In the new series From Harm to Healing, Capital B is putting a spotlight on how pollution and environmental dangers are threatening Black communities, and the people who are working to fight back against these threats to health.
For longtime resident Tristain O’Donnell, who has lived in the southwest Atlanta neighborhoods of Capitol View and Adair Park for nearly 18 years, the presence of abandoned, decaying sites was impossible to ignore.
She said this was particularly true near University Avenue, where an old trucking facility once greeted drivers with rust and broken windows.
“It felt, for lack of better word, unsafe, just from the optics because it was this abandoned space, and it’s the first thing you see when you get off the highway,” O’Donnell told Capital B Atlanta.
Across Atlanta and in cities nationwide, decades-old industrial sites have been left behind, and with them comes environmental and communal burdens.
Abandoned rail lines, derelict factories, and forgotten storage yards can contain toxic chemicals like lead, arsenic, and volatile organic compounds. These “brownfields” contaminate soil and groundwater with hazardous chemicals, causing health risks, and depressing property values.
Low-income neighborhoods and communities of color tend to be most impacted by these polluted sites.
America began to tackle its industrial past and clean up communities in the 1990s as the Environmental Protection Agency established the Brownfields Program in 1995. It provides federal dollars to states and cities looking to redevelop their neighborhoods.
Atlanta joined this movement with one of the city’s most transformative projects: the Beltline, which is a 22-mile loop of former railroad corridors reimagined as trails, transit, and parks. And while most Atlantans have come to know the Beltline as a convenient green space throughout the city, at the heart of the project is an environmental justice component.
Since it began in 2005, the Beltline project has not only provided recreational opportunities with its walking trails and parks, but it has cleared toxic soils from around 156 acres across Atlanta, according to Atlanta Beltline Inc., the public development authority overseeing the Beltline’s construction.
Kevin Burke, director of design at Atlanta Beltline Inc., told Capital B Atlanta that the most common chemicals that have been found in remediated areas of the abandoned railroads included arsenic and lead.
This year, for the Beltline’s 20th anniversary, residents and officials with Atlanta Beltline Inc. are reflecting on how the project has changed the health and environment of Atlanta and are looking back on how it was all made possible.
While some critics say that the Beltline has contributed to the housing affordability crisis in the city, O’Donnell said that because of the Beltline and its revitalization of previously neglected areas in her community, the southwest side of the city has been transformed. The old trucking facility that once was a sore point for her community has now been turned into a large development project that is connected to the Beltline’s Southside trail.
“It’s a good example of how the changes feel and as you’re coming into the area, it just feels different now. And so a lot of those buildings have created a different feel now of a community that is growing and not just static and blighted,” O’Donnell said.
Transforming abandoned land
The Beltline began as an idea laid out in the 1999 thesis of a Georgia Tech graduate, Ryan Gravel, who noticed that abandoned railroad tracks formed a circle around the city. He envisioned the Beltline as transit and public spaces that connected neighborhoods around Atlanta, but through the support of community members, local officials, and nonprofit organizations, the Beltline transformed into what it is today: walking trails, greenspace, and community hubs around the city.
To build the Beltline, the city needed to acquire the land, decontaminate it, and then build pathways and green space, but first it needed money. According to Atlanta Beltline Inc., the original projected cost for the entire project, which includes plans for future transit, was projected at $2.77 billion. An updated projection from 2013 put the total at $4.39 billion.
The largest chunk of the financing came from the Beltline Tax Allocation District, or TAD, established in December 2005. This funding approach enabled the city to use anticipated increases in property tax revenue from growing property values around the Beltline to borrow money for the project’s development.
Since then, around $750 million has been raised through the TAD to fund the project.
Other funding to support the project has come from state and federal grants, as well as philanthropic and corporate contributions.
While raising the money, the city began obtaining abandoned railroads, a hard-fought battle that cost millions of dollars and years of negotiations.
“Railroad [companies] are notoriously difficult to work with,” Gravel, who is now an architect and author of a book about the Beltline, told Capital B Atlanta. “They have no incentive to let people use rail corridors because once people get on them, it’s very difficult to get people off if they ever want to use that railroad in the future.”
According to Gravel, one of the lines, located in the northeast quadrant of the Beltline, cost the city around $65 million to buy.
Once the city got ownership of the land, it began cleaning the brownfields.
