Living on the Grid

It was a couple of weeks ago; there had been rain and thunderstorms for much of the weekend, and then, there were MARTA buses coming down Wessyngton Road. I heard the traffic before I saw it, but when I went outside, there was a steady and uncharacteristic flow of cars from the North Highland end of the street toward Cumberland. The power had gone off, too, so I figured there was a tree down on Highland and cars were detouring down our street. On my way up the street to try to find out what was going on, I saw Lynsley and Bill and Linda. They'd heard that a power pole was down, maybe struck by lightning.

On North Highland, yellow tape blocked the street and the sidewalks; there were Georgia Power trucks at the other end of the block, near Lanier, so I walked around the block to get a better look. By the time I got there, there wasn't much going on, and if a power pole had been down, a new one had replaced it already and the old one had been hauled away. People were starting to walk around or under the yellow tape that blocked the sidewalks and make their way past the trucks, still parked in the middle of the street, and the workmen who looked like they were waiting for directions on where to head next.



On my way home, back down Wessyngton from North Highland, I had to pay more attention than usual to the traffic -- there still was a steady flow of cars toward Cumberland -- but there were lots of pedestrians out, doing the same thing I'd done, trying to figure out why all the traffic and when the power might be back on. I saw lots of our neighbors that afternoon. One said, "I love it when there's a disaster." I think she meant it was fun to see everyone out walking around when Something Happens. I didn't say, "I do, too," but I did smile in response.

Many years ago -- before I moved to Atlanta -- I read a book about city planning that described what's now called New Urbanism -- the idea that cities should be designed to be pleasant and walkable with mixed use, for the benefit of everyone and not just people driving cars. One of the principles of the New Urbanism is that streets should go somewhere; they should be connected to the street grid, easing movement and dispersing traffic, rather than the tangle of deadend streets in many subdivisions that forces all the traffic onto arterial roads. I had never thought about this before I read that book and decided at that point that I never wanted to live on a street that didn't go anywhere.

There was an article in the Times last week about the housing market in Atlanta, which over the last year had the largest declines in prices of any major metropolitan area. But the neighborhoods described in the story weren't intown; they were in Marietta and Dacula and Jonesboro and Norcross. It's not that we didn't have foreclosures in our neighborhood -- we did, but that was a year or two ago. At least here, it's better now.

The New Urbanism people say that houses on streets that are connected to the grid of other streets in the community appreciate more in value than houses on streets that don't go anywhere. The occasional MARTA bus on Wessyngton Road is a small price to pay for living on a street in a real neighborhood, where there are places to walk and streets that will get you there.  

Enough of this; it's time for Iain and me to walk to Alon's and the farmers' market.