Atlanta City Council OKs Decatur Belt deal — with a catch
March 24, 2009 at 12:08 pm by Thomas Wheatley in NewsFor most of the Beltline’s history, concerns about displacement have largely focused around slowly gentrifying neighborhoods in Southeast and Southwest Atlanta. The land and homes are less expensive and ripe for the picking by a developer agog at the thought of a project near the 22-mile loop of parks, trails and transit.
But at Monday morning’s Atlanta City Council meeting, councilmembers heard from concerned residents who feared a plan to save a key part of the $2.8 billion project would potentially uproot them from their homes.
At yesterday’s special-called meeting, council unanimously OK’ed a deal reached by the Georgia Department of Transportation, Amtrak and Beltline officials that saved residents near the Piedmont Park the headache of high-speed trains lumbering nearby on tracks called the “Decatur Belt.” The move also saves the entire Beltline project — late last year, the city poured money into the area when it purchased the property from a Gwinnett County developer for at least $66 million.
But the vote came without some last-minute amendments thanks to Marietta Street residents who said Amtrak, GDOT and Beltline officials’ plan to save the Decatur Belt merely shifted the burden of high-speed rail on to them — and placed their homes at risk. According to rough plans presented to GDOT’s board last week, the alternate plans for high-speed rail serving Atlanta involve expanding the tracks and potentially seizing property. The buildings and lofts in which the residents could very well be some of those.
What piqued residents’ interest in this morning’s vote was this slide from last week’s GDOT presentation on the progress made by a multi-agency committee tasked with finding alternate routes for high-speed rail other than the Decatur Belt.
See that red line? The one slicing through the building? That’s how wide a berth the committee estimated freight and passenger trains would need to co-exist on the Western Trunk, an extremely busy freight rail route west of the city. (It’s important to note that the plan isn’t set in stone and the council wasn’t voting on approving the plan. The concept, however, is a possible alternative for high-speed rail into Atlanta other than the Decatur Belt that was explored by a multi-agency committee.)
Led by Marietta Street Artery Association President Suzanne Bair, the residents filled a row in an otherwise empty council chambers. The community organization, which represents residents and property owners from the CNN Center to Huff Road, only learned of the vote on Sunday.
“As a neighborhood association, we support the Beltline,” Bair told councilmembers. “But we don’t feel it’s fair to our community and to put people out of their homes…You can’t add capacity without property. [According to the GDOT sketch] one track [of added capacity] goes through my kitchen. Two tracks, it goes through my bedroom.”
Marietta Street residents contacted their elected officals — Councilmembers Ivory Young and Kwanza Hall — about the issue.
“I can’t support a plan that wipes out an entire community,” Young told his colleagues.
He urged the city’s legal staff to rework the resolution to show the city did not endorse the seizure of residents’ property.
“This community deserves some level of respect and attention to their concerns,” Hall said. “We moved the problem to the other side [of the city]. It’s a quick fix. We pushed the problem around to cut a quick deal.”
City Council President Lisa Borders said she understood the residents’ concern, even looking to them to ask if the reworded resolution met their approval. She stressed the importance of passing the resolution. Yesterday was the deadline for the agencies to approve the deal and update the federal government about progress.
“We lose as a city” if the resolution didn’t pass, Borders said. “It’s a difficult development, it’s a difficult place. We’re all sensitive to this. But if we don’t adopt [the resolution], the results are much worse.”
Finally, after much conferring with legal staff and tinkering with language, Councilmembers Mary Norwood and Young proposed amendments which would urge any analysis of future rail plans protect Marietta Street and “any and all” neighborhoods near the project. The amendments and resolution unanimously passed.
To read the legislation and amendments, click here.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
Could we please have a moratorium on articles that invoke “high speed trains lumbering” through residential neighborhoods? Such loose language distorts the reality of modern passenger rail, and diverts attention from the real problem Atlanta faces: too few alternatives to the automobile.
I lived for 14 years with both MARTA and the Southern Railway (freight trains) passing just beyond my back yard. People would be standing in my kitchen and see a MARTA train go by, and be amazed that they had not noticed it before, even though the trains passed about every 10 minutes. The freight trains were a different story, but they only passed by a few times a day.
In conversations about passenger rail (commuter or intercity) I have noticed that people tend to assume passenger rail combines the worst aspects of the trains that passed behind my house: the noise of freight trains, combined with the frequency of MARTA trains. In reality, it’s the opposite: modern passenger rail (commuter or intercity) comes by a few times a day, and is quieter than MARTA rail.
As for the spectre of high-speed trains going through neighborhoods at 100 miles an hour….a reality check: coming into or going out of cities, these trains are moving fairly slowly, and speed limits can be imposed by agreement. I have ridden the TGV trains in France several times, and these trains, which go a lot faster than anything we seem to be able to manage in this country, start out slowly as they depart the station, and start to slow down well before they reach the next destination.
I moved several years ago (nothing to do with trains, just marriage & children) and no one who looked at my house was put off by the nearby trains. I did lose two buyers, according to my realtor, because of noise….the noise from CARS! Get the picture: the highway, more than twice as far away from my house as the rail lines, THAT was what hurt the resale value: the sound of rubber tires on asphalt. When will we learn that Atlanta’s biggest challenge is providing adequate alternatives to the car?
March 24th, 2009 at 5:20 pm
put bpj on the beltline or statewide transit board as a citizen representative.
or does georgia not believe in such things these days?
March 24th, 2009 at 5:28 pm
Great idea, until I realized it wasn’t pbj that was gong to be put on those morons. :-)
BPJ – excellent points, thnaks for the post
March 24th, 2009 at 5:47 pm
PBJ – As a Marietta Street resident who attended the meeting, let me respond to your comments.
We live next to 5 Norfolk and CSX tracks. We get around 100 trains going by a day. We aren’t whining about “quality of life issues”. In fact, we support passenger rail in the current West Trunk!
We just don’t our 100 year-old warehouse neighborhood destroyed because the GDOT looked at Google Earth and said, “cool, nobody lives here”. I hope that alternate proposals, such as the Western bypass or “building new tracks on the eastern side of the West Trunk where there is empty land” will succeed and Amtrak can roll BY my home, not THROUGH it.
March 24th, 2009 at 5:49 pm
Correction – “building new tracks on the WESTERN side of the West Trunk where there is empty land”
March 25th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Sorry, Michael, I didn’t address that point because my post was getting too long; I agree that they should avoid taking anyone’s home for this (I have a friend who lives there, and am aware of the problem). I just want to emphasize that if the concern about taking residences can be addressed, then these projects (commuter and intercity should go ahead). I hope that the problem can be addressed either by putting tracks along the western side as you suggest, or by technologies which allow more trains to use the same tracks.