City leadership reviewed an updated Sandy Springs Housing Needs Assessment at the Oct. 6 work session, which will help create policies in The Next Chapter comprehensive plan.
Mayor Rusty Paul said the city’s housing supply challenges include luxury rebuilds and a lack of greenfield development, or vacant land available for construction. According to the new report, the median Sandy Springs household can no longer afford typical home prices amid increasing values and interest rates in recent years.
“We’re not going to be able to build $400,000 houses in Sandy Springs when land costs are a million dollars per acre,” Paul said. “The cost of construction and interest rates are going up, so the cost of housing is not going to be easily gotten down … I have five kids, not one of them can live in Sandy Springs and some of them are making really good money.”
Focusing on housing
The city first conducted a housing needs assessment in 2020, before the state-required five-year update to the 2017 comprehensive plan, called The Next Ten.
HR&A Advisors Principal Christiana Whitcomb, lead consultant on the housing assessment, said there has been no population growth since the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting smaller household sizes and families moving away from the city.
“What we want to see is maintaining a certain ratio of new jobs added to new homes added to make sure that supply and demand are in balance as the economy is growing,” Whitcomb said. “Sandy Springs has, from 2019 to 2024, really been well below what a healthy ratio would be of new homes to new jobs.”
The supply of new homes is trailing demand, and most new single-family units are multi-million-dollar teardowns of older homes, according to city demolition permit data.
According to the assessment and CoStar data, 2,084 multifamily units were delivered in 2017, and fewer than 600 have been constructed since 2021. Despite the lull in new apartments, several complexes with hundreds of units are under construction.
“The multifamily pipeline has not responded to meet this demand, following the 2016 building code change,” Whitcomb said. “It changed again in 2023, and we’re starting to see the market respond a little bit, but there was a period of time with no multifamily deliveries to meet that demand.”
The code change a decade ago required more apartment buildings to be built with steel and masonry rather than wood, but a 2018 state law wiped out Sandy Springs ban on wood-frame construction over three stories.
How to address housing
Council Member Andrew Chinsky said he wants city leaders to make a connection between population loss, housing, the closure of Spalding Drive Elementary, and increased traffic.
“Metro Atlanta residents may work in Sandy Springs, but can’t afford to live here,” Chinsky said. “So they have to drive here, which exacerbates traffic on our streets. We’re not going to single-handedly solve the housing crisis in metro Atlanta, but we have some hard choices to make in the next nine months as we finalize our comp plan.”
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The comprehensive plan is the city’s long-range policy document, guiding decisions related to growth, land use, infrastructure, housing, and economic development over the next 20 years. This year’s process also includes an update to the Sandy Springs Recreation & Parks Master Plan.
Paul said he agreed with Chinsky’s connection between traffic congestion and a lack of affordable housing supply.
“We’ve got to figure out where this housing is going to go, and target some areas that maybe have some aging commercial properties that we can convert or tear down and replace,” Paul said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do when it comes to the housing area and being able to get people in here affordably, without destroying the character of our neighborhoods.”
Third planning workshop
Assistant City Manager Kristin Smith said public feedback mirrors the housing needs assessment, and the plan’s advisory committee will start identifying policies in October.
“A lot of that is going to be a question of what policy steps council wants to take in this arena,” Smith said. “We’ll be having those conversations with you all. Obviously, we’ve been hearing from the community about what the interest is, so we’ll have to figure out where we want to take this.”
The updated housing needs assessment connects small residential lots to affordable ownership. In the city’s protected neighborhoods, which account for more than three-quarters of its land area, about 70% of homes sold were unaffordable to the average first-time buyer.
Urban Neighborhood zoning, which allows smaller lots along Roswell Road and highly trafficked corridors, accounted for 84% of homes sold below the $335,000 affordability threshold in 2024 and 2025.
The needs assessment update offers three ways Sandy Springs can support affordable housing: land-use reform, public subsidy, and maintaining naturally occurring affordable housing.
Residents, business owners, and other community members can participate in long-range city planning at the next workshop on Oct. 29 in the Sandy Springs Performing Arts Center’s Studio Theatre from 6-8 p.m.
A brief presentation will open the workshop, covering progress to date and key themes from earlier community engagement. Attendees will then take part in interactive activities to share input on policy direction and preliminary recommendations.
