60 Voices: Atlanta’s rising creative class is gaining new recognition on the national scene

Cellist and Reynoldstown resident Johnson and his wife, Heather Infantry—the executive director at Atlanta city-planning think tank Generator—met in Atlanta when Johnson was at Morehouse. They bounced between his hometown of Washington, D.C., and Atlanta before deciding that the combination of affordability, a nurturing community, and a past, present, and future of Black creativity have made this city the right place to raise their two daughters and carve out careers in the arts. Of primary importance to Johnson is holding onto that affordability that once lured him to Atlanta but has become imperiled by the city’s rapid growth and gentrification.

It’s not cheap. And that’s going to change things. It’s going to change who can come here and experiment and grow and fly and test their wings, so that’s something that’s changing. I think the great tragedy would be if somehow the city became so expensive that it lost its creative class. Right now, Atlanta is the heartbeat, the pulse of the country, and that kind of life is fragile. And the lifeblood of that is affordability.

This is a place where people from all across the country—but particularly African Americans from all across the country—can come for some opportunity and possibility for success. But I don’t hear the same kinds of stories particularly for migrating African American communities and families about other cities. So, that’s one of the things that I think we’re going to have to preserve is making this an affordable city.

There’s no other city in which I can imagine myself becoming the person that I am. This is the place that makes me feel like I have a future: a creative and fertile future. I haven’t had that feeling of possibility in any other city like I’ve had here in Atlanta.