Atlanta's 'Cityhood' Movement & Jason Lary's Fight to Incorporate Stonecrest

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But Lary, his supporters, and his opponents—the folks ripping up his campaign signs—are not the white people at the center of the cityhood movement. Rather, they are a black community: If Lary were to succeed, Stonecrest would become the 15th-largest city in Georgia and the first majority-black city created by its own residents since Reconstruction. Many of Lary’s neighbors and friends couldn’t believe that he was aligning the area with cityhood and employing the strategies of the very people whose political tactics had weakened local black communities for more than a decade. Worse, not only had Lary aligned with the cityhood movement; he had enlisted its most famous advocate.

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The cityhood movement was a major milestone for the politics of “suburban secession,” according to Kruse. These communities wanted “to get away from metropolitan Atlanta, both in terms of their identity, but largely in terms of having political, economic, or legal obligations to the city of Atlanta, its people, and what were regarded as its problems,” Kruse told me. “They wanted to be separate. And once that benchmark was laid down, that model was something that other suburban communities could easily look to.”

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Jason Lary counts himself firmly among the dissatisfied. As I accompanied Lary on his campaign stops, he told the story of his DeKalb County neighborhood, an area that, while middle-class, had been hit hard by the recession and hadn’t recovered. “You see these houses out here?” he asked me as we drove around the Stonecrest footprint, checking on his signs. “In north DeKalb, these would be $300,000, $400,000 houses. Here? $150,000, $165,000. They were built new at $400,000, and when [the market] crashed, they never came back. And this is the heart of Stonecrest—your average homeowner.”

The area has a large upscale shopping mall, includes the Arabia Mountain National Heritage Area, and sits just a few exits from downtown Atlanta, and yet Stonecrest hasn’t drawn much interest from businesses or developers. “I’ve tested this before,” Lary said. “As an insurance executive, I call on nothing but CEOs and vice presidents. And I will talk about having a location in DeKalb County—they just snicker and laugh ... They won’t even stop on our exit to take a look at us, because of the DeKalb County government.”

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I HAVE BEEN INVESTING in this town for 25, 30 years,” Lary told me. “We thought that the county would have done better for us, and it didn’t happen.” But then he noticed “cities starting to form on their own.” When Lary caught wind of these incorporation campaigns, he saw the cityhood movement’s potential to transform his own community. When a neighborhood called La Vista Hills tried to become a city, Lary started dropping in on their meetings: “Not only am I the only black guy there—I’m the only black guy there in a suit!” But Lary quickly befriended the La Vista Hills leadership, “and from there,” he said, “I watched and learned.”

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Lary, though, is comfortable with confrontation. “You cannot be a cotton ball for the kind of work I’m doing,” he told me. “It’s some Jimmy Hoffa-level work.” As he embarked on his war for Stonecrest, the hostility he faced from his friends and neighbors was countered by an unexpected source: a wave of conservative white support from across metro Atlanta. ...

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NO SUPPORT, HOWEVER, would be as crucial as that of a man named Oliver Porter. Lary is built like a linebacker and speaks in a theatrical baritone, but when he describes his first encounter with Porter, his voice lowers to an awed hush: “In the third [La Vista Hills] meeting, the master shows up: Oliver Porter.” After the meeting, Lary chased him down in the parking lot. “He thought I was trying to rob him!” Lary cackled. “And from that point on, I didn’t let him out of my sight.”

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When Sandy Springs became the first city to incorporate, other communities flocked to Porter for guidance. His written instructions to fellow cityhood enthusiasts grew to manuscript length, and so he published them; then he wrote a second book a few years later. As the cityhood movement grew, Porter became known as the guru of lean, effective local government. The first time we spoke, he had just returned from giving a series of lectures in Hawaii. He has worked with municipalities in Honduras and across the United States; recently, his book became a best-seller in its genre (“Government”) in Japan.

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Given Porter’s obsession with government efficiency and his disdain for politics, he embodies precisely what the cityhood movement has long claimed to be about.

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Porter, however, is passionately insistent that race had nothing to do with Sandy Springs’ zoning concerns. “I can tell you personally, from having sat on the organizing committee for 10 years, that race was never an issue,” he told me. The only time race was discussed, Porter said, was when the committee brainstormed methods of minority outreach as it planned the new city.

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While Lary and Porter are unwavering in their advocacy for the cityhood movement, they both acknowledge that achieving their goals means leaving behind a group of increasingly disadvantaged neighbors. When I asked Porter about this, he jumped in before I could finish the question. “So the issue is: People say, Well, it isn’t fair to the rest of the people who got left behind,” he said. “My answer to them has been: Form your own city. If you want to get good government, form your own city. Don’t just keep depending on someone else to subsidize you.”

This position is key to Porter’s argument. People in unincorporated areas may be worse off as a result of the cityhood movement, but the county is still exploiting them—and all they have to do to mitigate the damage from the incorporations around them is to incorporate themselves.

“What bothers me is, out there, all of these existing governments operating so inefficiently,” Porter said, practically seething. “And I’ve studied them, and I know they could be doing it much more efficiently for their citizens and providing them better service at the same time … And yet, you cannot get elected officials to do it, because they basically are more concerned about their own jobs than they are the citizens.”

Lary was more blunt: “Hey, go get your own. Do it for yourself.”

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