In a display of intense neighborhood activism like few observers had ever seen, a Grant Park resident speaking out against an influx of new housing near his block accidentally convinced an influential governing board on Friday his own home expansion plans should be denied.
Roughly 65 meeting attendees who witnessed the dramatic episode before the Grant Park Zoning Authority described the actions of retiree Terry Lancaster as unchecked preservationist fervor and NIBMYism at its most vile, loud, and boneheaded.
Lancaster, 68, was briefly hospitalized after the meeting but has since been released to recover at home.
The mix-up started when Lancaster, by his own admission, spent too much time prior to Friday’s monthly zoning meeting “pregaming” at a Memorial Drive coffee shop. He drank espresso until a manager informed him it was against company policy to serve him another caffeinated beverage. According to employees, Lancaster squealed his Ford F-250 tires in the parking lot while leaving.
Since retiring as a history professor from Central Georgia State College, Lancaster has been a fixture at neighborhood zoning meetings, an outspoken opponent of change in general.
He’s rallied against plans for a townhome community on a former urban dump, a fire station expansion funded by donors, and an Earth Day celebration that would have added 27 oak saplings next to sidewalks near Lancaster’s 1918 Arts & Crafts bungalow. (He decried the plantings as “a desecration of perfectly empty grass.”) He founded in 2021 the nonprofit RAAHD, or Reasonable Atlantans Against Housing Development, which has accumulated nearly 700 anonymous members with big online personalities but no record of attending in-person meetings. Critics say Lancaster is known to spend his evenings “poisoning” the online review sections of new Grant Park businesses—including a daycare built in a vacant storage facility—and Habitat for Humanity.
Lancaster, who is divorced and lives alone, filed plans with the city in December to expand his four-bedroom bungalow. According to permit applications, he intended to tack on a 1,500-square-foot wing that would primarily house “knickknacks” and various “large bovine collectibles” he’s accrued over occasional antiquing binges since 1979. The architecture plans alone had cost Lancaster $59,000, per the filings.
At January’s zoning meeting, Joey Bronson, head of pro-housing advocacy group More ATL Housing Yesterday, pointed out the “vicious irony” in Lancaster’s request, given his track record of “frothing, berserk opposition” to altering Grant Park’s housing stock in any way. Especially when proposals involve secondary housing units in backyards, Bronson said.
Lancaster has defended his home expansion quest as a “lifestyle necessity that’s been sufficiently earned” because he was there first.
As Friday’s zoning meeting unfolded, Lancaster appeared agitated and slightly red in the third row, donning a grey patterned blazer and gold-tinted spectacles. Zoning board member Tasha Miller quipped to a colleague—as was caught by her microphone, unbeknownst to her—that “our most obnoxious NIMBY” appeared to have been “a bit geeked out.”
The first agenda item to draw Lancaster’s wrath was a proposed mulch donation from Arborist Enhancements Group that would have circled the tallest trees around Grant Park’s largest meadow with fresh wood chips. Lancaster, speaking from the dais, lambasted the idea as a “monumental waste of road space, to get this stuff there” and strangely threatened to “call FEMA.”
Befuddled zoning board members trying to make sense Friday of Lancaster's FEMA threat. Shutterstock
Lancaster also spoke briefly against a proposal to paint playground equipment in preparation for summer months. And a community garden project on a United Baptist Church side yard. Lancaster ripped the fourth agenda item—a bakery’s request to replace two parking spaces with outdoor seating—as being “the moral equivalent of smut in a historically protected vehicle district.”
Next came a new proposal from developers Maximum Equity Bros. to build a triplex where a dilapidated 1980s dwelling stands today on Bottoms Avenue. (Later, Bronson, the pro-housing advocate, described Lancaster’s reaction to the triplex news as “pants-shittin' nuclear” after medics had cleared the zoning board chambers.)
Luke Beauregard, Maximum Equity’s chief extraction officer, said the triplex is fully financed, and if approved for multifamily zoning would break ground in June. He was declining at length to estimate what units might cost—until a physical struggle to keep Lancaster from the dais microphone erupted.
After a few seconds, the espresso-jacked sexagenarian prevailed. Lancaster told the zoning board the triplex was offensive in that it would stand within 400 yards of his upstairs closets and could impact “historic view corridors” from one of those rooms.
“Look, we’ve all been here, living and breathing history, for at least six years,” Lancaster told the board. “It’s important that, at some point, we have to reach behind us, grab the knob, and shut that proverbial door before these lots are all gone. If we don’t, we’ll find ourselves oozing multiplexes, tiny Zoomer shacks, and seriously affordable housing.”
When Miller, the councilmember, suggested Lancaster’s opinion was based in “xenophobic delusions,” the chronic naysayer was so furious and triggered he threatened a lawsuit. In a fury, while he had the room’s attention, he also preemptively objected to all remaining proposals on the agenda—including the expansion of his own home.
Given the outburst, and the applicant's self-inflicted rejection, the zoning board leapfrogged several agenda items in order to promptly, unanimously deny Lancaster’s personal project. (Miller noticeably snickered.) Bronson, also laughing, jogged to the podium to thank the board for standing up to “resistance run amok.”
At that point, Lancaster murmured several derogatory terms for young people, fainted, and dropped to the carpet. His cellphone, face up on the floor, was open to a Google search: “Where to buy lets go brandon flag.”
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