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You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and Tim Stenovek on Bloomberg Radio.
Carol Masser, when you think of Atlanta and business, what comes to mind?
Uh?
Rep Pulley, Okay, that's the right answer.
All right, Okay, Well, maybe.
I'd set you up for that one lot of things.
I mean, there's been a lot happening, and that's it.
There has Okay, So if you think about the mainstays right, Coca Cola, yes, Delta Airlines at and t Emory Ups. They are all among the largest employers in the area and by population is actually the sixth largest market in the US. Our next guest charged with attracting businesses to Atlanta, keeping them there, and working with policymakers to make the climate attractive to capital. Katie Kirkpatrick is President CEO of
the Metro Atlanta Chamber. It represents businesses, colleges, and universities not profits too, across the Greater Atlanta area. She joins us here in the Bloomberg Interactive Brokers Studio. Also here, Brett Pully. Yes, the man we think of when we think of business in Atlanta. He's Atlanta bio chief for Bloomberg News. We love it when he comes to New York and can join us here in the studio. Welcome to both of you, Katie. You compete with other major
metropolitan areas to attract and retain businesses. Mercedes, benz, Rivian, Duracell are among the recent wins for you and your team. Why is your area the best to do business?
In your view, that's a pretty simple equation. We have the world's largest than most efficient airport mean efficient.
Yes, okay, I've walked through that airport before.
Efficient did not feel efficient?
Sorry, go ahead, we can talk.
About Jay offline, okay, okay.
But the airport is a really important asset because if you're in business and you're either working in the United States or internationally, you can get anywhere with a direct flight and that's a big selling point. In fact, you can get to eighty percent of the United States within a two hour direct flight from Atlanta, so that's pretty good for business development. And then if you're international, we
have direct flights all over the world. Second piece is we have an incredibly robust university system, higher education system. A lot of people don't know that we have more than sixty colleges and universities within the twenty nine county metro Atlanta area that does not include University of Georgia, believe it or not, and that means we have three hundred thousand full time equivalent students. So we're diverse for
talent and opportunity. So that's another piece. And then of course we have deep, deep bones around supply chain and logistics. And so we were initially called Terminus before we became Atlanta, and that's because that's where the railroads all came in, It's where our highways come in. So supply chain and logistics is really the bread and butter of our economy.
You mentioned Delta, you mentioned GPS, You didn't mention the home depot, which is all and I say that because if we think about moving products, right, the home depot is moving product every day as well as all these others in Delta of course is moving people. So those are some of the assets that we talk about and seem to be compelling for companies when they're thinking about Atlanta.
Brett, I want you to come in.
You covered Atlanta, You've covered.
Actually business news for a long time and under kind of the cross between money, technology, politics, economy. But when you look at Atlanta, what do we need to understand about Atlanta? And I know you caught up with Katie earlier, but give us a quick premer if you will, on what's going on in Atlanta.
Well, I do think Katie has certainly hit on some key things, and a couple of them that really resonate.
You know. One is the fact that it is a transportation hub and long has been and she said it was known as Terminus, which and the airport, as you mentioned, Tim, Look, everyone knows that airport, right and it is amazing and one of the wonderful things about being there I've been there five years now is I can go just about anywhere in the world NonStop, and that's nice, and I get there very fast, but you do have to cover
some distance there first steps in. You know, the airport has been in the news in recent days as it relates to a lot of the stuff we're talking about,
and Katie and I talked about this earlier today. The fact that the mayor now is given Atlanta's history and even the airport's history, a lot of people don't know that airport was really expanded and developed very much with what is referred to as DEI today, but certainly with that as its foundation, and that's been something that's been really sort of pivotal in creating this sort of unique class of upwardly mobile, diverse entrepreneurs that you know who
are in Atlanta. Well, the mayor in recent days refused to change those initiatives around the airport, and as a result, the city lost so I think thirty seven and a half million dollars so far in federal funding. We've seen the same thing in the news today in New York, very similar, much larger amount, right again around infrastructure and again around DEI.
So it's it's really interesting.
And it's it's something that you know, I'd love to hear Katie talk about, how does the city a place like Atlanta again, which is the cradle of the civil rights movement, right and many of the things that we now know today is DEI, how do you balance that, How does a business community balance that fact.
