Walking in the Rain

The Atlanta Bicycle Coalition hosted the second Atlanta Streets Alive event of the year a couple of weeks ago, on May 18.  This was the first Streets Alive event I attended without Iain, who had left for Dresden a few days earlier.  Rain was forecast; I had volunteered for the set-up shift, and told Tom that that was the only time I *had* to be there, that if it was raining hard I would come home after that.  It was also unseasonably cool, and expecting to get wet, I wore my long underwear.  This was not typical Atlanta weather.

My assigned partner and I set up water stations along the north end of the route but that was all that they needed us to do, so after we were done I got lunch at Cafe Agora.  I had ordered it to go but while I was there it started to rain pretty hard so I stayed there to eat.  While I was there the police officer assigned to the nearby intersection stopped in for coffee.  He didn't look very happy.  It didn't look like it was going to be a great afternoon.

The participation was down, for sure -- I've not seen a head count for this one -- but it was still fun.  While it did rain off an on throughout the afternoon, if you were dressed for it, you were fine.  There was the bicycle parade, heading north on Peachtree.

There wasn't much live music this time, but there was recorded music being played at several places along the route, and these two volunteers were dancing.

The wet pavement provided a good surface for chalk art, which I saw in several places.

There were lots of people taking pictures, and I took some pictures of people taking pictures.  The man with the suitcase, who I imagined was from out of town and had stumbled onto the closed street and been surprised, was taking a picture of a musician at Peachtree Center.

These young men formed an impromptu chorus line in the middle of Peachtree Street.

And these two older ladies were being photographed as another photographer captured the scene.

I'm not quite sure what this was but it would scare me to have it this on the back of my bicycle.  It was (I should add) not an actual person.

There were a couple of food trucks and other vendors in the usual place, over the interstate, and when I went by the first time business was very slow.  They were busier when I came by the second time and I was hungrier, so I got an ice cream sandwich from Atomic Ice Cream.  It was unequivocally the best ice cream sandwich I ever had.  I talked with the man selling them about the weather.  I told him that I had been astonished when I lived in Boston that people ate a lot of ice cream, all year round.  He told me that Seattle had the highest per capita consumption of ice cream sandwiches in the country.  I said, well, it's a Seattle kind of day here today, so I guess it's a good day for an ice cream sandwich.

As it happened, a couple days later I left for Seattle, and the weather was fabulous.  Clear and sunny.

Tunnel Vision

I had never ventured on foot into the Boulevard Tunnel until April 12, when Living Walls had asked for volunteers to help prepare the walls for an artist who was going to come paint a mural.  Since I don't drive to Cabbagetown or Grant Park often, the tunnel is more something I go past on the way to Caramba than it is something I go through.  I thought of it as a dreary place but not a horrible place.  But for those nearby, it was more than an eyesore.  It was a place that felt unsafe and maybe was.  Nicki Braxley, a Cabbagetown resident, decided to do something about it a couple of years ago and started the Boulevard Tunnel Initiative.  Since then, the city has replaced some railings and a security camera has been installed in one of the stairwells.  But the big leap forward was when Living Walls took on the task of turning the tunnel into a destination.  Living Walls -- an organization that does magic with the resources available to it, which are long on passion and commitment, and short on cash -- brought in the artist MOMO from New York to paint the tunnel.

The Boulevard Tunnel Initiative had organized a clean up and then Living Walls staff and volunteers showed up to prep the walls for MOMO.  There were a half-dozen or so of us there, painting with rollers.  I was only there for a few hours, but it was unexpectedly hard work. (Iain had spent the weekend in Athens, and when I went to pick him up the next day he said, "Mom, there's something on your face.  It looks like paint.")

MOMO arrived in town a few days later and began to work.  First the walls were painted with blocks of color, then the boundaries between the blocks disappeared, and then designs were superimposed over the painted walls.  An army of volunteers was involved.  I took off a day from work and helped one day.  It was an amazing thing to watch.

The project took a little longer than originally planned at least in part because of the weather; you can't paint walls in the rain.  But it did get done, and after it was complete, Iain and Caroline and I went to see it in early May.  It is an amazing piece of work.

Can art transform the tunnel?  Probably not all by itself, but as Nicole Braxley told Rebecca Burns, it may increase pedestrian presence in the tunnel, and that should help.  

After taking a few pictures that day, we walked up to Noni's for lunch.  On the way back, two men from Fort Lauderdale asked us if the bus that stopped at Boulevard and Edgewood went to Five Points.  We had to admit we had no idea, but pointed them toward the nearby MARTA station on Decatur Street.  It was only afterwards that I realized I should have told them about the new murals in the tunnel.  

Next time.

Living on Fumes

The report, "Measuring Sprawl and its Impact," was released from Smart Growth America last month.  In case you missed it, this was the report that named Atlanta the most sprawling large metropolitan area.  Right after that report came out, I had a trip for work.  I was sitting next to the window and it was a clear day.  This was not long after take off but I'm not sure how long; even if it's some distance from Atlanta, it illustrates the point -- housing in places where you have to have a car to get around.  There just is no other way.

As more of the people who could afford to live this way decide they don't want to do it, there's increasing demand for housing in real places, in actual neighborhoods, in places where there is somewhere to go and something to do and where you don't have to drive everywhere.  I am fortunate enough to live in one of those places.  But there's no more space, inside the perimeter, than there was when it was built, so the only way to add more housing is to fill in the empty spaces (there are some) or knock down something that was already there and build something new.  That happens, in my part of town, with houses and with commercial developments.  Of course all of the new construction is much more expensive than what it replaced, so there are fewer and fewer places for lower income people to live.  This means that our neighborhoods are less diverse and less interesting, because there are fewer and fewer places (for example) for the young people who make neighborhoods interesting and fun, and the people who can't afford to live here any more get pushed out to areas where housing costs less.

Where are those areas in the metropolitan Atlanta area?  There are still more affordable areas intown than my neighborhood, of course, and if you can't afford Morningside or Virginia Highland, there are other neighborhoods to go.  But at the bottom of the income scale, increasingly, those places are in the suburbs, those places where transit doesn't go, where you have to have a car.  What happens to the poor and the almost-poor and the one-broken-down-car-away-from-homelessness poor?  Rebecca Burns wrote about it today in Politico, in a piece entitled "Sprawled out in Atlanta," with the subheading, "What happens when poverty spreads to a place that wasn't built for poor people?"  (Not to pick on Cobb County, the subject of Rebecca Burns' piece, in particular -- the New York Times had the very same article today, but set in Moreno Valley, California, east of Los Angeles).  Both articles make clear how sprawl keeps people poor, with requirements for long commutes and the resulting high costs of commuting in both time and money to low-paying jobs.

It all circles back to the need for more compact development and density and the importance of transit.  Which brings me back to accessory dwelling units.  I know I just wrote about this, but in case you missed it, Virginia Highland just had an opportunity to support the development of accessory dwelling units (garage apartments and so forth) in their new neighborhood Master Plan but decided against it.  In Portland, Oregon, the city now allows accessory dwelling units, and there adding an accessory dwelling unit increases the value of the property, provides rental income for the property owner, and contribute to sustainable communities through dramatic decreases in construction waste.  According to the New York Times article, "additional living spaces are springing up everywhere, providing affordable housing without changing the feeling or texture of established neighborhoods the way high-rise developments can."

In our neighborhoods, we value property owners' rights so highly that they can build any kind of house that meets zoning requirements whether or not it fits in at all into the neighborhood, but not enough to let the property owner build a garage apartment that might be invisible from the street.