The City of Atlanta has been working for the past few years on overhauling its zoning ordinances, with the goal of streamlining its processes and updating the code to reflect its design goals as outlined in The Atlanta City Design document released early last year. Since all changes to zoning ordinances must go through the NPUs before being picked up by the City, the Department of City Planning has been spearheading a public information campaign to let the citizens know what's going on.
Earlier this year, a series of "quick fix" changes known as Phase I made its way through the NPUs, but since Phase I occurred during the holidays and the January winter storm, many people felt ambushed by the vote regardless. In response, the City has made greater efforts to get ahead of these changes, including public meetings and presentations at the NPU.
The Planning Department sent us this podcast of one of the Phase II meetings, which we've embedded below. If you're interested in reading the master document outlining the City's goals in all of this, you can either go to
https://www.atlcitydesign.com/ or download a PDF copy of the book at
http://bit.ly/belovedCity (warning: 120MB file). There's also a presentation on Phase II changes specifically at
http://bit.ly/2018_Zoning_Phase_II.