How to Start Your Own City

Earlier this month, Brentin Mock reported on the burgeoning cityhood movements outside of Atlanta. Now he talks with the mayor of the newest city on Atlanta’s outskirts, Stonecrest.

You may have heard about the Amazon HQ2 proposal from Georgia offering municipal naming rights to the corporate behemoth—as in, the company could have its own city called Amazon, Georgia. That offer came from the city of Stonecrest, which sits about 20 miles east of the city of Atlanta. Stonecrest has only, itself, been a city since 2017. Residents of the formerly unincorporated area of southeast DeKalb County voted in November 2016 to officially incorporate into a city. It is one of the more recent municipal experiments to hatch across the county, and metro Atlanta as a whole, since the turn of the century.