Patrick Chopson || Atlanta Spotlight

By Staff Writer Atlanta Trend

• Sep 30, 2026

Washington Just Handed Atlanta's Housing Fix Back to Atlanta. Here's How to Win It.
By Patrick Chopson, AIA — Co-founder and Principal Architect, cove

 
The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act cleared the Senate 85 to 5 and the House 358 to 32. Sit with those numbers for a second. This is a Congress that can turn naming a post office into a floor fight, and it just agreed, nearly unanimously, on the largest housing bill in thirty years.

 
There is exactly one way a bill gets margins like that. It has to avoid making anyone do anything, and it has to avoid costing anything. The ROAD Act clears both bars with room to spare. It authorizes no new construction money. It does not preempt a single line of local zoning. Most of what's in it is a suggestion, a study, or a rule that some federal agency will get around to writing in 2027.

 
I'm not an all-or-nothing guy, so let me give the bill its due before I take it apart.

 
The real wins, and they are real

Banks can now put meaningfully more capital into affordable housing. Federal multifamily mortgage limits that had been frozen for more than two decades finally move, which means federal financing can reach something resembling today's construction costs instead of 2004's. Environmental review gets easier for smaller federally assisted projects, including office-to-residential conversions. And there's a long list of directed design and code reforms, from single-stair apartment buildings to pre-approved plan sets.

 
If you build workforce or affordable housing in metro Atlanta, more capital is not nothing. Deals that died on the spreadsheet last year will pencil this year. I'll take it.

 
Now the part that bothers me.

 
The thing I actually wanted is not in here

There is no zoning reform in this bill. None. No preemption, no federal floor, no minimum standard, nothing that nudges us an inch toward a code that reads the same way in two towns that share a road. The boldest move Congress could manage was offering cities money to modernize their own rules one at a time, and appropriators haven't even funded that yet.

 
Look at what that means from where I sit. The Atlanta Regional Commission plans for eleven counties and roughly seventy-five municipalities. Greater Atlanta has stood up about eleven brand-new cities since 2005, a fair number of them created precisely so the residents could run their own land use. Every one of those incorporations had somebody's very good reason behind it. Add them all together and you get a region where a duplex is by-right on one side of a street and a rezoning hearing on the other, where "multifamily" means four different things inside a fifteen-minute drive, and where the same developer files the same product under four different sets of definitions in the same fiscal year.

 
We built that. Not Congress. Us, locally, on purpose, over twenty years. And then we act shocked that it takes a year and a half to get a shovel in the ground.

 
I know what that fragmentation costs with more precision than I'd like, because the hardest thing we have ever built at cove, by a wide margin, is software that reads zoning codes. Not the AI. Not the energy modeling. Zoning. It's the hardest because there is no such thing as "the code." There are thousands of them, each with its own definitions, its own overlays, its own exceptions, and one clause buried on page 240 that quietly undoes page 12.

 
Congress spent twelve titles and sixty-odd folded-in bills carefully routing around that problem. Which tells you how hard it is, and also how unserious the moment was.
 
So what does an Atlanta developer actually do about it

Here's the part my own industry doesn't love hearing: the hardest problem was already ours to solve, and a lot of us have been using Washington as a reason not to.
Read the site harder than the process asks you to. On a cove project in Kirkwood, we read the ordinance all the way to the end, which sounds like an insultingly low bar and apparently is not one, and found 36 additional units on the same lot. No rezoning. No variance. No act of Congress and no federal dollar. Those units were sitting in the ordinance the whole time, in the part of the document where most people's attention has already left the room. That's yield recovery available today, on the deal in front of you, in a market where land is expensive and infill lots are shaped like Tetris rejects.

 
Take downtown seriously as a design problem. Office vacancy in the Downtown submarket was running around 30% in the first quarter of 2026, well above the metro average. Whatever that is, "market correction" isn't the phrase. Those towers either have a second life in them or they don't, and the deciding factors are floor plate depth, where the core sits, and how egress works. The capital stack gets no vote on any of that. The ROAD Act's conversion pilots and eased review are genuinely useful, but they help a building that already works in plan, and somebody has to do the plan work first. Right now, in this city, almost nobody is.

 
Watch the boring provisions. The bill pushes local governments to publish inventories of the undeveloped public land they own. That's a searchable data feed of sites, handed to anyone running automated feasibility screening, and I'd guess most of the market won't notice it for two years. Meanwhile Georgia's 9% low-income housing tax credits still get awarded once a year through the Department of Community Affairs under its Qualified Allocation Plan, with a dedicated scoring pool for metro Atlanta, on a calendar that does not care what Washington did this month.

 
One lever I'd love to have and don't: single-stair. The ROAD Act directs federal agencies to publish guidelines for it, and single-stair is the design that makes narrow lots work where a conventional double-loaded corridor with two stairways never will. Texas, Colorado, Montana, and New Hampshire all moved on it in 2025. Georgia didn't. That's a fight to have at the state and local code level, not a lever to underwrite a deal on today.

 
Three things I'd do this quarter

Stop waiting on zoning relief from Washington, because it is not in this bill and it is not coming in the next one either. Watch your city council instead. Local reform is the only reform, and it may move faster if a jurisdiction goes chasing the bill's incentive money.

 
Treat the next eighteen months of rulemaking as a calendar, not a headline. Federal agencies and the state will write the rules that determine what any of this actually does, and the comment windows are where the details get decided. Almost nobody from the design and construction side ever shows up to those. Show up.
Then put your energy into predevelopment, because it's the cost driver this bill names and does absolutely nothing to shorten. The 12 to 18 months between site control and permit carries land cost, rate risk, and escalation the entire way. Nobody in Washington is coming to compress that window. There's no ribbon to cut on a shorter entitlement timeline.

 
The bottom line

The bill got the diagnosis right, printed it on nice paper, and mailed the prescription to seventy-five city halls. For a region growing like ours, sitting on this much infill and this many conversion-ready buildings, that's not a tragedy. It's a sorting mechanism. The teams that can get a site to permit without asking anyone's permission are going to eat well for the next five years. The ones who spend that time explaining that the code is the problem will still be explaining it in 2031.

 
Until somebody writes a zoning code that works across an entire metro, the closest thing Atlanta has to a unified one is the software we had to build to read all seventy-five of them. That sentence should embarrass everybody in this business, myself very much included. Until it stops being true, we'll keep building.

 
Patrick Chopson, AIA, is Co-Founder and Principal of cove, an AI-powered architecture firm based in Atlanta. A licensed architect and building scientist with more than 20 years of experience, he co-authored Build Like It's the End of the World (Wiley, 2025). cove's full analysis of the ROAD Act for developers and architects is available at cove.inc/blog.