Come aboard the mental time machine to Atlanta in fall 2016: 

Centennial Yards was the barren Gulch. Atlanta’s largest greenspace was an overgrown, inaccessible quarry. South Downtown, in the new sense, was but a twinkle in a German developer’s eye. The former Buckhead Village party district was trying to find its footing as upscale “The Shops Buckhead Atlanta” (a mouthful). 

Elsewhere, renovated turnkey bungalows asking around $200,000 in places like Westview were real. The formal push for Atlanta’s “Upper Westside” was just getting started. Mercedes-Benz Stadium and The Battery Atlanta were massive construction sites. And when you said, “Atlanta Beltline,” you referred to scattered, unconnected, short pieces of multi-use trails around the city, from Old Fourth Ward to Buckhead and converted sidewalks in West End. 

Simply put, a decade can render a growing, amorphous place like the City of Atlanta functionally and fundamentally different. In some instances, way different. 

As a fun, end-of-week exercise, let’s consider what the fall of 2036 in Atlanta is going to look like, as we navigate another round of uncertain times, with a new Georgia governor on the horizon, another Super Bowl some 480 days away, and infrastructure projects that prioritize people over cars coming to fruition left and right. 

Vertical construction progress at New City Properties' Fourth Ward project (first phase) just four years ago. Courtesy of @build_atlanta

Sheer population growth in the city, like many cities, dipped last year to around 7,000—down from 14,300 new residents in 2023. So, let’s guesstimate Atlanta proper will be home to around 100,000 more people in 2036. 

That would make for roughly 650,000 residents in the city proper's sliver alone, give or take. And that’d be far and away the most populous Atlanta in history. 

Not all big ideas have panned out recently, of course. 

Office-to-apartment conversions, especially downtown, are hitting brick walls. The highway-capping Stitch—while spearheaded by motivated leadership that’s applied for a $60-million federal transportation grant, after the Trump administration pulled more than $150 million in grant funds last year—has made no physical progress since 2016, the year it was formally announced. The Midtown Connector concept is D.O.A., and Buckhead’s highway-capping HUB404 project is by all indications on ice. Beltline rail isn’t close to breaking ground. 

Still, this is Atlanta. Nothing stays stagnant for long. 

For this latest installment of Friday fun bag musing, let’s try to picture our fair city in a decade from now, for better and worse. 

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