Sprawl City on Ice

For days the weather forecast had been return of sub-freezing temperatures on Tuesday, and the possibility of snow.  Maybe it would stay to the south and miss the city, or maybe it wouldn't.  According to this morning's AJC, the weather service's advisory was escalated to a winter storm warning around 4 a.m.  But -- somewhat to my surprise -- the schools were open.

The weather was fine yesterday morning.  I wasn't worried about getting home from work -- if it got really bad, I could walk home -- but many of my co-workers have long commutes.  I was surprised at how many of them were at the office yesterday morning.  But the office wasn't closed, and people hadn't been told to stay home, so I shouldn't have been surprised that people had come to work.

There was an emergency message from the school mid-morning.  I said, "That's my son's school closing.  I'll let Tom deal with that."  I didn't read it until later, that it was just a cancellation of after school activities.

At noon there was a message that we could go home.  A lot of people left.  I finished up a few things and left a little after 1.  But traffic was terrible on Clifton and it took a long time to get home, and the drive was harrowing.

This photo doesn't capture it completely because I don't stay on the bumper of the car in front of me when roads are slick.  I think it took me around 40 minutes from the time I left my office until the time I got home.

At 2 p.m. there was a message from school that due to deteriorating road conditions dismissal was beginning at 2:15 p.m.  Tom was out in the northern suburbs somewhere and was stuck in traffic.  He said he might be stuck there over night.  I dismissed that as hyperbole and headed off to pick up Iain and our exchange student.  

It took almost an hour to get to the school.  Roads were packed and some intersections were gridlocked, as drivers filled up intersections and kept cross-traffic blocked.  The short section of Peachtree that I had to drive on was the worst, but I did finally get to the school a little after 3.  On the way home I had to detour because a street in Garden Hills already seemed to be impassable.  We got home at 4 p.m.  Tom did get out of the traffic jam he was caught in and stopped at a Target for steaks, bread, and milk.  He got home a little while after I did.

We made it home, but lots of people didn't.  Expressways were clogged with cars and Georgia DOT couldn't get their trucks out to spread salt or sand.  It was below freezing during the day but it got colder as the evening went on, and the snow turned to ice.  School buses couldn't run, kids were stuck at school or on buses, and expressways were full of cars as bridges and exit ramps iced over.  I kept Channel 11 on last night, seeing the images of roads full of immobilized cars, the stories of children stuck at schools, people who had been in their cars for eight or more hours, trying to get to schools to pick up their children or to get home, or as the evening went on, trying to get anywhere.

I didn't stay up for the Governor's press conference, but the spokespeople for GDOT and Georgia Emergency Management had been getting asked the accusing questions by the TV anchors, why weren't you prepared?  They said they were.  But it didn't matter if they were prepared if everyone in the Atlanta area hit the road at 1 p.m., when Tom and I did.  The roads couldn't deal with the volume, and it didn't matter how ready the GDOT was, if they were caught in the same traffic that everyone else was.

It's the next morning now.  There still are people stuck in their cars.  There are two school buses with children on them at I-285 and Cascade Road.  By this morning, the TV anchors were asking an Atlanta Public Schools spokesperson why the schools weren't closed yesterday morning.  The spokesperson said the weather forecast changed, which is true, but it did change in time that school could have been cancelled.  But I'm sure they didn't believe it.  Sometimes the forecasts are wrong.  The weather was fine in the morning; people would complain if school was closed preemptively and then it didn't snow, or didn't snow much.  

Atlanta was and is paralyzed by 2 inches of snow because our city is dependent on cars and the patterns of housing, work, and school that we have chosen require lots of driving.  *That* is the cause here.  It's not Georgia DOT's fault (except to the extent they have made this car dependency possible, which or course they have), or Georgia Emergency Management's fault, or the City of Atlanta's fault (ditto), or the Atlanta Public School's fault.  It's the fault of the political leaders and private sector interests that allowed the Atlanta metropolitan area to develop this way.

