Atlanta’s Black businesses are under threat. Here’s how we can save them.

Corridors like Sweet Auburn and West End rose to national prominence as centers of Black entrepreneurship, culture and economic self-determination. But today, the market forces reshaping this city are threatening to undo that legacy. Not through neglect, as in decades past, but through a kind of growth that leaves the people who built these neighborhoods behind.

Between 2016 and 2025, average asking commercial rents across Atlanta rose 32%. In the corridors where Black-owned businesses are most concentrated, the pressure is even more acute.

Small storefronts under 1,500 square feet that typically house barber shops, bookstores and neighborhood restaurants are increasingly scarce, replaced by oversized spaces with price tags that only national chains can afford.

And the ownership divide is staggering: Black residents make up the vast majority of these communities but own only a small fraction of the commercial properties where they live and work.

Toolkit lays out strategies across four pillars

Credit: Mecca Gamble McConnell

Credit: Mecca Gamble McConnell

This is not just a business problem. Our research found that neighborhoods with a higher density of Black-owned small businesses see measurably better outcomes for all children and families.

These businesses hire locally, circulate dollars within their communities and serve as cultural anchors that shape a neighborhood’s identity and safety. When they disappear, entire corridors feel the loss in jobs, in services, in the social fabric that holds a community together.

That is why Kindred Futures built the Staying Power toolkit. Released this February, it is a practical playbook designed for Atlanta’s policymakers, developers and community leaders and anyone else with a stake in ensuring that growth doesn’t come at the cost of displacement.

The toolkit focuses on 10 historically Black business districts where demographic vulnerability and market pressure collide: Westside Park, Grove Park, Bankhead, Sweet Auburn, Peoplestown, West End, Lakewood Heights, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive SW, Cascade Heights and Campbellton Road. Rather than treating them as a monolith, we sort these corridors into distinct typologies (high-growth, industrial, legacy) so that the right tools reach the right places at the right time.

The tools themselves are concrete. We lay out strategies across four pillars:

Each comes with an implementation road map, case studies from cities that have done it, and guidance on who should lead.

People who built these corridors deserve to stay here

Credit: The Atlanta Journal Constitution

Credit: The Atlanta Journal Constitution

We did not build this toolkit in a vacuum. Through our Rooted Policy Labs, we have been convening commercial real estate developers, community finance practitioners, small business owners and neighborhood leaders across Atlanta to identify what is broken and what is possible. What we hear, consistently, is that the will exists but the infrastructure does not. Atlanta’s commercial affordability ecosystem is fragmented, underresourced, and skewed toward debt rather than the ownership models and stabilization tools that our entrepreneurs and residents actually need.

The city has an opportunity to change that. Atlanta already has inclusionary zoning for housing. It has a BeltLine Overlay District and a growing set of tools for residential anti-displacement. But when it comes to commercial space, there are almost no equivalent protections. No citywide definition of commercial affordability. No commercial tenant protections. No automatic affordability requirements tied to public land, zoning bonuses, or incentives. Public investment is, in some cases, unintentionally accelerating the very displacement it should be preventing.

Other cities are moving. Portland created a formal affordable commercial tenanting policy. Detroit launched a streamlined zoning program that unlocked vacant industrial corridors for local entrepreneurs. Philadelphia explored commercial tax abatements to stabilize long-term property owners in gentrifying districts. San Francisco’s Community Opportunity to Purchase Act gives tenants and nonprofits the first right to buy buildings before outside investors. Atlanta — with its deep bench of Black entrepreneurial talent and its stated commitment to equity — should not be playing catch-up.

What we are asking for is not radical. It is a recognition that commercial space is a community asset, and that the market alone will not protect it. It is an investment in the idea that the people who built these corridors deserve to stay in them, build wealth from them, and pass that wealth on.

The strategies exist, the data is clear, and the coalition is growing. What we need now is the political will to act before more storefronts go dark.

Alex Camardelle-Floyd, Ph.D., is vice president of policy and research at Kindred Futures, an Atlanta-based organization that activates shared prosperity through impactful solutions, movement building and catalytic capital. The “Staying Power” toolkit is available at kindredfutures.org.

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