I’m not an attorney, but Cobb County made sure I was literate

Atlanta has embraced a hyper-complex zoning regime enforced by an illiterate bureaucracy, and my magic gravel™️ plus driveway has become the case study in why that’s a problem. When you mix HOA-style control with the City’s monopoly on force and a few side-hustling bureaucrats, you don’t get good planning; you get arraignments over magic gravel™️.

As a graduate of Lassiter High School in Cobb County, I can at least say this for them: they made sure I was literate. Scientific literacy was another matter. My honors physics textbook had that now-infamous Selman v. Cobb County sticker warning me about the dangers of Darwin and evolution — in physics, for reasons still unknown. But the words on the page? I was taught they mattered, that you read the text and argue from there, not from vibes.

At the University of South Carolina (yes, I went from being a Trojan to a Cock, insert your own joke here), that sticker became Exhibit A in my English 101 Critical Reading and Composition class when discussing the fundamentals of argument. And I was the one poor sap in the class who had that sticker in my textbook. 

Fast forward a few years, add a career in analysis, and give me some time thanks to an unexpected layoff (my LinkedIn if you want to hire me), and I’ve got more time to read opinions and code sections than is probably healthy. Dear Leader/Former Representative/Editor-in-Chief/Turned Lobbyist, Scot Turner sent me a Supreme Court of Georgia decision he thought would resonate with my ongoing saga with the City of Atlanta. Ninety-seven pages later, I can confirm: it does.

The case is Republican National Committee v. Eternal Vigilance Action, Inc., also known as “Scot v. The Dumpster Fire Formally Known as the State Elections Board.” Scot’s text to me is far more concise than the opinion: “When government staff enforce an interpretation that changes people’s rights and obligations, the interpretation needs a solid anchor in enacted law, because otherwise the executive branch is effectively legislating.” Hold that thought.

My Magic Gravel™️ vs. Atlanta’s HOA With a Gun

In my last piece, Atlanta Can’t Read, and That’s a Problem, I laid out more of the saga regarding trying to improve my property in a way that makes sense for my family. The City does not think I should be able to do that. Their “interpretation of code” lacks a textual basis in the code. The code:

Lot coverage: A percentage factor which, when multiplied by the total area of any lot within the R-1 through R-5 district, establishes the total area of impervious surface which may be built on said lot. Impervious surface shall include the footprint of the main structure, driveways, turnarounds, parking spaces, and all accessory structures, including patios, decks, tennis courts, swimming pools, and similar structures.

Notice what’s not in there: gravel, void space, infiltration rates, patio definition, or anything else that might distinguish a pervious surface from a slab of concrete.

My #3 gravel has 43.75% void space (yes, I measured), sitting on soil that drains at roughly 2.02 inches per hour. In plain English, it drains better than concrete and is more environmentally friendly than maintaining sod. The dogs (Nucleus and Proton, aka Duchess, are still available at Lifeline Animal Project, and Lifeline named them, not me) don’t track mud in the house, the stormwater has somewhere to go, and the watershed is better off than when there was solid concrete there.

Watershed Management’s Office of Site Development and the Office of Zoning hate this. The numbers don’t matter. The photos don’t matter. The text of the code doesn’t even really matter. What matters is that the bureaucracy has decided “gravel” lives in the same conceptual bucket as “impervious,” and if the meter reader thinks you’ve sinned against lot coverage, welcome to the sacramental rite of the stop-work order.

After the first stop-work order from the Office of Buildings, I did what a good citizen is supposed to do: I started the permitting process to fix it. I even had a video chat with a Watershed employee to walk through the site plan. My camera was on; theirs was off. I assumed that was just normal remote-Atlanta behavior.

A week or so after that video call, I received a second stop-work order. I thought it was related to Public Works/DOT replacing some sidewalk and the driveway apron. I had been resistant to this for a year and a half. I already didn’t have a driveway, so I figured I’d let them spend money on concrete and get some beer money out of it for when I could finally pour the rest of my driveway. It also seemed very on-brand for Atlanta to harass itself.

I was wrong. The second order came as a result of that same Watershed employee, using my own permit-application photos as evidence. I had heard of “hostile witnesses,” but not “hostile screenshots.” Keep in mind, this was Halloween, and I’d started trying to right this ship back in July.

For all this, I now have an arraignment scheduled because I did not have a preconstruction meeting with Watershed, and the “disturbed land” was already disturbed, having been previously concrete — the bureaucratic equivalent of charging someone with vandalism for removing carpet and polishing the underlying hardwoods. If I were building a three-story apartment building, this might make sense. Instead, I’m going to court because I swapped out concrete for gravel that improves the watershed without asking, “Mother, may I?”

The System That Produces This Nonsense

Atlanta has not only fully embraced zoning but has also adopted the “more is better” approach. The City currently has 268 zoning districts when you add the base map, special-purpose districts, and overlays. That’s before you get to the special public interest districts like SPI-25, the Tuxedo Park Neighborhood District, where the neighborhood literally codified its preferences into law.

This is central planning cosplay, except the cosplayers have guns and a jail. No planner or committee of planners can accurately predict a city’s growth patterns over 20 to 50 years and then dictate which parcel should be residential, which should be duplex-with-no-parking, and which should be forever-single-family-because-the-neighbors-like-them-that-way. Giving unelected bureaucrats the power to tell you that a house nine feet from the street is a crime, but ten feet back is civilization, is nonsense.

