The Neighborhoods We Want (Business Edition)

It was in early September that we got the email announcement that Toscano & Sons, the Italian grocery store in Virginia Highland, was closing.  This was a shock.  That was where we bought flour for pizza making in 50 pound bags and cans of Italian tomatoes for pizza sauce.  They had great sandwiches and it was pleasant to sit on the sidewalk with a panini and watch the people go by.  But the rents were high, and ultimately (Tom heard from the owners), it just wasn't worth it -- the landlord was making more than the business owners were.

The closing of Toscano & Sons led to a long and surprisingly lively and constructive discussion on Nextdoor about the difficulties that neighborhood businesses face.  My response when my favorite places close is blame the landlords for rents that are too high, which may or may not be fair; there was discussion in the Nextdoor thread about whether or not Virginia Highland is still a shopping and dining destination for people from outside the neighborhood, with competition from other commercial areas, like Ponce City Market and Krog Street Market and Inman Quarter.  There were complaints about Park Atlanta, which is always fair game in my book, but others pointed out that most of us can easily walk or bike there so parking should not really be so much of a deterrent for us in the nearby neighborhoods. There were discussions about the mix of businesses in Virginia Highland, pointing out that there were only so many bars and boutiques the neighborhood could support, and some proposals for what kind of businesses we'd like to see in the neighborhood, with most of the suggestions not sounding very viable to me (a lot of focus on "organic" and "locally sourced" which doesn't go so well with "inexpensive").  There was nostalgia for an independent bookstore that used to be nearby that I don't remember so it probably closed more than 25 years ago.  And some of the local business owners spoke up, and made the case that just a little more business from all of us would make a big difference to them.

There are lots of reasons to support local businesses -- we'd rather do business with people that we know and that know us than with strangers; it's more fun to walk to Morningside Kitchen than to drive to Buckhead (actually, almost anything is more fun than driving to Buckhead); and it would be so depressing if Virginia Highland or Morningside Village got replaced by, say, a Walmart.  Another reason is what the American Independent Business Alliance calls "the local economic multiplier effect" -- what we spend at locally-owned, independent businesses is far more likely to circulate in our community, contributing to the local economy, than what we spend at absentee-owned businesses, locally-owned franchises, or (in the worst possible case) a distant, online retailer.  ("Buying remotely creates almost no local benefit – just a few minutes’ work for a delivery person.”)

We shop at Costco and Target and Amazon, and will continue to, but having Toscano & Sons close and the subsequent conversation about our neighborhood businesses has made me realize that if I love having these businesses nearby, I need to support them better.  And if all of us did that -- just a little more shopping and dining in the neighborhood -- we wouldn't keep having our favorite places closing.

Yesterday, after early voting, we walked to Virginia Highland for breakfast, and I was surprised to see this in the window, where Toscano & Sons used to be:

It looks like we might have another chance at supporting our neighborhood Italian market.  I'll do better this time.

Waiting for the Bus

I've had some time off work recently and have been out and about in the city on MARTA a little more frequently than usual.  There are two bus routes that run on Highland near our street, and between them, you can get to lots of places -- one of them goes to downtown, and another goes to Midtown, and both connect to rail stations so you can get to everywhere the rail system goes, including the airport.  But the buses don't run very frequently -- if it's not rush hour, you're going to wait a long time, and even in rush hour they may still be 25 minutes or longer apart, so for this to not be a complete exercise in frustration, you need to know when the bus is coming so you get there before the bus you want comes, not after.

This is the premise of MARTA Army's Timely Trip project, to post (and keep current) schedules at neighborhood bus stops.  I've signed up for the two closest to my street, and went to the MARTA Army event a couple of weeks ago to get my updated schedules.  We were at the Atlanta City Studio, temporarily located at Ponce City Market.  The Studio is occupied by real city planners from the City of Atlanta, but is open for visitors and hosts events that are open to the public.  This time, the MARTA Army folks proposed that we personalize the schedule, with art or in some other way.