The History of Atlanta (Part 2): Other People

The Braves' abandonment of the city for the suburbs got me interested in the impact of the team on our city, so I've been reading.  One of the things I've read is a fascinating essay from Georgia State University about the changes in the neighborhoods surrounding the stadiums (Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium and Turner Field).  This image is from that essay:

People used to live there, but the city forced them out not only to build two stadiums but before that to build expressways to connect the city with the suburbs.  In those days there was no requirement that "urban renewal" projects make any provision for the people who are displaced, so no one knows what happened to those people.  Larry Keating's book, Atlanta:  Race, Class, and Urban Expansion, details the pattern over decades of redevelopment plans that get rid of housing and neighborhoods where poor people live -- especially poor black people -- without (for most of the period) any effort to provide a place for them to go.  Neither the white businessmen who used to directly led the city or the black political class that replaced them paid any attention to this until the Federal government eventually forced them to, and even then efforts were half-hearted and promises were rarely kept.

It wasn't just the interests of the poor, mostly African-American, citizens of Atlanta whose interests were ignored.  The city also had a terrible track record of supporting the interests of middle-class white residents, which its support for Georgia Department of Transportation plans to turn intown neighborhoods into even more expressways so all the people who moved out of the city during desegregation could come back every day to go to work.

The Washington-Rawson neighborhood was destroyed in an early round of urban renewal, and became Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.  With little regard for the neighborhood, Turner Field was built just south of the older stadium and has adversely impacted Summerhill, Peoplestown, and Mechanicsville.  Now Mayor Reed is promising "one of the largest developments for middle-class people that the city has ever had” will replace Turner Field.

Let's just say, for purposes of discussion, that that actually happens.  What happens to the people who've lived in the area, all these years, putting up with empty lots that fill up with cars on game day and traffic and the asphalt sea that is Turner Field and no supermarket?  Just as the city's leadership -- both elected and unelected -- have felt free to make bad decisions about other people's money, they have not shown more regard for other people's homes and lives.

We'll see if this time it's different.

The History of Atlanta (Part 1): Other People's Money

On November 11, the Atlanta Braves announced that they were leaving Atlanta and moving to Cobb County.  Although I'm not a big basefall fan and have only been to Turner Field a couple of times, I couldn't believe our team -- our team! -- would abandon the city for the MARTA-refusing, car-dependent suburbs.  Baseball is an urban game.  It was just wrong.  And this lame excuse that they were moving to the I-75/I-285 area in part because of traffic?

I'm still angry but now I'm angry at others in addition to Liberty Media, the owner of the Cobb County Braves.  Soon after the announcement, there was a wonderful piece from Georgia State posted on line that detailed the impact of the stadiums -- not just Turner Field, but also Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium, that preceded it -- on the neighborhood.  There were several other sources referenced -- an excellent article by Rebecca Burns that appeared in Atlanta Magazine last summer, and several books.  Since then I've been reading.  One of the books, Kevin Kruse's White Flight:  Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservatism, I've now read most of, but I have to admit that I haven't quite finished it because it's just too depressing.  The other one is Larry Keating's Atlanta:  Race, Class, and Urban Expansion, which I finished yesterday.  It was pretty depressing too.

It's very striking, especially in Keating's book, how recurrent is the theme in recent Atlanta history of the power structure of wealthy white businessman and the black political class making decisions that didn't make fiscal sense.  Professional sports teams are not financial winners for cities, and the city has paid dearly to have the Braves here.  MARTA was not projected at the time it was built to have much ridership, but estimates were made based on anticipated high-density development around transit stations -- even though land use policy continued to allow low-density development in those areas.  But city leaders thought "real cities" had train systems, so Atlanta had to have one.  There was the Underground Atlanta debacle.  There was a continued disregard for thoughtful planning with placement of the civic center, multiple stadiums, and Centennial Olympic Park and public investment in the name of economic development in things which ended up not being good investments at all, and by people who should have known better.

Towards the end of the book, Keating wrote:

An obsession with image, however, does not fully explain why a business-led coalition would have repeatedly pursued redevelopment projects that were ineffective in terms of economic development.  A desire to enhance Atlanta's prestige explains why the city's governing elite has found glamourous, high-profile projects so appealing, but it does not explain why the governing elite has consistently ignored practical realities.  Oddly, the fundamental reason for this impracticality is that narrowly defined private interests have viewed public investment differently from private investment.  The Atlanta business powers have been willing to pursue projects that were poorly conceived from an economic standpoint because these projects either have been paid for directly with taxpayer money or have been indirectly subsidized.  City leaders have not felt that a satisfactory return on public investment should guide their actions, as would be the case with private investment.  In undertaking expensive redevelopment projects, they have not felt fiscally constrained, and as a consequence have been irresponsible guardians of the public purse.

