Thanks to Atlantans who got in touch to tell us about their city for Guardian Atlanta week. We could publish only an abridged selection, but rest assured every submission was read and will inform future Guardian Cities coverage on this fascinating, diverse, complicated and – as we’ve experienced for ourselves – hugely welcoming city.

‘Watching Donald Glover’s Atlanta is like gaining an education’

One high school friend changed the way Atlanta took shape for me. Nazareth had grown up moving between Atlanta’s majority black neighborhoods. The corners of the city that he knew best were East Lake, the West End, Adair Park – all mostly foreign to me. As a teenager, I sensed that we lived in parallel Atlantas – ones sometimes separated by a single street marking a racial divide – that I didn’t yet have the language to name. But when Donald Glover’s Atlanta came out years later, it gave us both words.

From New York City, where he is now an emerging playwright, Nazareth has told me that Glover’s Atlanta looks like the place he’s from. “It’s full of ranch houses like mine, and everything is on the cusp of falling apart. It’s the city I know,” he’s told me. But for me, watching Atlanta has been like gaining an education on a new place. It has shown me just how blind I have been to the landscape and the pulse of my hometown, growing up. In the show, I see myself and my people in the amiable and blundering white folks who get shit wrong, who always miss the wink.

Donald Glover’s Atlanta. Photograph: Guy D'Alema/FX

In the second episode of the second season, rapper Paper Boi and Glover’s character Earn go to a (fictional, I think) recording studio. I can so easily imagine it being situated on the BeltLine, in an old industrial complex redesigned by a peppy young developer. It is the kind of place that hikes up the property values along the trail and forces the renters who’ve always lived in the spaces around it to move. I might find it cool and hip, yet Glover makes it feel undoubtedly nefarious with the nervous glances made by white staff members. There is the guy who asks Paper Boi to do one more take: “Let’s do one that’s cool. That’s, like, cool.” The scene makes me think of all the moments I’ve called upon Nazareth to be my tour guide, my entrance to black Atlanta. Yet this access – from him and from Glover – has helped me see that our Atlantas aren’t parallel at all. I see, now, that my Atlanta intends to suffocate theirs.

Carly Berlin

‘Atlanta’s “build now, worry later” mentality simply has to stop’

Like many Atlanta residents, I’m a transplant who made my way to the city 12 years ago. Unlike New York, Chicago or LA, Atlanta is a “city that sleeps”, and overall people are generally nice as long as they aren’t behind the wheel of a car. I do worry about the lack of long-term planning and accountability about infrastructure, as evidenced by the bevy of cranes that litter our ever-changing skyline. We have huge buildings and skyscrapers being built on top of two-lane roads, with multi-story parking decks, and many traffic lights that don’t even have dedicated turn signals. Our infrastructure is improving, but it simply cannot keep up with the demand in large-scale development.

The “build now, worry later” mentality simply has to stop. What I think is most eye-opening is the development near MARTA stations. I recall a time not long ago when people scoffed at the idea of living within walking distance of the train. Now these very same areas command the highest rents and mortgages – an extremely discouraging fact, given that people who need access to transit the most likely cannot afford to live in these areas. What’s worse is that many residents who live near the train may not even use it. There’s still plenty of room for people to move here to Atlanta if they so choose, but at what cost? Quality of life for many of us is already at risk.

Ryan

Modern houses next to older homes in Old Fourth Ward. Photograph: Ben Rollins/the Guardian

Atlanta’s growth is contributing to its segregation

I’m 47. I’ve lived in and around Atlanta for my entire life. I went to Georgia Tech and made a great career in the software industry. I love living in the city and, though I have been urged to relocate for my career purposes, have never seriously considered moving away. Suddenly it seems that people want to live in the city again, which I think is wonderful. However neighborhoods are rapidly gentrifying and there’s a huge disparity between long time and new residents.

I’ve heard neighbors wish that long-time residents would just move because they are dragging down the neighborhood. As a newcomer here myself, I am appalled by this in-town colonialist attitude. I am in an interracial relationship, and feel this is a friendly safe place to be. However, for our last move we looked for neighborhoods that were racially mixed, but these are really hard to find, even in Atlanta. For schools as well, there seems to be fewer opportunities for people of different socioeconomic and racial backgrounds to live and learn together.

Anonymous

‘The world’s only just begun to have a taste of Atlanta’s sauce’

I’m a native ATLien, from OTP [Outside the Perimeter] in Fayetteville. I went to the first games at the Georgia Dome and Turner Field. I’m a two-time alumnus of Georgia State. I bought my first home here. I was born here. I’ll die here. The main change I’ve seen is that the world’s gone from not giving us the time of day to wanting a piece of what we’ve got: FX’s Atlanta is a cult sensation (and Donald Glover momentarily captured the zeitgeist in a fragmented world), Gucci Mane was a guest on Malcolm Gladwell’s podcast, Emmanuel Macron hit the dab with France’s national soccer team, Migos is bringing the Culture to new audiences across the world – there’s a burgeoning trap scene in Italy! – and more is filmed here now than anywhere else.

My hope is that ATL is recognized for what it is: an epicenter for at-all-odds cultural pioneering. Inarguably this is related to our blackness, but I want the world to give credit is due. We’ve got the sauce, and the world’s only just begun to have a taste.