I opted just for a short message in colored pencil, pointing out that if you took MARTA, you wouldn't have to find a place to park:

And here they are, in place:

Now that's all well and good, but for the posted schedules to be helpful, the buses need to run on schedule, and they don't so much. Sometimes there's little traffic and few passengers to stop for, and they run ahead of schedule, or the traffic is terrible and they run late.  Even that wouldn't be a complete deal-breaker if you could find out that your bus is running 10 minutes early or 15 minutes late - you could plan accordingly.  MARTA does have an app with some helpful functions but you still can't really tell from the "real-time map" when your bus is likely to show up.  This is not one of my bus routes (more about that in a minute) but this is what the map looks like:

The map is not continuously updated, and even when the buses appear on the map, sometimes they disappear or just don't move and and it's hard to figure out from this whether it's time to head for the bus stop or not.  That's when they show up on the map in the first place.  This is the current map for Route 16, the bus that goes south on Highland to downtown:

There should be a southbound bus but nothing shows up (it being early Sunday morning as I am writing this, there is not yet a northbound bus running; that's a separate problem.)  Many of the buses don't seem to have location information available, which makes this function not useful.  (I also tried to take a screen shot of the other route on Highland, Route 36, but every time I try to open that map, the app closes, which is another feature which really limits its usefulness.)

I was complaining about this absence of information about when the buses were expected to show up at the very first MARTA Army event I went to, and someone told me that there is an app that provides this information that the MARTA app does not.  One Bus Away takes the location information from MARTA and projects when your bus is expected to show up.  Or at least it used to; more recently it doesn't seem to know where the buses are, and just shows you the scheduled times, which doesn't help:

Advance Atlanta, one of several groups that is working on regional transit issues, is collaborating with Civic Dinners to provide a framework for people who are interested to get together and discuss what are the problems with transit in the Atlanta region and hopefully get more of us to care about the solutions.  You can sign up to host a dinner or find one that someone else has organized and sign up to attend one.  My neighbor Alyssa hosted the first one last week.  This is not quite our entire group -- one person joined us after this was taken -- but we had good representation from the neighborhood, and and there were several people with professional interest in transit issues.  It was a good discussion, and it was interesting for me to hear other perspectives on the issue.

One of the questions we discussed was if we could magically solve one really big, intractable problem, what would it be?  By the time I spoke up, others that already mentioned the big ones -- absence of an integrated regional transit system, fragmented governance across the metro region, and the racism that is so deeply entangled with transit issues in Atlanta -- so I said I just wanted to be able to tell when the bus was going to show up.  Really, I'd take it more often if it wasn't so frustrating.  This should not be so hard.  Just let us know your best estimate of when the bus is going to show up at the bus stop.

In November, we will have a chance to vote on funding for MARTA.  This is a big opportunity, and there are lots of ideas about how those funds should be invested, if the referendum passes.  Citizens for Progressive Transit put together an interactive website where you can put together your own proposal for how to invest the $2.5B or more that the sales tax is expected to raise over the next 40 years.  But before we extend rail or build more streetcar tracks or even buy more buses, we should fix the system we have so that we know when the bus is probably going to show up. Just that one thing.  It should not be that hard.

Still Not Thinking about Selling

They are at it again,  Last week someone from Muffley & /Associates "Land Acquisition Team" left handwritten (but probably not written by the signer) at Lynsley's house and at ours, and I think he also talked to Kathy.  Here is Lynsley's card:

And here's ours:

The text of the two is nearly but not quite identical.  Here is ours:

Dear Neighbor,

I have a lovely young couple who absolutely loves [sic] your street.  They have asked me to reach out to you about your house specifically. They are ready to pay a premium for a special place to call home!  They want to know if you are interested in selling?  Please call me when you recieve [sic] this so we can discuss a price that may interest you!

Thank you, 

Jarrett Reeves [initialed "JR", followed by a phone number]

This is frustrating on so many levels.  There is the fake familiarity of "Dear Neighbor," and the "lovely young couple who absolutely love your street."  There's the implication that this lovely young couple is "specifically" interested in our house (as well as Kathy's and Lynsley's and who knows how many others), no doubt because our houses are so nice -- or maybe because they think they are teardowns, which most of us find pretty offensive.

Of course, if there really was a "lovely young couple" who wanted to live on our street, there's Danielle's house, that's been on the market for a while now.  

There's the lot where the duplex used to be, that is now home to random construction debris and a swamp.  There's the other duplex, on the corner at Cumberland, where a builder got a variance to build "an English country cottage-style home" but nothing has happened yet.  If you're interested, though, here's what they say it will look like, after they cut down the trees and build it:

And most famously, there is the site where the apartments used to be, where the city had to approve building three houses on two lots because they made a mistake on a planning map maybe ten years ago and the property was purchased based on that planning map.  Nothing has happened for years there, except damaging trees and periodic stop work orders because of tree damage and erosion.

Periodically signs for real estate companies or developers appear there, but nothing has happened.  Recently new, very large signs appeared, which may be the harbinger of new, very large houses to follow.  Or maybe not -- we'll see.

