atlantathecity: Today I finally had a chance to make use of the new traffic signal in front of the Midtown Publix on Spring Street. It makes crossing the street much easier as a pedestrian. This was an un-signalized “run for your life” crosswalk since this store opened in 2006, though for the past two years there was a temporary light to help pedestrians (in my experience, it usually did not work). This is better, though it shouldn’t have taken so long to happen ..read more

Darin Givens | May 16, 2024 Here’s some interesting news in the AJC this morning about the new population estimates for Atlanta… Between 2022 & 2023: There was a minor population decline in Sandy Springs, Johns Creek, Roswell, Alpharetta, Stonecrest, & Dunwoody ↘️ Essentially no population change in Marietta, Smyrna, & Brookhaven ↔️ City of Atlanta added 12,000 new residents ↗️ ? While it’s good to see the population rise in the City of Atlanta, please note that this happened within the context of our low density. Meaning: we’re still nowhere close to being ‘full’ of people. Per ..read more

Here’s an aerial view of the giant parking lot that used to sit beside the old Masquerade on North Avenue circa 2010 (I’ve circled the parking lot) along with another aerial of what the same area looks like now (that’s Ponce City Market in the lower right). When you look at that second photo, it’s hard to even recognize the landscape, there’s been so much development! Because I’m obsessed with the issue, I’ll say that those tall parking decks in the middle of the “Dallas Doughnut” apartment buildings that have sprouted up do concern me. Parking decks are really expensive and they jack up the ..read more

If you see this small structure attached to the front of a house on Boulevard and Old Wheat Street and wonder “did that used to be a business”? The answer is yes. And there are others like this throughout the city, leftover from a time when small storefronts were allowed to be built among a block of homes. The second image is from the Real Property Survey of Metropolitan Atlanta, 1940 from GSU’s digital collections. The overall structure (this plus the house) was classified as “mixed business and residential.” IMO, one of the weirdest things to see in a city like Atlanta is large districts w ..read more

atlantathecity: Peachtree Center MARTA Station. Headed north after a visit to Central Library. What a beautiful Atlanta day ..read more

Here’s an idea for the less car-centric generation of Atlantans of the future who will be more open to stuff like this: You could basically string together the parking lots of Little Five Points to make a spur trail of the Atlanta Beltline. Yes, it’s private property now. But we moved a historic church for a stadium. We collected a ton of properties in downtown for Centennial Park. Atlanta takes some really bold steps to accomplish some things. Just convince the city that this project would help draw a big sports event and you’re fine ..read more

The blocks of Atlanta’s Summerhill neighborhood that lie east of the stadium have seen a big transformation over the last few years with housing built on top of former parking lots. I’d like to see even more density like this all along the upcoming Bus Rapid Transit route, which will run on the north-south street visible on the right side of the stadium (it will go from Downtown on the north end to the southern point on the Atlanta Beltline). Investments in high-capacity transit like this one should be combined with high density development, including affordable housing & great pedestrian ..read more

atlantathecity: Darin Givens | May 5, 2024 Spot the pedestrian. This person, who is being visually dwarfed by car infrastructure on West Peachtree Street in Midtown, is waiting to cross while standing in front of a giant parking deck that’s across the street from Arts Center MARTA Station. The gulfs of asphalt here are daunting. This is not human-scaled urbanism. It’s car-scaled, and it stinks to have this land-use in Midtown next to our major investments in rail transit. Too many Atlantans seem to expect the Beltline paths and the proposed freeway caps to be our sole pedestrian zones for th ..read more

Congrats to the team of Georgia Tech students who won the top prize with this lovely proposal in the 2024 ULI/Gerald D. Hines Student Urban Design Competition! The competition asked students nationwide to come up with a plan for developing a property in downtown Seattle. The Georgia Tech team’s entry was all about mass-timber buildings (a sustainable building material), a mix of uses, and pedestrian-oriented density. I’ll give kudos to both the students and the competition judges for two things about the proposal that I particularly love: 1.) 26% of the residential units are exclusively ..read more

Where NIMBYs Got Their Veto Power This is a good writeup on a complex topic. I’m definitely not politically aligned with Jacob Anbinder, but he rightly points out the failures of Dem-controlled cities to produce adequate housing in the last few decades, due (at least in part) to the problematic rise of neighborhood-level veto power. Which is not to say that Rep-controlled cities did any better, but the hypocrisy of this housing failure within relatively liberal spaces is glaring ..read more