Kyle Stapleton

Part of the BeltLine, which some worry is contributing to gentrification and pricing people out of their homes. Photograph: Ben Rollins/the Guardian

‘My history with Atlanta goes back generations but I want to get out’

My family’s history in Atlanta goes back generations. I was born at Grady memorial hospital and was raised in the metro area. I go to Georgia Sate University and work at a coffee shop downtown. I am definitely not a transplant. But my husband and I actually want to get out of here! We both feel that developers and gentrification are eating this city alive. The BeltLine is pricing people out of their homes and making all inner neighborhoods virtually unaffordable, especially for those who were here before the major development started happening.

I’d say Atlanta is experiencing the suburbanization of poverty. With all of the success we have had as a city growing and prospering I think that we need to put money towards helping the most vulnerable people here. One of the major homeless shelters downtown was closed about a year ago. Oftentimes coming into work in the morning there will be a someone asleep in the doorway. It’s heartbreaking. Atlanta needs to figure out a way to provide mental healthcare and housing for those living on the streets and in tents under the highway.

Tara Woodworth

‘Atlanta is not like other spots in the south – for better and worse’

I grew up in New Jersey, right outside of NYC, in a very liberal, artsy, diverse neighborhood. I moved to the Atlanta area last August. The south is supposed to be less expensive, more laidback and yeah, a bit more conservative than the northeast. But Atlanta is different. It is not as politically red – you can’t go a few miles without seeing a Stacey Abrams sign – and it is NOT cheap. Of course, people make more money here than they would in Columbia, South Carolina, but the rent is so high you probably want to be making somewhere around $50k a year, at least. If you are a student, well, you better have some giving parents.

Then there’s the extreme traffic. It technically takes 20 minutes to get to my work in Midtown from my apartment in Smyrna, but at rush hour it is closer to an hour. Diverse is a word that comes to mind when I think of Atlanta. Drive 10 minutes, and I’m in $25m house territory. In Midtown, everyone is dressed professionally and walking a mile a minute. Then I once went to a gym in southern ATL and was told by an employee to never come back because that part of town was so dangerous.

Katy Minet

‘As a black LGBT Atlantan, I’m so grateful to live here’

The population explosion in Atlanta is real, but I don’t see it as a bad thing. Many black LGBTs – myself among them – move here because we see it as being freer than our communities of origin and because of the economic opportunities. I moved here from Nashville, where I was just another un/under-employed millennial with a liberal arts degree, to be with my partner in late 2012. I got a job paying minimum wage because it was a mile from home and I didn’t have a car. Three years later, I won a scholarship to a coding bootcamp.

That one event enabled me to start saving, pay down debt and eventually get out of poverty. And I was able to go on the [HIV prevention drug] PrEP and not have to worry about how to pay for it. My hope is that similar opportunities be extended to all who need them, not just one or two people every so often. I fear that the wealth gap will only increase, leading to even more homelessness and HIV. Atlanta has its issues with poverty and gentrification, but I’m so grateful that I live here.

Chris Dobbins

Some readers worried that the Stone Mountain monument damages Atlanta’s progressive reputation. Photograph: Michael Rabideau/Getty Images/EyeEm

‘Atlanta is still held back by outside perceptions of the south as backwards’

I am an Asian American who was born in Stone Mountain, Georgia (a predominately black suburb of Atlanta) and moved to Marietta, Georgia (a prominently white, affluent suburb) in fifth grade. I stayed in the city for another year or so after college before moving to California in 2008. As a 24-year-old, Atlanta seemed very limiting. The regionalism “OTP”, or “outside the perimeter” – referring to I-285, the highway that forms a perimeter around the city proper – is relevant to my point here, properly used as: “Why would you ever go OTP?” Now that I am older, I have come to appreciate Atlanta for the cultural and economic powerhouse that it has become.

I think the city’s biggest obstacle is the perception of the south as a socially-backwards, bigoted part of the country. When I first told Californians I was from Atlanta, they usually had one of two responses: “What was that like?” or “There are Asians in Georgia?” Things like recent voter suppression in Georgia and Stone Mountain Park damage Atlanta’s ability to market itself as the progressive and diverse city it is. I think Atlanta still needs to shed vestiges, both actual and perceived, of civil war-era racism.

Michael Ng

‘Did Atlanta have to tear down its natural habitat along with its problematic past?’

In 1956 the block of Peachtree Street that would become the home of the High Museum of Art was a single small museum building, a Woman’s Club house with pool, a couple of large homes, and a tiny public library building. Among them was my grandmother’s mock Tudor home, also a boarding house. From there we could walk to the 10th street theater and many local drug stores, laundries, and eateries, such as something called Tottle House. In the evening we would go up the road to the home of the Atlanta minor league baseball team.

But my grandmother could not afford to keep her home after the area was zoned for business. All of that is now gone – I might as well be remembering a time before Columbus. It was a lovely neighborhood with large oak trees, shady backyards and carefully tended gardens. I have been back to Atlanta and to the museum complexes, and nothing of the landscape remains. I do appreciate the new Atlanta, the energy and inclusive wellbeing of races and cultural diversity. But did you have to destroy the natural habitat? Tear down all the old plantation homes and get rid of flags and symbols, but please keep the hills and trees and riverbanks – those shady places where young and old can enjoy a nice glass of iced tea.

Ann Gray

Follow Guardian Cities on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram to join the discussion, and explore our archive here