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From CityLab:

A twelvemonth agone this week, Jason Lary was sworn inward equally mayor of his brainchild, the build novel metropolis of Stonecrest exterior of Atlanta. Now Stonecrest is a frontrunner to the world the novel Amazon headquarters. How’d he produce it?

Earlier this month, Brentin Mock reported on the burgeoning cityhood movements exterior of Atlanta. Now he talks amongst the mayor of the newest metropolis on Atlanta’s outskirts, Stonecrest.

You may convey heard close the Amazon HQ2 proposal from Georgia offering municipal naming rights to the corporate behemoth—as in, the companionship could have its ain metropolis called Amazon, Georgia. That offering came from the metropolis of Stonecrest, which sits close twenty miles due east of the metropolis of Atlanta. 

Stonecrest has only, itself, been a metropolis since 2017. Residents of the formerly unincorporated expanse of southeast DeKalb County voted inward Nov 2016 to officially contain into a city. It is 1 of the to a greater extent than recent municipal experiments to hatch across the county, in addition to tube Atlanta equally a whole, since the plough of the century.

Stonecrest elected its outset mayor, Jason Lary, on March 21, 2017. He was sworn inward half dozen days after making Tuesday his one-year anniversary. Lary is besides the individual who came upward amongst the Stonecrest metropolis concept in addition to who planned it for 4 years earlier taking it to the the world legislature for a vote inward 2016. The city’s formation is non without haters, though. Sam Rosen wrote close the “controversial cityhood movement” happening unopen to Atlanta for The Atlantic final year, explaining that the master copy impetus for unincorporated suburbs to municipalize may convey been driven at to the lowest degree inward utilization past times racism.

Many of the neighborhoods that became cities, starting inward the 2000s, were predominantly white in addition to upper-income enclaves that wanted to a greater extent than command of how their revenue enhancement dollars were used past times DeKalb County. Prior to becoming cities, the unincorporated areas depended on the county to deliver services such equally garbage collection, policing, sewage maintenance in addition to edifice inspection. As cities, these places tin dismiss contract amongst individual entities to operate these services inward a to a greater extent than controlled in addition to localized environment. 

Stonecrest was the outset majority-black metropolis to shape from this cityhood displace inward DeKalb County, in addition to and hence far it is the exclusively metropolis to shape inward the county’s southern parts, where the mass of the African-American population lives. There is currently some other proposal to municipalize the balance of South DeKalb into a city called Greenhaven, but it is meeting massive resistance.

It’s like to the resistance that met Lary when he spearheaded the Stonecrest metropolis effort. (“You cannot live on a cotton wool ball for the sort of operate I’m doing,” Lary told Rosen for The Atlantic. “It’s some Jimmy Hoffa-level work.”) For those who oppose cityhood inward DeKalb County, the fears are, mostly, that residential property values volition collapse in addition to that taxes volition rise, specially if the metropolis has a bulk non-white population. The question inward general, does non back upward that anxiety, but Stonecrest, which has an almost completely dark population, has at to the lowest degree a year’s worth of information from its ain beingness to exam those claims.....MORE