That reality, that historical past.
With the.
Demands from the White House today.
That's pretty simple. You acknowledge what your past is and we because we are the cradle of the civil rights movement. Our DNA is steeped in having a diverse workforce, a diverse community, and the mayor doesn't shay away from that, and I think if he had, it would have been inauthentic to who we are as a community.
And so from a.
Corporate perspective, corporations are going to hire the talent where they find it, and they're going to look for quality, and that is one of the biggest strengths that we have in Metro Atlanta right now, is a diverse, well educated population that can fill the jobs that we are creating. So while the mayor may have made that decision, I think it's indicative of the DNA of who we are as a region, and we're not going to shy away from that authentic piece of our history.
If we don't, I think we don't look true to ourselves.
I am curious, though, Katie, because I think one of the things that we talk so much as a result of this administration is the fear that's out there, whether it's among politicians certainly on the other side of the political aisle here here, or whether it's in the corporate community. Nobody wants to be a target. Nobody wants to be in a social media tweet. And here we are with
the government shutdown. You've got the White House halting eighteen billion dollars in New York infrastructure funding due to concerns over diversity and inclusion practices. Things are being politicized. How do you make sure that the city's DII programs aren't causing problem or undue notice by the White House are causing you guys to lose federal dollars.
Yeah.
I think what's important is the ethos that we have in Atlanta, which is really the corporate, political, and civic all work together. And so people come and go in local, state, and federal politics. What doesn't change is who we are as a community. And so from a corporation standpoint is they're going to continue to do with their customers, with their employees, what their shareholders ask for them to do.
Change comes and go.
But if they can stick to what their strategy is and they can stick to who their purpose and what their purpose is, I think that's how you move through this moment. And that is what I'm hearing from our CEOs is We're just going to keep executing on our strategic plan. We're going to do what's best for who we serve, and that in the end is going to be good for us as a company and ultimately as a community.
It's really interesting.
You know, Katie's not just whistling Dixie when she talks about the corporate and the community partnership. I mean, I have to tell you I have been really impressed by the level of civic engagement, right, And it goes again to this point. I mean, anecdotes abound about the extent of which Coca Cola worked with Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, right. And this wasn't like everyone
was necessarily jumping and willing to do it. But I think that the city and the business leaders recognized that it was a business imperative, right if they were going to be successful as business people, probably the same thing we're facing as a country.
You know.
One thing.
The other thing I'll mentioned really quick is transportation, which which Katie mentioned as well.
It's a big, big deal.
And you know, and I'm not talking about the transportation hub now. I'm talking about transportation around this fast growing, really rapidly spreading city.
And I mentioned that.
On my way to the airport yesterday, I saw an accident wasn't the accident that held up traffic.
It was the driverless waymow that held up the traffic.
I love driverless because you figure out what to do because the accident was there.
But I'd like to still love them.
Maybe that's a solution for Atlanta, But what do you do about marta the public transportation system and making all of that work better.
So we're one of eleven cities that have a heavy rails system, and that is always an asset for us when we're thinking about growth. Right, what a better way to talk about You can land at the Atlanta Airport and you can be in downtown or midtown within about fifteen minutes straight shot for two dollars and fifty cents.
That is an easy selling point.
Now that system has to work for everybody, and that is the opportunity that we have is creating a system that has better headways, has a better customer experience, and perhaps also modernize it itself. It's stations in it's trains, and that's the direction it's going. But the business community cares, and so we are actively engaged with our transit system very different than the system that is here, and in
terms of its construction and governance. So we're doing what we can to make sure that they are delivering all the promises. I think the point, Brett, that you were making about transportation. I said this to you earlier. It's a success jam that we experience. Tell me one urban city where you have been, where there has been growth and no traffic. It really is a symptom of our success. And I know that's hard if you're sitting at it, or you're.
Stuck behind a way mow.
That gets, you know, disoriented, But at the end of the day, it tells me that we must be doing something right.
I don't know.
Here in New York.
We've been successful for a long time, and the traffic's been here for a long time.
I've been waiting and waiting and waiting, so right, So I.
Mean it's it's I hear what you're saying.
And if we didn't have that success, we wouldn't have those.
Growth nodes that we see around our region.
That's really what has happened is we moved from one central business district to a second one to about eight now and they're all over the region. And that allows you to live, work, and play close to one central location.
