During a housing discussion during the GMA Board of Directors meeting on June 20, 2025, Sandy Springs Mayor Rusty Paul spoke to his city's challenges. In this follow-up Q&A, Mayor Paul talks about the steps the city has taken and the challenge of market forces.
What makes Sandy Springs’ housing challenges different from those of other growing cities?
We’re a fully mature community; there are no greenfields left. If something gets built, something else has to come down. That makes redevelopment complex and expensive. We’ve got aging strip shopping centers that could be revitalized, but everything we do has to account for the realities of density, infrastructure, and market viability.
How has the city tried to incentivize redevelopment to meet housing needs?
About five years ago, we rezoned the entire city. Beyond that, we funded an economic study of four major older retail centers to demonstrate to property owners that if they redeveloped according to our vision, they could actually improve their return on investment. We’ve done everything we can to show the upside of redevelopment aligned with our goals.
How has the community responded to the citywide rezoning and the proposed redevelopment of older retail centers?
Mostly positive because it has created clear ground rules for both neighborhoods and developers about where and what we want development to occur. There has been significant negative reaction to any new apartment development, but capital markets still favor multifamily over fee simple making homeownership stock a real problem.
What’s preventing the kind of housing Sandy Springs wants to see, particularly for ownership?
Capital markets are the sticking point. Investors have shifted their mindset. They favor rental housing because it provides recurring cash flow. Homeownership, whether it’s single-family homes, condos, or townhomes, is harder to finance now. Even when we show that the return could be higher with for-sale housing, we can’t get the financing. Developers are getting pushed toward rentals, and we’re losing the housing types that younger families want to buy.
Is affordability the issue in Sandy Springs, or something else?
It’s not a traditional affordable housing problem. It’s more of a luxury housing problem. People are buying $750,000 homes just to tear them down and replace them with $3 to $5 million properties. That’s eating into the limited housing stock that young families could actually afford. So even our existing “starter homes” are being cannibalized. Also, city employees are largely priced out of our market even though our pay for city positions is among the highest in the state. Pay cannot keep pace with rising home values.
Are there any regional or state-level partnerships or policy changes you believe could help cities like Sandy Springs better balance housing diversity and investor-driven development trends?
It’s almost impossible to buck market trends. Between capital markets preference for multifamily housing over fee simple — rental provides ongoing returns while selling a home is a one-time return — along with the high cost of land, skilled labor shortages and rising material costs, producing affordable “for sale” housing is a monumental task. We are pushing condo and townhome options, but they aren’t particularly affordable since condos and townhomes start at just under $1 million and go up.