So, if there really is a "lovely young couple" who absolutely love our street, they have lots of options.  Those options do not include purchasing and demolishing Lynsley's, Kathy and Steve's, or our houses, though.  The Land Acquisition Team at Muffley and Associates may want to make note of that and save themselves some time.

One Year Later

The small brick duplex that used to be a few houses away from us was demolished a year ago yesterday.  The duplex had not been occupied since November 2013,  It was in the fall of 2014 that several large trees behind the duplex were cut down.  By March 2015 there was a dumpster in the driveway and a "For Sale" sign from Keller Williams and a Black Dawg Construction sign in the front yard.

It was demolished a year ago yesterday, on July 2, 2015.

By the next morning, there was just a pile of debris; in this picture, the trees that were cut down the previous year are still visible behind where the house used to be.

And here it is a couple of days later, after the heavy equipment was gone.

The debris got removed along with the remains of the trees that were cut down, but by fall there was a dumpster, a pile of rocks, and a trailer on the lot.

There also was a puddle at the low point of the back yard that never really went away.

By January 2016, the dumpster was gone, but otherwise nothing much had changed.

By early June, the trailer was gone and the grass and weeds had grown tall.

There still was a puddle in the back, maybe because there was an open drainage pipe.

 

These pictures were taken about two weeks later.  Someone had mowed the weeds, tidied up a little, and put the signs back up, but the rocks were still piled up near the mailbox.

Now, we're a year out from demolishing the house, and the lot is still a mess and there's still mud in the back yard, even though it's been a long time since it rained.

I don't know if or when this will ever get cleaned up, but if I were Black Dawg Construction or Keller Williams, I really wouldn't want to have my sign here.

Jane's Walk in Downtown Atlanta

I can't even remember how I found out about it; it might have been an email from the local Congress for the New Urbanism chapter, or maybe I saw it on Facebook.  CNU Atlanta, along with PEDS, was hosting a Jane's Walk on May 7.  I had never heard of Jane's Walk, but I had heard of Jane Jacobs, the influential author and advocate for livable cities.  (Just before I sat down to write this, I looked for my copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities, but I couldn't find it; it is probably at the bottom of one of the large piles of books next to my bed.)  Jane Jacobs identified the things about cities and neighborhoods that makes them good places to be -- things like diversity of use, older buildings, small blocks, and population density.  The group behind Jane's Walks (more about them in a minute) have a nice overview of her life and her work on their website, or you can look at the graphic version from artist James Gulliver Hancock -- it's pretty much all there.

Jane Jacobs lived in New York City and later in Toronto.  After her death in 2006, friends and colleagues in Toronto started Jane's Walks to honor her ideas and her legacy.  What is a Jane's Walk?  Here's what is on the Jane's Walk website:

Jane’s Walks are free, locally organized walking tours, in which people get together to explore, talk about and celebrate their neighbourhoods. Where more traditional tours are a bit like walking lectures, a Jane’s Walk is more of a walking conversation. Leaders share their knowledge, but also encourage discussion and participation among the walkers.

Iain and I rode MARTA to Woodruff Park, where we met up with the group.  The walk's leader, Candler Vinson, was late (he was stuck on MARTA, someone announced) so there was some waiting around before we got started.  One woman had brought her copy of The Death and Life of Great American Cities.  It was worn with many Post-It notes marking pages.  Someone handed out a sheet with the Jane Jacobs graphic printed on it,  While we waited we checked out the concrete ping-pong table in the park.

Once Candler Vinson got there, we headed east on Auburn Avenue, and our first stop was across the street from the Atlanta Daily World Building.  One of our several enthusiastic narrators told the story of how the building -- damaged in the 2008 tornado -- was proposed for demolition by a developer.  That didn't happen and another developer purchased the building and renovated it for commercial use on the first floor and apartments above.  Somehow I did not take picture of it (I think it was in the shade) but there are photos at the link above.  There's now a coffee shop and a juice place on the first floor.  What I did take a picture of at this stop was the person with the microphone who I think is Darin Givens while Terry Kearns took a picture of the crowd.

We continued on to Piedmont where we stopped and talked about what we'd seen.  The thing that had struck me the most was how much of the area was taken up with parking decks.  There were more places to park, I think, than things to do once you got there.  Sally Flocks from PEDS talked about how all the four lane one way streets created more road capacity than almost any city needed.  At one point along our route the sidewalk was nearly completely blocked by a large sign for motorists telling them a lane was closed ahead.  And there was discussion about how Georgia State had been really good for downtown, by putting lots of students there (not so much for all the parking decks, though.)

