Traffic
As a person who lives in a city with a lot of stereotyping, I, and everyone else, are susceptible to it. For example, many say Atlanta has the worst traffic in the Southeast or the USA. Sure, Atlanta has a lot of traffic, but that is just because we have a lot of interstates. The number of traffic jams per interstate inside the city is lower than in many other cities. People measure our traffic by how many traffic jams there are in the city per day/week/month/year. When you measure it that way, Atlanta suddenly becomes full of traffic.
Sprawl
In Atlanta, we are often classified by our sprawl. While we have a massive metro area, it is less populated and smaller than other cities. Take Charlotte, NC, which some or half of people usually think of as the relatively small capital of North Carolina. However, the sprawl of Charlotte continues past the border well into South Carolina. In addition, Atlanta has a much smaller population than Charlotte (~500,000 (ATL) – ~900,000 (CLT)). For one final reason, Atlanta’s area of ~135 square miles is about 155 square miles less than Charlotte’s area of ~290 square miles.
Our Past
To people living in Atlanta, the most aggravating stereotype is when people talk about pre-1970 Atlanta. They talk about Margaret Mitchell’s apartment where she wrote: “Gone with the Wind.” They talk about how Atlanta was and is the “capital of the south,” where “southern belle ball gowns flow” and where you can “experience the true glory of the south.” These stereotypes are the worst kind; they glorify or draw attention to topics the locals want to forget. But they also talk about our dark past, such as segregation and white mobs raging around the city. These things should not be copied from or carried along but should be learned from.
Poor
Around the US, there is a lot of talk about how Atlanta is so poor. But, like the other stereotypes, it is not exactly true. Atlanta has a reasonable amount of poverty but less than the media and people say. When people talk about Atlanta’s poverty, they either exaggerate it by saying that two-thirds of the population lives in ghettos, or they underestimate it, saying that Atlanta has almost no poverty at all. However, there are some poor tenants around the city, and there is a reasonable amount of homeless people. Still, it is smaller than they say.
