Atlanta Beltline Health Impact Assessment

First of all, we have to applaud the City of Atlanta for mustering the foresight to even bother with a Health Impact Assessment. For a city where insightful funding and conscientious planning for any public projects are about as tangible as the bigfoot, it is a huge step forward that Georgia Tech's Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development managed to team up with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the CDC to conduct one of the United States first HIA's.

Let me begin by explaining what the purpose of an HIA is. HIA's are reports that are beginning to create new relationships and strings of dialogue between public health experts and city planners. They seek to understand the relationship that new projects will have with the citizens of a city in terms of their health and quality of life.

According to the HIA report dealing with the proposed Beltline project in Atlanta, the Beltline would greatly increase the health and quality of life of the citizens of Atlanta. It would do this by enhancing air quality and increasing access to parks and healthy foods for many of Atlanta’s residents who rely on public transportation, among other things. The Beltline will also add over 1200 acres of parks and trails for the people of Atlanta.

All of this good however, may not be seen by the current generation of Beltline supporters, as the Beltway funding plan is operating on a 25 year timeframe. This is far too long for the city to take to build a project that could do so much good for the people of Atlanta.

Make no mistake, attention spans are very short in Atlanta politics, if you need evidence of this, one needs to go no further than to look into the all but forgotten plans for the city to help build a new world-class symphony center for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. When it comes to large scale public projects in this city, it seems that the attention spans of our legislatures and officials directly coincide with the election campaign cycle.

The attention span of the people is not significantly better either. If, in say 10 or 15 years, the people can still not see the full benefits of the Beltline, will they still be voting for the candidate who is pledging to continue to spend their tax money on a project that has, as of yet yielded little return for their investment? This is Doubtful. It should also be taken into serious consideration that Atlanta is a rapidly growing city, and 25 years from now, there may be obstacles to the creation of many of the parks and green spaces that simply cannot be removed.

Hopefully, the recommendations offered in the report will be taken seriously, and the officials and city planners involved with the creation of the Beltline will implement these very recommendations. There is a very real possibility that the existence of this report is in fact a symptom of a cultural sea change in the city, where ideals like health and quality of life will be taken more seriously in the future planning of a city that is rapidly growing and in need of many of the amenities that the Beltline can provide.