What this is
Atlanta is rewriting its zoning code. The draft, called ATL Zoning 2.0, changes what can be built on nearly every lot in the city. These two tools let you look up any parcel and see the rules today next to the rules in the draft, and they rank the single-family lots where two to eight homes could fit with the least change.
What could be built here?
Type an address or click a lot. See its current zoning district and its proposed Zoning 2.0 district side by side: how many homes each allows, whether an accessory unit is allowed, and whether the lot meets each district's minimum size and street frontage.
Open the zoning checkerMissing-middle site finder
A scored map of Atlanta's single-family lots. Lots near transit, big enough for a duplex or small apartment building, outside the flood zone, and already allowed (or about to be allowed) to hold more than one home rise to the top. Filter by council district, download the shortlist, or move the weights yourself.
Open the site finderWhy compare two sets of rules?
Every lot in Atlanta has a zoning district under the current code (names like R-4, R-5, RG-3 or SPI-16 SA2). The district decides what you can build: one house, a house plus a backyard cottage, a duplex, or an apartment building, and how big the lot has to be. Zoning 2.0 replaces that system. Its Draft V2, published December 19, 2025, gives every lot two labels instead of one:
- A Form district (N1, N2B, N5B, UG5 and so on) that sets the minimum lot size, the minimum lot width, and the maximum number of homes on one lot.
- A Use district (R1, RX2, MX3 and so on) that says whether people can live there at all and how many accessory dwelling units are allowed.
Putting the old district and the new pair next to each other answers the question most people actually have: does the rewrite change what I can build on my lot? For most lots the answer is no. The draft mostly maps single-family districts to single-family form districts. The exceptions are the interesting part, and the checker highlights them in green (gains capacity) or red (loses capacity).
How the checker decides what a lot allows
Today's rules
The current code is read from the City of Atlanta Code of Ordinances as it stood on August 25, 2026. For each zoning district family the tool records the maximum homes per lot, whether an accessory dwelling unit is allowed, and the minimum lot size and street frontage, with the section of the code it came from. The special public interest districts (SPI) are handled one subarea at a time, because each of their chapters has its own use table: SPI-11 subarea 6 in Washington Park is single-family only, while SPI-16 in Midtown allows apartments everywhere.
Draft V2's rules
The maximum number of homes and the lot minimums come from the Form district chapter. Whether homes are allowed at all, and how many accessory units, comes from the Use district chapter. The tool combines the two: the form district's cap applies only if the use district allows household living.
The lot check
Each lot's area is measured from the parcel outline. Its street frontage is measured along the edge of the parcel that runs beside a street centerline, so corner lots and flag lots are handled sensibly. The checker then says whether the lot meets each district's minimum lot area and, for Draft V2, the minimum lot width.
Confidence
Values quoted straight from a table in the code are shown solid. Values the code text could not confirm (planned developments, historic and landmark subareas, and a few SPI subareas) are shown with a dashed outline and marked "verify". The tool never guesses silently.
How the site finder scores a lot
The finder looks only at residential lots with at most one home on them, at least 1,500 square feet of land, and no tax exemption. Each of those lots gets a score from 0 to 100 built from nine ingredients, each scaled from 0 to 1:
| Ingredient | Scores highest when | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Lot area | the lot is 5,000 square feet or more, the size of a duplex lot in the draft | 20 |
| MARTA rail | a station is within half a mile | 15 |
| Frequent bus | a bus that runs every 15 minutes or better in the morning peak stops within a quarter mile | 10 |
| Zoning today | the current district already allows two or more homes | 15 |
| Draft V2 zoning | the proposed form district allows two or more homes | 15 |
| Underused lot | the building is worth little compared with the land under it | 15 |
| Flood zone | the lot is outside the FEMA special flood hazard area | 5 |
| Historic district | the lot is not in a historic district | 5 |
| Policy gap | Draft V2 allows two or more homes where today's code allows one | 0 (published) or 30 (least change) |
The score is the weighted sum times 100. Tier A needs a score of 75 or more, a lot outside the flood zone, and a Draft V2 district that allows two or more homes. Tier B is 65 to 74 and Tier C is 55 to 64.
Two ways to rank
Published mode asks where small multi-unit housing fits best today. Its Tier A is dominated by R-5 lots in Reynoldstown, Inman Park and Midtown that already allow two homes and sit near rail, plus single-unit lots inside the downtown and Piedmont Avenue special districts. Least change mode gives the policy-gap flag 30 percent of the weight and drops "zoning today", so it surfaces the lots whose extra homes depend on Zoning 2.0 passing, mostly the R-4B lots in Pittsburgh and the Ashview Heights lots mapped to N3B.
Read this before trusting the ranking
The weights are judgment calls, and transit carries more of the result than its share of the weight suggests. If transit is given no weight at all, only about a fifth of Tier A stays in Tier A. The finder says so on its own page, and the sliders let you test any other weighting on the live map.
The numbers behind the maps
Where the data comes from
- Parcels and current zoning: City of Atlanta Department of City Planning GIS. The parcel layer covers the whole city, including the DeKalb County side. Zoning is attached to each parcel by overlaying the zoning map and taking the district that covers most of the lot.
- Draft V2 districts and text: the ATL Zoning 2.0 Draft V2 district map (published through the city's Konveio review site) and the Form District and Use District chapters from atlzoning.com.
- Current code text: the Code of Ordinances on Municode, as of August 25, 2026, including the full SPI chapter tables.
- Assessor data: Fulton County tax parcels for land use, living units and appraised values.
- Transit: MARTA's published GTFS schedule, used to find rail stations and the bus stops with 15-minute or better weekday morning service.
- Flood zones: FEMA's National Flood Hazard Layer. A lot counts as in the flood zone when at least a tenth of it is inside the special flood hazard area.
As a check on the joins, the city's own zoning label agrees with the "existing zoning" field on the Draft V2 map for 99.7 percent of parcels, and six known addresses are re-checked against the city's live map services every time the data is rebuilt.
How it was built
A Python pipeline downloads every layer from its public service, cleans the parcels, runs the spatial joins through QGIS in headless mode, reads the transit schedule and flood layer, applies the code lookups, scores the lots, and writes the results as vector tiles. The two map pages are plain HTML with MapLibre and PMTiles, so there is no server behind them. Every step writes a row-accounting log, and the methodology, data inventory and sensitivity tests live in the project's docs folder.