ENTERPRISE: Atlanta's Beat Goes On

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WITH enlightened civic leadership and one of the nation's fastest-climbing skylines, Atlanta rode the urban-renewal wave of the '60s with pleasing—and well-publicized—results. But where many other cities have grown disillusioned with their downtown business districts—in spite of all the new civic centers, office buildings, freeways and other signs of progress—Atlanta, which in 1970 became 51% black in population, seems determined to use the first round of renewal as the down payment on a second, even bigger round in the '70s. Moreover, the courtly businessmen and politicians who engineered the city's renaissance a decade ago are rapidly turning over their jobs to a group of men in their 30s and 40s, who should be around to oversee new rounds of expansion for years to come. The result is a business climate that is practically unparalleled in the U.S. for solid growth and sheer bullishness.

Atlanta's metropolitan population has doubled, to 1,400,000, in 15 years, and the area continues to be one of the fastest-growing in the nation. Much of the expansion is due to the fact that Atlanta is the key commercial center within a radius of nearly 600 miles. Companies eager to tap the South's expanding consumer and industrial markets headquartered their regional operations in Atlanta, making it the ultimate branch-office town. No fewer than 430 of the FORTUNE 500 largest U.S. companies have offices in Atlanta. Recent arrivals include National Distribution Services, Inc., a subsidiary of Eastern Air Lines; Americana Corp., a real estate marketing company; BP Oil Corp., a subsidiary of the Standard Oil Co. (Ohio). The comings and goings of corporate salesmen and executives help make Atlanta's airport the nation's second busiest, after Chicago's O'Hare.

Unlike some metropolitan areas, where booming satellite cities of office buildings and shopping centers have grown up outside the center city, the place to be in Atlanta is still downtown —if possible, right on famous Peachtree Street. The central tax base, which doubled in the '60s, is expected to grow half again as big before 1980. All together, some $3.3 billion in construction has been scheduled for the next few years, including a 70-story hotel, six office buildings, a trade mart and a $1.3 billion rapid-transit system approved by voters late last year.

Unfortunately, Atlanta's remarkably violence-free move toward racial integration in the '60s has not made economic life for its 256,000 blacks much easier than in any other big city. Black unemployment remains about twice as high as white, and the ghetto areas of Summerhill and Vine City are no less depressing than their counterparts in Brooklyn or St. Louis. Yet Atlanta supports what many blacks believe to be the most comfortable black middle class in the nation. Much of it is associated with the city's thriving black academic community in the six-college Atlanta University complex, but there are also several large black-owned businesses, including Citizens Trust Co. and Atlanta Life Insurance Co.

Just as Atlanta's median age is declining (from 27.4 to 26.3 in the 1960s), so its leadership is getting younger —only much faster. Some examples: