What Are Cities For? A Letter from KB President Geoff Koski

 I’ve been turning over a question lately that keeps surfacing in different forms, in different places: What are cities for? Not just how they function, or how they grow, but what purpose they serve, and for whom.

Trevor Butler, a member of our team here at KB Advisory Group, has been exploring this question in his latest personal Substack post. Using intelligent visual analysis and demographic insight, Trevor maps how cities and suburbs in Georgia are changing.

The past 20 years has seen a proliferation of new city formations in the Atlanta region and we’re curious about the consequences of this “revolution,” as the former mayor of Chamblee described the cityhood movement over lunch with us recently.

We are curious about who lives in these new cities, what they desire from their local government, and what their future might look like.

This work helps illuminate something that many of us feel intuitively: the shape of growth is changing, and our assumptions about what a city is and how it functions must stay up-to-date. We must continually check our priors.

At KB, we work with communities as they determine how to operate and sometimes our work is directly related to the cityhood trend.

That was true when we were asked to evaluate what might happen if Buckhead separated from Atlanta and became its own city. And it was true again when we studied whether Mulberry, previously a part of unincorporated Gwinnett County, could become a new city of its own. These two efforts, while very different in many ways, were both driven by the same core impulse: a community asking what kind of future it wants, who gets to decide, and what it means to govern locally.

In Buckhead, the numbers told one kind of story: a potential loss of over $100 million annually to the City of Atlanta and its public schools, should secession have occurred. That work helped inform the public debate and, ultimately, the decision to keep Buckhead part of the city.

In Mulberry, the story is still unfolding. Our feasibility study concluded that the area could support limited self-government without new municipal property taxes. But the creation of the city has sparked legal challenges, state-level legislation, and ongoing tension between Gwinnett County and the new municipal leadership. It has revealed just how much is at stake financially, but also in terms of identity, trust, and the mechanics of who delivers what, and why.

Our job in these discussions, our calling really, is to help communities make decisions grounded in facts, not fear. To offer clarity in moments when things feel uncertain.

More often than not, we end up reminding everyone that there are tradeoffs to every structure, every boundary, every choice.

Trevor’s work adds another layer to that. His post doesn’t just look backward at where the population has grown or stalled. It looks forward. It asks us to be honest about where our current approach to housing, planning, and governance is falling short, and what kind of cities we need now.

I hope you’ll take the time to read Trevor’s post. Not just as a data story, but as an opening. We’ll have more to say in the coming weeks. But this feels like the right place to begin: with a question, not an answer.

Read Trevor’s post here.

Geoff Koski

President & Owner

KB Advisory Group