Fresh Loaf

Oh, North Fulton. Y’all are so wacky up there.

The City of Alpharetta recently began presentations of a proposed government complex to replace the two-story building it currently calls home.

The vision: a $69 million city-center project complete with storefronts, a fountain and a grassy area where residents can ostensibly fly kites. There’ll also be a new park. According to the artist’s sketch at right, the adjoining parking lot will be complete anarchy, as gray cars will be allowed to park wherever they choose. Big Government will literally overshadow nearby churches. Aside from that, CL’s urban-planning team thinks this will be a good project because there might be kites.

But not everybody’s cool with the idea. The project, which would be backed by $25 million in municipal bonds, must first be approved by voters on the November ballot. And the city’s got some very visible — and creative — opposition: Chateau Alpharetta, a website that lampoons the project as an opulent moneywaster, one which the taxpayer is “cordially invited to pay for.”

Who’s behind the site? A former CL columnist of course!

(more…)

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After months of behind-the-scenes coordination, the Atlanta Regional Commission can finally confirm celebrated New Urbanist Andres Duany’s project for metro Atlanta.

In early February, Duany and a team of town planners from his Duany Plater-Zyberk firm will hold a nine-day series of charrettes to design five sites in the metro region aimed at retrofitting communities — a proactive move to accommodate the growing population of aging metro Atlantans.

If that sounds like a ho-hum project for a town planner commonly called the “father of New Urbanism,” think more long-term. By 2030, according to the commission, one out of five people living in metro Atlanta will be over the age of 55. And the auto-dependent, subdivision existence that is metro Atlanta doesn’t bode well for those residents in terms of housing, transportation and quality of life.

Members of Duany’s team will set up shop in the commission’s downtown headquarters, hear input from stakeholders, and assemble and present its preliminary vision for five chosen sites — Toco Hills in DeKalb County, the Grant Park area along the Beltline, Mableton, Fayetteville and Conyers. Think of the process as Jackson Pollock meets urban planning.

Funding for the charrettes is provided by the American Association of Retired Persons, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.

Kathryn Lawler, the commission’s project manager, says the initiative is a first and could have national implications for how sprawl-ravaged regions can adapt to a population that’s living longer — and deserving of the right to move about the world like its younger counterparts.

(Photo courtesy of Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company)

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The Atlanta Regional Commission’s innovative program to help local communities benefit from the spot-planning blunders of their pasts has garnered the organization the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s National Smart Growth Achievement Award.

Since 1999, the Livable Centers Initiative (LCI) program has helped local communities design vibrant “town centers” where residents can live, work and play. Local governments apply to the commission for grants that pay for planning studies. To date, more than $141 million has been allocated.

Sounds mundane, but it’s actually cool. The program has sparked the interest of planning organizations across the nation as regions are finally trying to figure out how decades of sprawl can be retrofit to create town centers, increase areas of activity, and rethink transportation corridors. Think of it as making sense of exurban eyesores and annoyances. Or turning jalopies into Jaguars. Alliteration abounds!

The commission says the initiatives also help kickstart economic development while benefiting public health and the environment. The idea: More walkable communities encourage people to drive less and get around on their feet. This in turn reduces congestion and improves air quality while bringing people closer to their shopping needs and workplaces. And it’s been working:

Since the first LCI grants were awarded in 2000, more than 84,500 residential units, 20 million square feet of commercial space, 12,000 hotel units and 40 million square feet of office space are either planned, under construction or complete in these areas.

There’s a problem, however: This year marks the last the funds are committed to the program.

EPA Administrator Stephen L. Johnson presented the award to Dan Reuter, the commission’s land use division chief and LCI program manager, at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C.

For more info on LCI’s, visit the ARC’s website.

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Wow.

Governing Magazine may not have the newsstand pop of US Weekly, ya scandal-lovin’ misanthropes, but it churns out some of the best content when it comes to policy issues facing metropolitan areas. This month’s article by staff writer Rob Gurwitt about Atlanta’s shifting demographics and its impact on politics is no exception.

From the piece:

There is really only one way to put it: Atlanta is becoming whiter, and at a pace that outstrips the rest of the nation. The white share of the city’s population, says Brookings Institution demographer William Frey, grew faster between 2000 and 2006 than that of any other U.S. city. It increased from 31 percent in 2000 to 35 percent in 2006, a numeric gain of 26,000, more than double the increase between 1990 and 2000. The trend seems to be gathering strength with each passing year. Only Washington, D.C., saw a comparable increase in white population share during those years, although several other big cities are starting to see it now.

This development is occurring at the same time that race and ethnicity are driving changes every bit as fundamental in Atlanta’s suburbs. For if the city itself is growing whiter, the Atlanta region is growing less white. The Atlanta Regional Commission reports that in 2000, the white, non-Hispanic population of the 20-county Atlanta metro region formed 60 percent of the total population; by 2006, that had shrunk to 54 percent, not so much because whites were leaving — although four counties did see absolute declines in white numbers — but because of the arrival in the suburbs of African Americans, Hispanics, Asians, Africans and Caribbeans. Of the 10 counties in the nation with the largest declines in white percentage of the population from 2000 to 2006, six are in the suburbs of Atlanta.

Gurwitt interviews a variety of voices and manages to encapsulate the realities of the situation. He also weighs in on the changing face of Atlanta’s suburbs and how minorities and low-income residents are flocking there for cheap housing. And in turn, changing the face of the once lily-white communities.

He also notes that the state Legislature failed to pass a transportation funding strategy that would’ve allowed regions to levy a sales tax for people-moving projects. Now that a gallon of gas costs as much as a Happy Meal, the state should reexamine the idea. It’s never too late to act, right? Eh? This thing on, lawmakers?

Give it a read.

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