RoamingRushka

Atlanta, GA, January – February 2026

Ever since staying in​​ Inman Park in 2022, I knew Atlanta had a lot of potential. The city was planned around cable cars in its early years, and you can feel remnants of that aura. Unfortunately, as many people would attest to, the traffic in Atlanta is laughable, so there has clearly been a regression into car-dependency, but the feeling is still there. Piedmont Park, Old Fourth Ward, and Midtown all feel like they are on the precipice of being an urbanist’s dream, but still shackled by our auto oligarch’s desire to extract every red cent from our continued use of worn down roads, polluting engines, and rubber tire dust air particles. 

I got this sense on my first visit (2022), but did not yet fully understand what the issue was. In fact, I had been living in southern California for almost a decade at that point, and I was fully indoctrinated into car-centrism. After all, I was a NewEdge Mustang, and T5 Volvo wagon aficionado (still am, but that’s a different discussion). I was unable to wrap my head around why some cities felt really cool and others felt dead. Upon reflection in my more recent years, it in part has to do with cars, pedestrian safety, zoning laws, and parking lots. More on that later. 

We booked a cute apartment in Old Fourth Ward (nestled between Mid-Town and Inman Park) that suited our needs. It was a fifteen minute walk to the bouldering gym nestled within a downtown skyscraper, which quickly became my second home during our stay, and a ten minute walk to the Atlanta Beltline, a pedestrian walkway that I will touch on later.

Our stay was from late January through February, but I was ready for the East Coast winter. Back in 2022, upon my first November visit to Atlanta, I learned the hard lesson of how cold it actually can get over here compared to Coastal CA. This time it was different; the dead of winter and an ​​actual road advisory due to an ice storm. At least I had proper jacket and clothing coverage. Needless to say, the half inch sheet of ice covering our Honda Fit, Pebble, presented new-to-me challenges when we tried to make the trek over to our new Mid-Town apartment from Paloma’s parents house in Suburban Atlanta.

After a half hour of scraping ice and another half hour drive, we made it down to our new apartment. The difference between our first coffee stop at Panera, in a strip mall that is 95% parking lot, and our high-density apartment nestled right next to a high school and park was stark. I am finding it harder and harder to justify the suburban yearning for parking lots.

The Beltline, considered a linear park by some, and a pedestrian pathway by others, is a 22-mile long pedestrian-only inter-urban loop that is truly a remarkable addition to the city in spite of the car-dependent attitude the mostly car-centric city has adopted. On any given day, in any given weather, you will see hundreds of people enjoying a walk, scoot, blade, or bike down the road either for leisure or to get to another connected part of town. In my opinion, the Beltline is Atlanta’s saving grace. It’s beautiful, vibrant, and full of life. Equally important, it generated $23 billion in economic activity, catalyzed 14 billion in private investment, and supported 91,000 jobs in 2025. Fiscal conservatives often ask whether public investments pay off. The BeltLine is their answer.

We enjoyed the local restaurants (Bon Ton, and Mary Mac’s Team Room are two that deserve mention), Krog street market, Ponce city market, comedy shows at the Vortex, a concert at the Masquerade, and the mid-town vibes while we stayed in Atlanta.

As with many of the cities that we spent some time in, there is a lot of wealth disparity neighborhood to neighborhood and unfortunately, the proper Downtown section of Atlanta has been abandoned economically and overtaken by unhoused individuals (think tents, shopping carts, and refuse). At our concert outing to the Masquerade, we expected to be able to find a restaurant to grab a bite before the show, but this was not possible due to the amount of closed businesses, and general deserted nature of that part of Atlanta. I would recommend that visitors stay out of the proper Downtown neighborhood if possible, and stick to the Mid-Town, Little Five Points, Piedmont Park, Inman Park, and O4W neighborhoods located North East of Downtown.

There is also a lot of natural beauty inside and outside of the city. Atlanta is known to be one of the most densely tree-lined cities in the country alongside Seattle. On one of the warmer winter days, we decided to take a quick trip out of the city to hike the otherworldly granite playground of Arabia mountain which offers a respite from the loud city in exchange for quiet lake and mountain scenery.

Atlanta is a city that I am glad I will be visiting often. Whether or not I would want to live there full time is still under debate, but we really enjoyed our winter month as we prepared to head north for a New England summer.

-RoamingRushka