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.

The Cost of Sprawl

The work that was done in the neighborhood, funded by the Federal Safe Routes to School program, is now done or almost done.  Yesterday I saw the new high tech pedestrian crossing lights at Sussex and East Rock Springs, installed in time for the start of school next month.  The sod that was put down where intersection work was done looks great, thanks to all the rain; when they put it down a few months ago I figured it was doomed, since no one was going to water it, and it would fade to brown once the weather got hot -- I'm glad I was wrong.  But on the neighborhood email lists there's still grousing about loss of the right turn lane at Morningside and North Highland and new bike lanes on 10th Street are generating complaints, too.

The traffic is bad in Atlanta and we can't build our way out of it by building more roads -- even if there was the money to do it (which there isn't), extra lanes just generate more traffic and we end up with the same or greater level of congestion.  We have to drive less, and that's hard to do in a city with such limited transit options.  

Atlanta's sprawl and lack of transit options are especially bad for less well-off people.  Combine sprawl with lower-cost housing located far from where the jobs are, and if you doesn't have a reliable car to get to work, well, it's really hard to work.  It's not rocket science, but that was one of the findings in a new study that was highlighted in yesterday's New York Times.  Atlanta's geography is one of the factors that keeps poor people poor in Atlanta.

Our reliance on cars means state and local governments have to support a sprawling road network that does not generate enough tax revenue in many areas to be self-supporting.  It means employers have to plan for parking for their employees, which often means higher costs for them.  And if you don't have a car and you don't happen to live in a neighborhood where MARTA can get you where you need to go, you're just out of luck.

But here in Atlanta we just keep driving, and complaining about the traffic.

Staying the Course

The Eastside Trail on the Beltline had its official opening on Monday.  I've been wanting to get out and walk it again, including the segment north of Virginia Avenue, but I just haven't had time.  But even though I've not explored it as much as I'd like, it's clear it's an amazing opportunity and can lead to private sector investment that can revitalize neighborhoods around our city.

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.

Opening the Street

I first heard about Atlanta Streets Alive when someone pasted a link on Facebook – North Highland was going to be closed from Virginia Avenue south for two miles on Sunday, May 20.  It sounded like it could be very disruptive for anyone needing to drive somewhere.  In retrospect, I can’t believe that that was my first reaction.  It may have had to do with the original information I saw, which made me think it was a bicycling event, or some vestigial memory of being pregnant in the 1990s, with a spring due date, back when Freaknik paralyzed traffic in much of the city for one weekend each spring, and Tom trying to figure out how we would get to Piedmont Hospital if Peachtree Road was impassible.  But I looked into it a little more, and it wasn’t just for bicycles, and it looked like fun.  So last Sunday afternoon Iain and I headed off for the North Highland and Virginia, with hats and sunscreen and water bottles.

We hadn't seen quite sure what to expect, but we had a great time.  We ended up walking all the way to the endpoint at Corley Street, near the Old Highland Bakery in Inman Park.  We saw people on bicycles in costume, people on unusual bicycles like the man riding the reproduction of an old bicycle with the very large front wheel and the small back wheel, and a napping cat strapped into an umbrella stroller.  There were musicians; my favorite were the percussionists, playing on overturned 5 gallon plastic buckets, and offering passersby and chance to join them, with pan lids to play, but the Seed & Feed Marching Band was playing near Manuel’s Tavern, and there were others too on sidewalks and in parking lots along the route.

There was lots of food.  The restaurants seemed to be doing a good business, and the ones with outdoor seating were pretty much full.  Some had set up tables to sell takeout, and there were food trucks and other vendors too.  We got lunch at a stand in the parking lot of the video rental place at Highland and North Avenue, and ice cream from the Westside Creamery truck, and popsicles from the King of Pops himself, in Inman Park. 