So let's talk about live, work, and play, because the other thing that comes up with economic development and attracting and retaining businesses, employees, and finding places for employees to be able to live affordably while working where they want to work. In an area that is growing, such as Atlanta, how do you make sure that you're working with different constituencies to make sure that housing is abundant for these people you want to attract.
That's a national problem. We aren't alone, and.
It's a national problem, but it's it's a problem with local regulations and.
You have to solve it at the local.
You can't solve it nationally.
But we are not alone in the need for increased supplies, right. We have a problem for a long time, thirty years. We have been und here alone for thirty years. The chair of my board right now is the CEO of Culti Group, which is the third largest home builder in the United States, and he has been very instructive with us to think about it. We're an economic development organization, Okay, so we think about creating jobs. So the second thing we think about is where do we get the talent
to fill the job? How are we skilling them right? He goes, are you thinking about where they're going to lay their head at night? And I said, gosh, we really haven't thought about that. And you said for every two jobs you create, you need one home. And so if you have thirty years of underbuilding across the United States, I think it's four million homes.
We are behind.
You not only have to build the amount you need every year, you now have to play catch up. So the way that we have engaged is working with the corporate community. We're working with our state politicians because they have a role. Even though local zoning controls, they will have a role in how growth proceeds. And then also working with local governments to think about how do we take our transit system and build transit oriented development and
put housing right on transit. That is an opportun unity, that's low hanging fruit for us.
So that's how we're thinking about it. But this is relatively new.
What is the role of the business community and thinking about how to create affordable housing?
And when I say affordable, I mean attainable. It is not it's all layers of the status.
They should have an interest in it because if there isn't housing, then it's expensive. Then you have to pay your employees more, and that's honestly his margins. So they're ripple effects throughout the economy.
If there's no housing, you've just captured what Ryan Marshall says on a daily basis to us that is incumbent upon us as an organization actually kind of push the local and state governments to do more, and then also as an organization, what can we do to support them.
You sound very optimistic, which I love, because you know, it's certainly been an interesting year to say the least, and interesting sometimes being difficult and stressful. Tariffs, other White House policies, inflation. What impact is any of that having a development in your city.
We haven't seen anything yet, and I think that's largely nothing. Yeah. No, I haven't heard any companies make any major decisions.
Based on tariffs or trade.
We haven't heard of massive freezing or hiring, layoffs or layoffs of individuals. I think that is largely and again this is my personal opinion, but what I have gleaned from CEO to.
Talk to CEOs, I do they talk to community leaders and.
They're not saying, yeah, we're not doing this project.
Because no, they in some ways have just said, Well, we're sitting in what I would say watch mode for the moment, like where are we going? Where are we heading? What is that strategy and vision ahead? Remember we're only nine months into this administration, so I think a lot of.
Members were only nine months look at all that has happened.
But what I am hearing from CEOs is they have a strategy, yeah, that they have developed with their board, their shareholders have adopted, and they are just controlling what they can control, and that is moving forward. And that's what I'm hearing from the C suite in Atlanta.
All Right, we only have about thirty forty seconds, But Brett, I want to.
Tell you the last question.
Well, real quick, one of the big projects we talk about things going forward Centennial Yards. Yeah, five billion dollar project right around the Stadium's a big entertainment district. How's that going? Tariffs are not slowing that down? And will it be ready for the World Cup?
It will be ready for the World Cup at least phase one, which includes a hotel and apartments. If you are familiar with Hudson Yards, it's a stack on stack on stack. It's the same developer that did Hudson Yards. This was a fifty acre undeveloped for seventy years gash in our downtown, and it is going to be ready. We're not only going to have housing and hotels, we're also going to have an entertainment space that will be
constructed an online called Cosm by June first. So we're really excited about the opportunity to display that when World Cup.
Kicks off June first, just around the corner, yeah, right, when they have a cowntown call.
Trust me, what a joy to have both of you here in studio. Katie Kirkpatrick, President and CEO of the Metro Atlanta Chamber, thank you, Thank you so much. Hope we can catch up again with you in the future. And Brett Pooley always good to have you normally in Atlanta, but here in our.
New York studio. Good to have you here. He is an Atlanta beer chief at Bloomberg News.