On Ellis Street we stopped across the street from the newly renovated Atlanta Legal Aid building, now named for our neighbor Steve Gottlieb.  It's a beautiful building, but it's nearly completely surrounded by parking.

After that we crossed Peachtree and continued on Carnegie Way.  I think that is where I got this photo of the iconic Portman-style skybridges that sucked people off the street in a very non-Jane Jacobs kind of way.  On the Jane's Walk website, that's Jane Jacobs' Big Idea number 1, "eyes on the street."  The difference between a street that feels safe and a street that doesn't feel safe is people -- people going to and from work or school, out for a bite to eat, or out to shop, or to visit friends, and anything that diverts people from the street makes the street feel less safe, and if it feels less safe, people are even more likely to avoid it.

Our next stop was Walton Spring Park.  On Google Maps, the park is green, and there is some green there, with trees creating a pleasant shaded area on the sidewalks surrounding the park.  

The park itself, not so much.  It is a bare, unshaded granite plaza with benches that appeared to be used only by homeless people.

Looking at these pictures and remembering what it was like to be there that afternoon, one does have to wonder who thought this was a good idea.  Central Atlanta Progress and the City of Atlanta and some other people did this on purpose in 2008, to honor Andrew Young.  It seems like it might have been even more of an honor if they had designed a park that people actually wanted to be in.  

From there we headed southwest on Ted Turner Drive and then back southeast, but I am not sure what street this was on but I stopped to take a picture of it.

Our next stop was the Fairlie-Poplar District, which I have heard of for years but don't think I had ever visited.  It was very pleasant, with narrow shady streets, small buildings from the 19th and early 20th century, and several appealing-looking restaurants and bars at street level, with what appeared to be residential floors above.  Big Idea number 3 is "the generators of diversity" that help make the city "diverse, safe, social, convenient, and economically vibrant" -- mixed uses, aged buildings, small blocks, and population density.

From there we headed back southwest on Forsyth Street.  I think this is where I took this picture, where clearly the city is trying to do something about the overly wide streets.

We continued on Forsyth and went by the Atlanta Journal Constitution building at the corner of Forsyth and Marietta.  I am sorry that the picture is better of the fence than it is of the building.  It is a weirdly compelling sight, with trees growing from various surfaces; this photograph does not do it justice.  The building is definitely ruin porn material; I just didn't take a good picture of it.

We stopped at the Federal office complex, where there was a pleasant shady green space.  Thousands of Federal workers have their offices there, but apparently they park their cars in their parking deck, go to work, have lunch at the cafeteria in the building, work some more and then go home, and the nearby commercial areas don't benefit particularly by their presence.

We headed back southeast on Martin Luther King Jr Drive, and stopped at Broad Street, which the Goat Farm team has been trying to catalyze as a downtown arts district.  I would have liked to walk around and explore but we kept moving; I guess I will have to come back.

From there we headed past the Fulton County Government Center and then back to the northeast.  We ended up at Underground Atlanta, where one of our speakers made the point about the hazards of having the place in the hands of a single owner, where whatever you do it's a really big investment, and if it fails (as has happened several times at Underground) it fails big, instead of one-building-at-a-time investment and experimentation.  That's Big Idea number 7, "make many little plans" and Big Idea number 8, "gradual money."  

The diversity of a good neighborhood can only be achieved when we allow many different people to pursue their own little plans, individually and collectively.

Both diverse little plans and new kinds of work require diverse little sources of money available on an ongoing basis.  Unfortunately, both public and private sources often only provide money floods and droughts instead.

Iain and I agreed that it was an interesting way to spend a Sunday afternoon.  So many neighborhoods with great old buildings that could be special, if we renovated them instead of knocking them down to build parking decks.  I found the thing I always find when I travel by foot or by bike through parts of town I knew only by car, that things are much closer together than I thought.  From the point of view of distance, it was definitely walkable, even if the walking wasn't necessarily pleasant with obstructions on sidewalks and so little interesting to look at in some places.  And finally, the overwhelming sense that for downtown to be radically better, we have to have more people there without their cars.

On the way home we (well, make that "I" - this was more me than Iain) got impatient and frustrated with MARTA -- a bus was supposed to be coming, but it didn't, and then we were going to take the train but none were showing up on the electronic board, and then the next bus didn't show up on One Bus Away and wasn't moving on MARTA's real time map.  So we booked an Uber ride home.  As soon as we did that, of course our bus appeared.