The Indie-pendent had a participatory art project – we painted something on the large canvas they had propped up against a retaining wall – and we cut pictures out of old children’s encyclopedias to make buttons outside Young Blood Gallery (they came out great --  that was really neat).  Story Corps was collecting very brief stories on Post It notes (“When did you fall in love for the first time?”  “What are you proudest of?”).  PEDS was asking people to put their foot in paint and leave a print on a roll of paper that they were going to deliver as a petition to the city, requesting that the sidewalks get fixed.  (I would have signed a petition, but I wasn’t going to take my shoe and sock off, almost three miles from home, and leave a paint footprint on a petition.  That just didn’t seem like a very good idea.)  I think it was the organizers who had a participatory exhibit entitled Pop-Up City Hall on how to improve the city.  But my favorite thing of the whole afternoon was Free Poems on Demand.  Two young men and a young woman were sitting on the sidewalk on folding chairs near Highland and North Avenue.  You could give them a topic, and then come back in a few minutes and get a poem, written just for you, on that topic.  As it turned out, demand was high and our poet had not gotten to the topic Iain had chosen by the time we finished lunch.  So we stopped by on our way back, and Iain collected his poem, and we dropped a dollar in the hat on the sidewalk.  (The poem, by the way, was worth waiting for, and we probably should have contributed more than a dollar.)

It was a great afternoon, but it was more than that.  The experience of walking the route really made me see the area differently.  It wouldn’t otherwise have occurred to me to walk from our house to Inman Park, but that’s what Iain and I did last Sunday afternoon.  It was about three miles, six miles round trip.  Realizing that in fact these distances are walkable (although maybe I won’t do it often) means that I probably will do it again sometime.  Honestly, that never had occurred to me.  And things look different from the perspective of the sidewalk (or walking down the middle of the street, where we were walking much of the time) than they do from behind the wheel of the car.  The event taught me that our intown neighborhoods are even more walkable than I thought they were, and just knowing that, I am more likely to do it.  (Where's that sidewalk petition?)

Atlanta Streets Alive wasn’t a big commercial festival like SummerFest for the Dogwood Festival.   A two-mile stretch of a street was mostly closed to vehicular traffic for the afternoon, and there were small scale, almost spontaneous activities and performances along the route.   Since last Sunday, I've learned a little more about the thinking behind events like Atlanta Streets Alive.  It's part of a movement of sorts to reclaim cities for people, through small scale changes in how people use space and interact with each other in the urban setting.  It’s called tactical urbanism.  According to Tactical Urbanism 2, “Improving the livability of our towns and cities commonly starts at the street, block, or building scale.  While larger scale efforts do have their place, incremental, small-scale improvements are increasingly seen as a way to stage more substantial investments.”  

The Atlanta Streets Alive project was – in tactical urbanism terms – an open street.  Open streets “temporarily provide safe spaces for walking, bicycling, skating and social activities; promote local economic development; and raise awareness about the detrimental effects of the automobile on urban living.”  I can’t say it better than the authors of Tactical Urbanism 2, so I am going to quote them at some length.

While the benefit of Open Streets initiatives are widely recognized, perhaps the most tangible benefit is the social interaction and activity that develops – thousands of people of all ages, incomes, occupations, religions, and races have the opportunity to meet in the public realm while sharing in physical or social activities.  In doing so, participants develop a wider understanding of their city, each other, and the potential for making streets friendlier for people.

The resulting vibrancy therefore enables people to experience their city’s public realm in a different way, which helps build broader political support for undertaking more permanent pedestrian, bicycle, and other livability improvements.  In this way, open streets are a tool for building social and political capital, while having a very real economic impacts for businesses, vendors, and organizations along the chosen route.

Last night we went to Caramba for dinner, and driving down North Highland I was pointing out to Tom and Caroline where we’d made the buttons, where we’d gotten a poem written to order, where we got our lunch.  I don’t see the street through the same eyes as I did before last Sunday, and I know I can walk to places that previously I would have never thought of walking.  And I'd still like that sidewalk petition.

