Another troubled suburban shopping mall is in the news. Town Center at Cobb, which sits at the split of I-575 from I-75 near Kennesaw, failed to pay its 2024 property-tax bill of more than $1 million. This comes after the mall recently was shuttered due to “highly delinquent” power bills.
Growing up, this was the first major real-estate development I remember noticing. As it rose from an empty plain in the mid-1980s, it seemed, even to a small-town boy, far from the big city. This “edge city” pattern was so synonymous with Atlanta that Tom Wolfe wrote a novel about it.
Town Center reopened a day after the lights went out, and the tax matter may yet be resolved. But it is hard not to view these incidents as part of the decline of suburban malls. North DeKalb Mall was closed and razed, and a largely vacant Gwinnett Place Mall has bounced from one redevelopment plan to another.
In a broad sense, this is the market at work: Entrepreneurs forge a path, consumers buy it or don’t, and more builders and investors follow suit. Or consumers buy it until someone offers something more attractive, prompting capital and activity to flow in a different direction.
In this case, Town Center has been overtaken on all sides: by outdoor malls such as Avenue East Cobb, revitalized downtowns such as Woodstock, and megadevelopments such as The Battery. Consumers spoke, and the market moved.
The public sector doesn’t work this way, or at least not anymore. Why? The administrative state.
Our system was built for the people to elect their leaders periodically. Those leaders were to represent the popular will, updating the laws and pushing power into new corridors and endeavors as a result.
But power is prone to pooling rather than flowing. And over the past century, policy increasingly has been made not as laws passed by the legislative branch but as regulations promulgated by those who have been pooling power in the executive branch. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute’s Clyde Wayne Crews recently wrote: “Is Congress even trying? … In 2024, federal agencies issued 3,248 rules and regulations, while Congress enacted only 175 laws.”
Crews calls this disparity the Unconstitutionality Index because it defies the way our government was designed to function. The differences of branches matter: The popular will is not reflected, or much considered, when we are governed by unelected bureaucrats in jobs for life rather than elected representatives who must answer to the voters for their decisions.
Recall that after the 2016 election, when the people clearly opted for something different by electing Donald Trump, unelected bureaucrats famously sought to undermine him. Their illegitimate “resistance” frustrated his efforts to do what he told the voters he would do. That was more of a usurpation of the popular will than any of the “stolen election” claims over the past decade.
Bureaucratic unaccountability has been less of a problem in Georgia. But that doesn’t mean everything’s fine. New administrative rules have piled up over the decades, only rarely decreasing from one year to the next. There are also insufficient guardrails around the process, which means matters could get out of hand if there were not a governor and appointed agency heads trying to keep them under control.
These issues informed the Red Tape Rollback Act that the Senate approved last month. That it passed on a party-line vote mostly reflects the fact that both proponents and opponents have likened the bill to the “DOGE” efforts in Washington. In fact, the Georgia effort would merely apply legislative scrutiny to executive-branch rulemaking and require more thorough examination of the tradeoffs between costs to small businesses and benefits for Georgians.
To the extent that people at the state or federal level thought they could bypass the normal legislative process to make law, the bill is coming due. You might even call it “highly delinquent.”
