The affordable housing crisis is growing increasingly dire beyond Atlanta’s city limits as prices rise and construction slows in its suburban towns and cities.
But arduous permitting processes and hostile neighbors are making it hard for affordable developers to build units in the fast-growing suburbs for nurses, police officers, teachers and firefighters, panelists said Wednesday at Bisnow’s Atlanta Affordable Housing Summit.
Bisnow/Jarred Schenke
Prestwick Development’s Casey Craven and Beverly J. Searles Foundation’s Philip Searles during the 2025 Atlanta Affordable Housing Summit.
The metro area added roughly a million new residents over the past decade, straining housing availability and affordability across the region, particularly impacting low- to moderate-income households.
Some suburban towns, such as Woodstock, welcome affordable housing, said Philip Searles, the president of senior affordable housing nonprofit developer the Beverly J. Searles Foundation.
“Next door in Roswell, if you breathe the word affordable, they will run you out of the out of the city,” Searles said.
Even if an affordable developer has local government support leading up to public hearings, NIMBYism can derail a planned project, said Searles, whose firm has built a number of affordable senior housing projects in Georgia, including The View Senior Residences in Stone Mountain.
“There’s not a single developer in this room that has not been completely blindsided at a public hearing as it relates to a zoning project where you’ve got the staff support, you’ve got city council support, and then the public gets involved, and all of a sudden you get voted down,” he said.
“Hard to believe in 2025 we’re still dealing with NIMBYism, right?” Green Building Initiative Senior Director Emily Bowers said in response.
Complicated and long permitting and approval times add to the final costs it takes to build an affordable project and impact how much, or how little, a developer can charge for rents, Prestwick Development Vice President Casey Craven said.
“You go out in the suburbs, maybe you can get a better land price,” Craven said. “Then you’re spending your time and efforts trying to convince the local community, you know, this is not what they think it is, and it’s something they need.”
Bisnow/Jarred Schenke
Green Building Initiative’s Emily Bowers, Geheber Lewis Architects’ Patricija Pericic, Prestwick Development’s Casey Craven, Beverly J. Searles Foundation’s Philip Searles and Pennrose’s Ivy Dench-Carter.
Nearly 27% of the cost to build a single-family home in Georgia is attributable to regulation, according to a 2021 study by the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. That outstrips the national average by 400 basis points. But regulatory costs made up 23.4% of the multifamily construction costs, far below the national average of 40.6%, according to the foundation’s study.
Pennrose Senior Vice President Ivy Dench-Carter said during the event at the Wyndham Buckhead hotel that fighting NIMBYism and slow permitting processes have helped push the cost of housing up.
“From a timeline perspective, we all know the longer it takes to get to the closing table, the more obstacles that seem to jump in our way and cost us money along the way,” Dench-Carter said.
Dench-Carter said affordable developers need to know how to present their projects to suburban cities and their residents to make them more palpable. Her firm got a green light for an affordable project in Roswell because she positioned it as housing that will address Roswell residents’ children who earn $80K per year — people who are employed as teachers, police and firefighters.
Bisnow/Jarred Schenke
LDG Development’s Rick Cunningham, Mission Partners’ Margaret Stagmeier, Atlanta Housing Innovation Lab’s Matt Bedsole, Truist Community Capital’s Shannon Longino, The Benoit Group’s Eddy Benoit, Georgia Department of Community Affairs’ Kim Golden and American South Capital Partners’ Tyler Epps.
Developers said onstage that an unforeseen contributor to rising costs is getting fire marshal approval of fire suppression systems.
Margaret Stagmeier, the managing partner of affordable housing developer Mission Partners, said fire marshal demands at one of her projects, an older property that she preserved for affordable renters, added $166 a month to rents. She said the costs could have been avoided had the fire marshal consulted with the developer earlier in the process.
“Everyone knows, every time you raise your rents $100, homelessness increases 10%. So that’s what the fire marshal is doing,” Stagmeier said. “We should not have had all this expense and delay.”
Searles echoed her frustration, adding that even an approved plan from the fire marshal before construction won’t stick when they inspect the finished project.
“I think every developer in the room understands that you can get a stamp from the fire marshal before you start construction, but that doesn’t mean anything,” Searles said. “One of the things that we’re being forced to do is basically having a fire marshal contingency in our construction budget, knowing that they’re going to be asking for some uncertain items.”