Why the Vote to Secede From a Black City Failed in Georgia

The city of Stockbridge, Georgia, came dangerously close to losing half of its municipality this week. It came down to a ballot vote on Election Day that would have allowed a country club-anchored enclave in unincorporated Henry County to snatch away large swaths of Stockbridge to create a new, wealthier city called Eagle’s Landing. The ballot failed—4,545 people voted against it, and 3,473 for—but questions abound concerning how it even came to this point. How could a place with no municipal standing simply redraw the boundaries of another place that’s been a city for nearly 100 years?

If nothing else, the drama around this ballot has exposed the fault lines of “cityhood,” the name for the movement happening around metro Atlanta that has unincorporated territories lobbying for official municipal status. Of the dozen new cities that have formed since 2005, none took residents or properties from other existing cities to do so, as the Eagle’s Landing group attempted to do with Stockbridge. But there were other problems with the manner in which Eagle’s Landing pursued cityhood. Looking at the events leading up to this vote, it probably should never have come up for a vote to begin with.