably means densification, infrastructure, and quality-of-life improvements that my old friends in Grant Park and Candler Park and East Atlanta and Decatur, and the other inner neighborhoods I used to frequent, will get to enjoy. But it will also mean a lot of pain, spread out over a decade or two, for people who bought into an unsustainable lifestyle in places like Suwanee and Buford.

Because I have a geeky side (shh, don’t tell), I’m a subscriber to various roadgeek email lists, where I was recently reminded that there exists a longstanding web site to keep track of which US counties you’ve visited, and people actually do this. And are competitive about it.

And have arguments about what kinds of visits count. Some people say it only counts if you step into the county courthouse. Some people say you have to see the county courthouse, or set foot in the zip code where the main post office for the county seat is located. Some people say it doesn’t count unless your feet touch the bare earth of the county, so changing planes doesn’t count unless you step out of the airport. (Note: That rule is patent lunacy. Oh, and on an unrelated note, I count myself as having set foot in France due to stepping out through border control and back in while changing planes at Charles de Gaulle on the way from Hamburg to Atlanta. I never left the airport, but my passport says I was in France, so I was in France!)

But most people, myself included, respect a looser standard that permits what someone on the list recently referred to as “bipping,” which means taking a detour on a road trip to drive just over the county line of a new county, and then turning right back around and going on your way. (That is how I first set foot in Vermont, back in about 1984, by making a side trip from Keene, New Hampshire, and getting out of the car in the parking lot of a place called Basketville, no joke. It’s also how I first visited Alabama, and I remember finding it funny that the road I was on, in northwest Georgia — in Chattooga County, if you want me to be precise — turned to a dirt track at the Alabama state line. But I digress)

Many years ago I started keeping track of my Georgia counties visited (which, I see, are far out of date at this point — the ones I bothered to tag comprise mostly metro Atlanta and the road to Savannah). I just now filled in my Arkansas counties visited, which you can see by clicking the image above. To fill in the whole US, it’s going to take some time and some reconstruction with a good map that shows county lines in front of me, but I’ll get there. And then I’ll be able to show you a gigantic US map of every place I’ve ever been.