We’ve taken the worst parts of HOAs — deed restrictions, lawn police, and Karen & Chad’s opinions about your landscaping — and married them to the City’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence. An HOA can fine you; Atlanta can arrest you. Atlanta has decided to use that power to obsess over my magic gravel™️. At the same time, basic city functions limp along on a good day.

Remember the 2021 election, when Amir Farokhi’s pitch included the radical promise: “We’ll pick up the garbage on time?” That wasn’t a rhetorical flourish. In KLB’s last year as mayor, it was a legitimate question whether your trash, recycling, or yard waste would be left at the curb in any given week. As Wykeisha Howe has documented over and over, the water system isn’t exactly a model of reliability either. But by all means, let’s focus on the rocks in my backyard.

Layer on top of that our insistence on the strong-mayor system. The mayor appoints department heads, which means someone with no actual city management background gets to place their buddies in charge of entire agencies. Those buddies may or may not have relevant expertise, but they always have one thing in common: they owe their jobs to one person.

Personally, I’m a fan of technocratic government — but competent technocratic government. I want literate technocrats who read the code the way it is written, not fortune-tellers who intuit “imperviousness” by feel. The request that the bureaucracy read the words on the page and stay in its lane should not be radical.

Government absolutely has a role in setting health and safety standards and enforcing building codes. Streets laid out like Oglethorpe’s Savannah or Manhattan — rational grids that move people and goods efficiently — are a public good. What government is bad at, and should stop pretending it can do, is centrally planning how every lot in a city must be used decades into the future.

The Watershed Employee’s Side Hustles

This is where things go from “dumb policy” to “potentially corrupt policy.”

After that second stop-work order and an open records request, I did some light internet digging on the Watershed employee reviewing my permit who submitted the complaint about my driveway to be investigated. It turns out she also runs Gentrispot Inc., which bills itself as a gentrification-focused nonprofit. Gentrispot has a 501(c)(3) letter and an EIN. It was once registered as a nonprofit in Florida, but that registration was administratively dissolved for failure to file reports. The IRS seems to be taking a similar posture. It’s worth noting that it was never registered in Georgia.

On top of that, there appears to be a second side gig in real estate development. Some of it looks like personal acquisition, but on social media, she appears to be soliciting investors for projects.

Put it together: you have a City of Atlanta employee whose day job includes reviewing building permit applications, and whose side gigs include a gentrification-focused nonprofit with missing paperwork and real estate development seeking investors. I have not found any ethics disclosures for this employee with the City of Atlanta listing these potential conflicts. I had to file two disclosures as a volunteer NPU chair. Scarlet had to file a few as well while serving as a volunteer on the Atlanta Planning Advisory Board. She even had an ethics complaint threatened 2x and one actually filed. TL;DR it backfired on the filer.

I’m sure the Secretary of State or the Atlanta Inspector General might have a question or two. The Inspector General’s Office, of course, is something Mayor Dickens has already tried to address — by functionally removing the teeth of the office altogether. Funny how that works.

Zoning Abolition, Houston, and Tuxedo Park

So, what do we do instead? After reading M. Nolan Gray’s Arbitrary Lines, I’ve come around to zoning abolition. Gray makes a persuasive case that Euclid v. Ambler — the Supreme Court decision that blessed modern zoning — was wrongly decided, and that we should regulate concrete harms (noise, pollution, structural safety) rather than micromanaging land-use categories.

If you want to see what that looks like in practice, look at Houston. It’s the fourth-largest City in the country, roughly five times Atlanta’s size, and it does not have a zoning code. Every time a zoning code has been put to a vote there, it has failed, sometimes spectacularly. Houston is not a utopia, but the housing supply and land-use flexibility put Atlanta’s 268-category labyrinth to shame.

A sane system would keep building codes and health and safety standards, and yeet the parts of zoning that exist mainly to freeze neighborhoods in amber for current homeowners. You don’t need a setback requirement that forces a house in Tuxedo Park to sit half the length of its lot from the street to protect anyone’s safety. You do need rules that prevent buildings from collapsing, sewage from backing up, and stormwater from flooding your neighbor’s basement.

For a deeper dive into the lunacy of Atlanta’s ManBearPig zoning, take a look at the Governor’s Neighborhood. Surprisingly, the Governor’s mansion is zoned R-2 instead of R-1. The mansion also sits in the Special Public Interest 25 (SPI-25) overlay district. SPI-25 is also known as the Tuxedo Park Neighborhood District. This neighborhood managed to codify poor land use and HOA-style covenants. Should the state decide to sell off some of the property, Atlanta would only require the Governor’s house to sit on one acre (R-2) instead of two (R-1). Any development from that hypothetical sale would then be required to meet the design aesthetic of a wealthy neighborhood rather than actually address the City’s needs or what the market could sustain. That’s the pattern; the system is built to freeze what is, not to read the law literally, apply it consistently, or let the market respond to what people actually want to build and live in.

Atlanta doesn’t need more districts, more overlays, or more creative interpretations of “impervious” to meet the needs of a fast-growing city. It needs literate technocrats who anchor their decisions in the text, a political class that stops using zoning as a tool to protect what is, and a serious conversation about what should be. We have a housing shortage, we have crappy roads, we have a transit system that is a laughingstock of the Western world, a water infrastructure that somehow still hasn’t been modernized since Shirley Franklin, and a school system that still produces graduates with a 30-some-odd percent literacy rate.

In the meantime, I get to go to court over some magic gravel™️. Stay tuned for more.

AI Disclosure: Perplexity Pro provided commentary to edit and rearrange the flow of my argument. ChatGPT created the Magic Gravel image.