Co-housing, not in Georgia's Cobb County
In Cobb, where there are fewer apartment buildings and little traditional subsidized housing, the most affordable places to live are trailer parks like Castle Lake, or older homes in the county's earliest developments--low-slung brick ranches and split-levels built in the 1960s and 1970s. Politics is a factor here too: Cobb County could have done more but refused to loosen restrictions that control how many unrelated adults can live in a single-family home. Critics say the law was racially motivated, aimed at immigrants who shared houses. "In essence, we limit people's ability to make unaffordable housing affordable," says Lisa Cupid, a Cobb County commissioner who tried and failed to change the 2007 ordinance.
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/sprawled-out-in-atlanta-106500_Page3.html#ixzz31KRMYHOV
As affluent young professionals and older empty nesters flock back into cities across the country in search of better lifestyles, the suburbs left behind are increasingly stuck with a demographic--the working poor and struggling middle class--they were never built to accommodate. Many of these people don't have cars, and many of them can't even easily make it to the bus. In fact, the Brookings Institute has found, fewer than 50 percent of poor suburbanites in metro Atlanta even have access to transit, and what they have is limited.
Bus service in Clayton County, which has a 21 percent poverty rate, was canceled outright in 2010. There is no regular mass transit in exurban counties like Paulding or Bartow. In Cherokee County, there are just two fixed bus routes along with a few park-and-ride connections to the Xpress regional bus system, which brings suburban commuters to downtown and midtown Atlanta. If you don't live or work near one of these nodes, you're out of luck.
Read more: politico.com/magazine/story/2014/05/sprawled-out-in-atlanta-106500_Page4.html.