This southern city is also the State capital of Georgia, but even reapportionment has not brought much aid or understanding of its problems from the State legislature. Rural-dominated, at least until lately, the legislature is accustomed to dealing with the problems of municipalities by ad hoc special legislation. Attitudes on racial distribution, typical of the South, have heightened resistance to regional treatment of the problems of urbanization.

Under subcontract with the Atlanta Region Planning Commission.

General Description of the Atlanta SMSA

The Atlanta SMSA is composed of 5 counties, 44 municipalities, and 9 school districts. The City of Atlanta, with a 1966 population of 499,000, contains more than 40 percent of the SMSA population of 1,211,000. Other municipalities range in size from 40,724 people in East Point to 96 in Chattahochee Plantation. Atlanta lies in Fulton and DeKalb Counties, Fulton being the SMSA's central county. The following table reflects the extent of urbanization in the five counties.

*One of these 2 cities is the DeKalb County portion of the city of Atlanta.

Source:

Atlanta Region Metropolitan Planning Commission, Population and Housing, 1966,
Pp. 12-15.

More than 60 percent of the metropolitan area population lives in incorporated places, although a majority of the people in Clayton, Cobb and Gwinnett Counties lives outside municipalities. Approximately 75 percent of the cities in the SMSA have a population of fewer than 10,000 people, and nearly two-thirds contain fewer than 2,500 people. Fulton and DeKalb Counties are urban in nature; Clayton, Cobb and Gwinnett are substantially rural.

The Atlanta SMSA contains more than 1,700 square miles, nearly 400 square miles of which contain urban development. The central city contains approximately 130 square miles.

Atlanta is the communication and transportation hub of the southeastern region of the nation. The Atlanta SMSA is moderately industrial, containing two automobile assembly plants, an aircraft manufacturer, and a diversified list of smaller industrial firms. Nearly every agency of the state and federal government is represented in Atlanta. District offices of the Internal Revenue Service, the Federal Reserve System, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and other national agencies offer many jobs to clerical workers. The Georgia State Government is centered in the city, and Atlanta's portion of state level governmental activity is substantial. In the private sector, manufacturers' representatives and district sales offices of industrial, insurance, and consumer service firms expand the city's total office space requirements to more than 8 million square feet as of 1967. All this activity is expected to expand steadily during the next ten years.