Going back to what started this -- the Braves' move to Cobb County, to a taxpayer-subsidized stadium -- good luck with this, Cobb County.  I hope it works out better for you than it did for us.

Hidden in Plain Sight

I probably was in middle school when I read the story; it was about a boy who lived in a space inside of a bridge.  Looking back on it now, as an adult, the premise was frightening, and I don't know why it was in a middle school anthology -- a boy without caretakers or a home, living alone in a city -- but I probably first learned, reading it as a child in a small town in Kansas, that in cities there was a world that was invisible, underground or in spaces we didn't even know were there.  I am still fascinated by the stories of what's in the tunnels under Paris or London or New York City, abandoned metro stations, the places that urban explorers surreptitiously go.

But you don't have to go underground to find places you didn't know were there to explore in cities, and urban exploration doesn't have to mean creeping into abandoned buildings or utility tunnels.  There are other places where streets don't go that are empty spots on maps, and I wonder about them too.  Often these places are private property, and exploring them risks a trespass charge.  But there are the spaces under elevated highways, the cleared areas under major power lines, and sewer easements along creeks that are not necessarily accessible and sometimes not even visible from the street or sidewalk.  We all know about the accessibility that streets and sidewalks provide, but what if these invisible places got stitched together into a network?  Where could a pedestrian go?

When the Lindbergh-LaVista Corridor Coalition worked with the Georgia Conservancy on development of a plan for their community a few years ago, one of the themes identified was a desire by the neighborhood to be more connected, and not just by streets.  There's a lot in the report about improving the pedestrian environment and access to the streets by bicycles, but the authors also talk about how trails could help bring the neighborhood together.  The North Fork and the South Fork of Peachtree Creek converge there, and there is green space, some flood plain, and access via sewer easement along the creeks.

I don't know when exactly the South Fork Conservancy got started; by the time I first learned about them, they were a well-established organization, working with Park Pride on a visioning exercise for the South Fork of Peachtree Creek.  This is when I first learned about the work the Conservancy was doing to develop trails along the creek.  Since then, they've put an enormous effort into Dekalb County's new park in the Zonolite area, near us, but they've also been working with the Lindbergh-LaVista group, and now there's something to show for it.

Last Saturday two Board Members of the South Fork Conservancy led a small group on new trails in Lindbergh-Lavista.  At the end of Armand Road we walked past the private property sign (we have permission, we were assured) and onto trail that went along the sewer easement on the north side of the South Fork.

Walking these trails, there's a sense of wonder.  You know you're in the city, not far away from streets we drive on all the time, but you've never been here before and you didn't even know it was here.  But it is, and there's the creek, and even though you can hear the roar of traffic it's like you're in a hidden place that doesn't have anything to do with cars and traffic.    

The trail extends under I-85 to the confluence of the South Fork and the North Fork of Peachtree Creek.  I always wonder about the places under interstates so it was a treat to get to walk through the space.  This one is better suited for art exhibit space than, say, a pop-up restaurant.

Under the expressway there was lots of unsanctioned art work.

On the other side of I-85, it was a short walk to the point where the South Fork (on the left, in the photo below) converges with the North Fork (on the right) to form Peachtree Creek, which at the horizon of this photo is heading toward Piedmont Road.

At this point, the trail currently ends; another group is planning trails along the North Fork, and there is not yet a bridge to cross the North Fork.  So we walked back and entered the trails along the North Fork from Lindbergh.

We climbed over the guardrail to the trail that went along the North Fork.  I drive by here all the time and I had no idea there were trails here.  They aren't long, though, ending back at I-85, where large rocks make continuing under the expressway currently hazardous.

More is planned -- the Department of Transportation is building some trails on the other side of Lindbergh, and there's a planned connection somehow with the Beltline.  I've always been a little spatially challenged but it's hard to imagine where these spaces are if your view is constrained by what you've seen from the street in a car.  

One of the new DOT trails is supposed to be open in early 2014.  I don't quite understand where they are and where they go, but when it's open I'll walk it and see more of the city that I've never seen before, parts that are hidden in plain sight.

