What kind of development revitalizes neighborhoods? It's not so difficult. The kind that encourages walking and gets people out of their cars. If there must be parking, put it behind the housing and retail, but build for density so there are enough people who can get there without driving that you are not relying on huge numbers of cars that demand so much space for parking that things are too far apart and too ugly. It's diversity, so there's places for all kinds of people to live -- students and young people just out of school, families with kids, empty nesters, retired people. And diversity too in what's there -- coffee shops and bakeries and farmers markets and neighborhood taverns and art galleries restaurants and local retailers. All built to human scale, not for cars. I'm not a city planner, but this is clear to me, and I am sure it's even clearer to the people who do this for a living.
I went to the MLPA Board meeting a couple of weeks ago and there was a report about a recent City Council vote on a requested change to the city's master development plan for the Lindbergh area. Lindbergh is already home to too many big-box stores and parking lots, and a developer wanted to but a WalMart Superstore there. There might be a way for a WalMart to work in a location like this (but this is awfully close to an existing Target store) but not with a huge footprint and a huge parking lot surrounding it. It is currently zoned for high-density residential, and the City Council did not have enough votes to change it.
One of the new neighborhoods in Atlanta that has benefited from the right kind of redevelopment is Glenwood Park. There's thoughtful design, community involvement, and "nearly ideal walkable density." It had been an abandoned industrial site that had most recently been used as a concrete recycling facility. Now there's houses and apartments and retail and public space and (as best I can tell) it's a great neighborhood and a terrific example of how to do redevelopment right.
Now just to the west of Glenwood Park, a developer has proposed to build a WalMart. This is in the Grant Park neighborhood, and the proposed development -- with at 155,000 sq ft store and more than a thousand surface parking spaces. The Neighborhood Planning Unit opposes the development, which is inconsistent with the Beltline Master Plan. For NPU-W, Chairman Edward Gilgor wrote, "This kind of aggressive ignorance is indicative not of an enlightened view of new urbanism, but rather a rather common and pervasive view of old-style suburbanism."
We have wonderful neighborhoods in Atlanta, and with the right kind of development we can have even more of them. But big-box stores, regardless of the retailer, are just not the right kind. More from Chairman Gilgor:
More fundamentally, the proposal fails in nearly every way to comply with the goals and ideals adopted by Council in committing to the construction of the Atlanta BeltLine and Council’s bold vision of connecting and revitalizing Atlanta. Instead, the proposal seeks to wedge a typically suburban big box store into historic neighborhoods and communities that have strived for true intersection of the live, work play ideal represented by new urbanism. NPU-W urges the Office of Planning to exercise its discretion and deny the application as it had been submitted. Should the applicant decide to submit an application that does meet with the BeltLine Overlay and the Subarea 4 Master Plan, then it will find the surrounding communities, as well as this NPU, to be active partners and supporters in its endeavor.
What kind of neighborhood do you want to live in? There's an on line petition on the Glenwood Avenue rezoning. The Beltline is a great opportunity, but let's stick with the plan and do it right.
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