Burke, the Beltline’s design director, said that in order to figure out how much toxic soil needed to be removed from the acquired land, small plots of soil had to be tested across the entire property. Once officials figured out where the clean soil on the property began, they could make calculations on how much toxic soil needed to be replaced.
He said that the contaminated soil is taken to disposal sites located throughout the state.
According to Atlanta Beltline Inc., soil remediation has cost around $20 million. In total, around 156 acres of soil have been remediated throughout the Beltline’s creation.
Ripple effects in neighborhoods
Cleaning up the brownfields to create the Beltline caused a chain reaction in Atlanta, said Kim Wilson, vice president of design and construction at Atlanta Beltline Inc.
Nearby property owners had a strong incentive to start cleaning up their parcels, too. Nearly $10 billion in private investment has followed the trail’s construction, turning abandoned industrial sites into things like town houses, restaurants, markets, and community spaces.
“The housing, business and economic development that follows wherever we put the trail in, pushes developers to use the land on both sides adjacent [of the trails],” Wilson said.
The Beltline also became an urban oasis of trees, after the authorities established a partnership with Trees Atlanta and created the Atlanta Beltline Arboretum — 85 acres of greenspace managed along 13 miles of the Beltline trail. The arboretum contains more than 9,000 trees and hundreds of thousands of native grasses and flowers, all of which help cool the air and reduce flood risk, Wilson said.
O’Donnell has watched the change unfold in her community, Adair Park, and also in the neighboring community of Capitol View. Forgotten industrial sites, like the Lee + White complex in the West End, have now become popular community hubs.
“By replacing old, abandoned places that are just unused, it made it easier for the area to continue to expand,” O’Donnell said. “It’s not just plots of land out here, but they’re taking old, unused buildings that are blighted, that are just continuing to rot and age and turning them into useful spaces.”
Because of the Beltine, O’Donnell said, she and her neighbors are exercising more, too. Around 80 free fitness classes are offered each month at the Beltline, and nearly 30,000 people have participated in Beltline running events since its inception, according to Atlanta Beltline’s website.
“People are getting outside more without even thinking about it,” O’Donnell said. “It has made being healthy easy.”
Increased housing costs
Housing and rental prices along the Beltline have risen sharper than elsewhere in the city.
A study conducted by Dan Immergluck, an urban studies professor at Georgia State University, showed that from 2011 to 2015, prices rose between 18% and 27% more for homes within a half-mile of the Beltline compared to homes further away from it.
And while the city pledged in 2005 to create and preserve 5,600 affordable units within the Beltline TAD by the end of 2030, some longtime residents worry about eventually being priced out.
Brian Sumlin, a resident of Capitol View, told Capital B Atlanta that he is enrolled in Atlanta Beltline’s legacy resident retention program, an initiative that aims to counteract displacement as it covers the cost of increased property taxes for residents living in west and southwest Atlanta neighborhoods.
The program ends in 2030, but Sumlin is hoping there will be an extension of the initiative.
“I love my neighborhood. I’m just afraid that I won’t be able to stay,” he said.
Sumlin and other residents welcome development, but he said that they’ve had to fight back against some developers to ensure that their projects are benefiting the already existing community.
“Most of our experiences, as far as my neighborhood is concerned, whenever a project comes to town … it’s a bully,” he said. “If you’re building a project of a significant magnitude, it’s going to have impacts on the community with traffic and all that stuff.”
Lessons for other cities
Other places that have taken on similar initiatives and have succeeded in turning old railroads into public spaces include Railroad Park in Birmingham, Alabama, which, according to AL.com, is “a hub for health and wellness activities and welcomes nearly 600,000 annual visitors.”
And there’s also The High Line in New York City, which has enabled more than 500 species of trees, shrubs and grasses to be planted, helping to preserve biodiversity in the surrounding area.
Transforming brownfields into public assets restores more than soil — it revitalizes ecosystems, increases mobility, and boosts neighborhood confidence.
The Beltline shows how environmental cleanup can become the backbone of community revitalization when paired with green space, walkability, and an equity-minded development strategy.
It also demonstrates that healthy habits emerge naturally when communities have safe, connected places to gather.
“People want to see more use of existing buildings and spaces that will make the community more cohesive and bring the community together,” O’Donnell said.