No Longer For Rent

The "For Sale" sign went up at the duplex, a few houses up the street from us, a couple of months ago.  This picture was taken in mid-September, when the grass was still green.  I haven't known any of the people who lived here for a couple of years, although Tom and I did talk to one of the residents a couple of weeks ago, when a dog from across the street had gotten out of the yard and there was some discussion about where the dog belonged.  He introduced himself and told us his wife was a teacher at a nearby public school.  The only person who lived there that I ever knew very well was our former neighbor Mathew, who played guitar at block parties.  He used to toss a Frisbee in the front yard for his dog to retrieve.  I suspect Iain has fond memories of watching Mathew and a friend of his shoot off fireworks one 4th of July.

Even though the "For Sale" sign was up, a "For Rent" sign appeared too and I hoped that that indicated that the intent was to keep it as a rental property.  One day a few weeks ago there was a man walking around the front yard.  He asked me if I knew what the place rented for.  I said I didn't know; he said that someone he knew was thinking about buying it and he'd been asked for a second opinion.

Then a couple of weeks ago a well-dressed older woman got out of a car and took down the "For Rent" sign and put it in the trunk of a car.  I asked if the place had rented, and she said no, that it had sold.  Is the owner going to knock it down and build something new?  Probably, she said.

After that the surveyors came, and left orange tape at the edge of the property and and a sign in the front yard.

Monday night when I walked the dog I noticed that there is now a sign that says the property is "Under Contract."  There was a vacuum cleaner and a mattress and springs and small dresser at the curb.  

By this morning the dresser was gone, but the vacuum cleaner and mattress and springs were still there.

The True Cost of Parking

I was in Boston in July and went to an event at Fenway Park.  The Red Sox weren't in town, so we had the ballpark to ourselves.  We got a tour; I got to sit in the press box as well as in one of the coveted seats that were added above the left field wall 10 years ago.  The Red Sox have played in Fenway Park since 1912; in 2012 it was added to the National Register of Historic Places.  But here is what was most notable to me about Fenway Park (even though the picture does not capture it very well):

Look on the righthand side of the photo.  On the other side of Yawkey Way, there are bars and restaurants, and I bet it's fun being there on game night even if you don't have tickets to the game.

On the other hand, let's look at the area around Turner Field.

All there is, almost as far as the eye can see, is asphalt.  And yet, it wasn't enough.  The businessmen who run the Atlanta Braves who announced yesterday that the team is moving to Cobb County cited not enough parking along with traffic and "the fan experience" as the reasons for the move.

So they are moving outside the Perimeter, to an area near the junction of I-75 and I-285, and building a brand new stadium with multi-use development around it with bars and restaurants.  And parking -- lots of parking.

Yesterday, when I heard the news that the Braves were abandoning a city that supported them through the bad years for a county that refuses to allow MARTA to be extended there, I went pretty much straight to anger and I'm still there.  I'm angry at Liberty Media, the owner of the Braves, and think they should be honest about it and change the name of the team to the Cobb County Braves.  I'm also angry at multiple city leaders and the Atlanta Fulton County Recreation Authority for not doing more to mitigate the impact of the stadium on the neighborhood, which would have had the additional benefit of "improving the fan experience."

Let's be really clear about this.  Developers can build malls and theme parks, but it's pretty hard to build a neighborhood from scratch.  And they don't want MARTA in Cobb County, so they are going to have to have spaces for 40,000 people and then some to park their cars.  Look at that photo of Fenway Park.  It's not just different from Turner Field because it's a hundred years old and on the National Register of Historic Places; there is almost no where nearby to park, and that's just fine because it's close to the Kenmore Square stop on the Green Line.

The problem is cars.  As long as we drive them every where we go, we *can't* create great places, because we have to have places to park.

Good luck with that theme park.

The Neighborhoods We Want

It's a good thing that people want to live in Atlanta's older walkable neighborhoods, the neighborhoods that were built as streetcar suburbs in the 1920s or even earlier.  These older intown neighborhoods have many lovely older homes, and many have within them small commercial areas that provide walkable destinations, with neighborhood restaurants, coffee shops, bars, and small shops.  As more people want to live in these kind of neighborhoods, there's demand for housing in them.  Some people want to live in the neighborhood but want a bigger house with all the modern amenities.  So older homes are being purchased, demolished, and replaced with bigger houses.  In most parts of the city, the only requirement for newly-constructed houses is to comply with the city building code.  They are not required to be of the same scale as adjacent houses, to be of the same design as adjacent houses, or to be compatible in any way with the neighborhood.  All they have to do is meet the current building code.