On page 2 of Tactical Urbanism 2, there is a story about a “guerilla crosswalk” that was painted across a busy street in Baltimore; it has since become permanent, with an official, City of Baltimore-sanctioned crosswalk there.  I’m thinking that maybe we need one at Wessyngton and Cumberland.

Photo from Tactical Urbanism 2

Spring, finally

It was such a long winter; it didn't seem like it would ever end. In so many recent years, the trees began blooming in February, the azaleas in March, and by April, it seemed to be summer. Not this year, though. The redbuds and tulip trees were first, maybe two weeks ago, followed by the cherry trees and Bradford pears. Last Sunday, walking to church, I noticed that the dogwood blossums were just starting to emerge but the trees - Bradford pears and everything else - really didn't have leaves. By Monday, they did. It was quite amazing, how suddenly everything started to be green. Even our ginkgo tree - which always seems to be the last tree on the block to break into leaf - is starting to get leaves.

At the sale a couple of weeks ago, I bought an apple tree from the Virginia Highlands group that is raising money to build a new park at Highland and St. Charles. It was bare root, and I didn't have time to plant it that day, so I wrapped the roots in a wet towel and left it on the driveway. It was cool and wet that day, so it seemed like it would probably be okay til I could get it in the ground, assuming it wasn't too long.

Iain and I planted it the next day. We dug a hole-that-seemed-to-be-bigger-than-it-needed-to-be in the back yard and mixed in some compost from the old site of the compost bin. (The new site has yet to yield compost, as it has been too cold for that particular magic to happen. Mostly we have a large quantity of garbage and paper, waiting for the weather to warm up.) We got the tree in the ground, and then we waited.

We may have to wait a couple years for apples, but like almost all the other trees, this is the week that our little apple tree broke alive with green leaves. Every day when I get home from work I go outside and look for new evidence of life, and there is a little more to see.

There also are stirrings on other fronts, after a long cold winter. Some of the vacant retail space in the neighborhood and beyond is starting to get occupied, store front by store front. The opening of a new discount furniture store at the site of the old Home Depot on Sidney Marcus completely filled the parking lot, and there's also a new furniture store at the former site of the pet supply store on Piedmont in the strip mall that was emptied Before the Crash to make way for something that to date has not been built.

Of course, one has to wonder how long it will take to absorb all the apartments and condos that Someone thought needed to be built in town. I drive by them and I see the buildings, mostly empty but with a few units looking occupied. (I was on my way to pick up Sarah at school and she called and asked where I was. Not far, I said, driving by the empty apartments on Piedmont. She asked, which ones?) Lights on timers and rented furniture, just so the place won't look so dismal, or are there really a few people living in these mostly empty buildings? What would it be like, living in a place meant for high density with no one there?

I have been slowly savoring Jane Jacobs' classic book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities. She makes a powerful case for it being lots of people that make a city feel safe. At night, if there are people on the sidewalk and lots of coming and going from bars and theaters and restaurants and people just getting off the evening shift or on their way to the night shift, the neighborhood will feel safe, but the same street, without the people, won't. Green space for the most part does not contribute to safety because at night it becomes a sort of urban no fly zone that doesn't attract any people; there's no reason to be there, and and because of that, it doesn't feel safe. For an urban environment to feel safe, you need lots of people coming and going into the night - and you don't have that without high density and diversity of use. Diversity of use is facilitated by having diversity of building stock - old buildings with interesting spaces can provide inexpensive commercial space for galleries and small restaurants and interesting little shops. If there are too many new buildings, rents are too high for anything interesting and there is no reason for people to be there who don't have to be.

So we now have all these - mostly empty - work/live developments, with really boring-looking retail space (a lot of which is empty) and all those empty apartments and condos. I am so glad to see signs of life in the economy - like the leaves on the trees outside, it is so welcome after a really long winter - but you just have to wonder what's going to happen to all these developments. It wouldn't be so bad, having these large, boring structures around if they were actually full of people who might provide the population density to support something interesting, but they aren't. Without people?

At least if they were green space they would soak up some CO2.