Atlanta Attracts Wealthy Black Transplants, But Locals Languish

It’s a Tuesday afternoon in January, and Ryan Wilson is holding court at the Gathering Spot, a sleek co-working space and business networking club that sits on the site of an old railway yard west of downtown Atlanta. Dressed in a jean jacket, hoodie, and Salvatore Ferragamo sneakers—Wilson’s take on the uniform of a Silicon Valley chief executive—the club’s 28-year-old co-founder surveys the room, acknowledging the city’s new power players with waves of his hand. The director of a six-day hip-hop festival swings by his table to chat about potential business ventures. Passing by is one of the creators of Partpic, an app she sold to Amazon.com Inc. Seventy percent of the club’s members are black. “Part of what the Gathering Spot proves day-to-day is we are not a second-tier market in the way that people have traditionally thought about the city,” Wilson says.

As the multimillion-dollar extravaganza that is the Super Bowl descends on Atlanta for the first time since 2000 (and the third time in its history), the Gathering Spot is emblematic of the city’s ascendant role within the black community. Between 2010 and 2017, the black population here soared by 288,600—far and away the biggest such gain of any U.S. metropolitan area.