This is an issue in many parts of the city as well as in Decatur.  There's currently an effort in Virginia Highland to explore Historic District Overlay Zoning for two subdivisions in the neighborhood.  This has already generated vigorous discussion on the neighborhood email list, with an active opposition group formed that opposes the designation.  Decatur's City Commission recently considered a moratorium on demolitions of single family homes.  They ended up voting against it.  In the Oakhurst neighborhood, the demographics of the neighborhood are changing rapidly.  Commissioner Kecia Cunningham told the Atlanta Journal Constitution, “For me, it’s not about ‘McMansions,’ it’s the loss of racial and economic diversity, the loss of affordable housing."

On our street, the apartments at the corner of Wessyngton and North Highland are being vacated and will be demolished soon.  I don't know what will be built there, other than that I am certain it will be three large expensive homes.  Lynsley found designs on line that a local architecture firm has proposed for the street (see this link and this one).  The two houses are contemporary, "fusing modern luxury with holistic sustainable design."  The architects note that the proposed location for these houses is "one block from some of Atlanta's best shops and restaurants."  What it doesn't say is that Wessyngton Road is still mostly made up of small ranch-style homes built during the 1950s and that these new houses that are proposed don't look anything like most of the houses on the street.  

But not all the houses on our street were built in the 1950s.  There are newer houses, some dating from a few decades ago; one of them has a quite contemporary design and is for sale now.  There also has been demolition of older homes and new construction on the street in the last few years.  Some older homes including ours have been renovated and second floors added.  It's not that small 1950s ranch-style homes are architecturally important and should be preserved; it's that demand for lots for new construction threatens existing neighborhoods by forcing out longtime residents when property values become too high.

And it's not just that.  A neighborhood is a complex adaptive system, and changing one thing can result in major and unanticipated changes in other areas.  Part of what makes Atlanta's intown neighborhoods interesting is that different kinds of people live in them, that everyone is not just alike.  Interesting neighborhoods require housing to be available across the income spectrum.  Already Morningside is not nearly as interesting as Virginia Highland, which is not nearly as interesting as Poncey-Highland, and that is why.  

I love Atlanta's intown neighborhoods, and I'm glad other people do too, but at the moment it feels to me that we are at risk of loving them to death.  The city doesn't require a Social Capital Impact Statement for new development; all there is is the permitting process.  But building codes and even Historic District Overlay Zoning are pretty blunt instruments.  We need additional and sharper instruments if we are going to shape the direction that our neighborhoods take.  Incentives and disincentives are preferable to regulations, if they'll do the job, and if there are things that the market will do without incentives, even better.  (My impression is that many of the new large intown mixed use developments do include a range of housing types; whether that's due to requirements or incentives, I don't know, but I am pretty sure it's not market forces.  Market forces are leading to an increased focus on walkability in commercial areas, according to a recent study, but not to what the authors called "social equity," which included affordable housing and accessibility.)  My guess is that new houses that look like they belong in the neighborhood probably sell for more than houses that don't, and not all the new construction is dreadful.  But the city and county need to use tax policy to help people on fixed incomes be able to stay in their homes when property values are rising.

This is my new favorite house in the neighborhood.  It was on the market in 2011, after its owner moved into assisted living.  A couple bought it, and after that work started out the site.  I assumed it was going to be demolished and replaced with a much larger, new home.  One day after that I saw them standing in the yard, and I asked.  They seemed surprised at the question.  No, they said, they they planned to renovate it.  The work is ongoing, but one of the things they've done already is enlarged the front porch.

I wish our neighbors in Virginia Highland well, as they continue the discussion about the Historic Overlay District Zoning.  But unless everyone in the two subdivisions wants it -- and that seems pretty unlikely -- it will be a tough sell.  So the discussion continues about the kind of neighborhoods we want, and what -- if anything -- we are willing to do to maintain them or improve them.