Catalyst for Change

By David Pendered

Midtown Atlanta and suburban Woodstock are 30 miles apart and could have completely different mindsets about growth. They don't. Scale more than psyche distinguishes the homes, shops, and offices built there in the past decade. Each urban center is developing more densely than its history would suggest, largely because of redevelopment plans influenced by a regional planning program.

The Livable Centers Initiative was started in 1999 by the Atlanta Regional Commission. The move capped a decade in which metro Atlanta had added more than 1.1 million residents — as pastures and woodlands gave way to development from Midtown all the way to Woodstock (pop. 24,000) and beyond. Metro Atlanta topped the nation in vehicle miles traveled per household — a dubious distinction. In 1999, the federal government gauged the region's tailpipe exhaust and shut down most road construction for violations of the Clean Air Act, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Everyone, it seemed, was beginning to see a need to dramatically alter long-established development patterns. "The trends were going in the right direction when we created LCI," says Dan Reuter, AICP, the manager of ARC's community development division. Many developers concur.

"LCI really changed the conversation," says Doug Crawford, owner of D.L. Crawford Associates, Inc., an Atlanta-based planning and pre-development firm. The sprawl model "came with enormous benefits, but some enormous unintended consequences: long commutes and needing a car for almost everything," he adds. "LCI brought people together around a new model of growth and sustainability."

What's evolved

Midtown today is a bustling city center, the heart of the region's cultural attractions, with gleaming towers for offices and residential apartments, a premier urban park, and a growing green component that includes the Atlanta BeltLine. Scant evidence remains of the blight that prompted a coalition of civic and neighborhood leaders to form the Midtown Alliance in 1978.

The group convened an extensive public consensus process to create a visionary planning document, Midtown Blueprint, which the Midtown community improvement district later adopted. The blueprint was grandfathered into the LCI program, through which the ARC has provided $10.8 million for various projects.

Woodstock, once a trading post in the hinterlands, now has a Main Street that bustles with people walking to shops, green space, and restaurants. Back in 2002, as urban sprawl began surrounding the community, city officials realized Woodstock was squarely in its path and sought an LCI planning grant to redefine their downtown. According to Reuter, Woodstock handed its completed study to developers and said, "This is what we'd like to see."

The market has affirmed the plan: The vacancy rate is less than 10 percent in the entire historic district, according to Brian Stockton, director of Woodstock's Office of Economic Development and Downtown Development Authority. Retail vacancy rates remain considerably higher outside the historic district.

It's likely that none of downtown Woodstock's redevelopment would have happened without impetus from the LCI. Woodstock's zoning code prohibited mixed uses and residential use downtown. After the LCI was complete, the city enacted a special zoning district that allowed mixed use and promoted a pedestrian scale by eliminating rules on setbacks and buffers.

Main Street's subsequent redevelopment won an ARC Development of Excellence award in 2006 for the city and Hedgewood Properties. In 2013, the ARC gave an achievement award to the city and Walton Communities for Woodstock West, an area west of Main Street that now has a street grid anchored by Market Street, connection to local and regional trail networks, and a 308-apartment structure. All the made-to-look-old buildings are a brisk walk from the original train station, which once served the Northeastern Railroad line and now serves burgers as the Freight Kitchen & Tap.

Hot spot

When ARC created the LCI program in 1999, census data would soon show that metro Atlanta was concluding a decade in which its growth accounted for two-thirds of the population gain of the entire state, more than 1.1 million of the total statewide increase of 1.7 million. The ARC board (comprised of elected officials and citizen leaders) established the LCI program to deliver competitive grants to local governments and nonprofit organizations, such as community improvement districts. The purpose is to improve air quality by fostering the development of existing centers and corridors in ways that enable commute options.

An additional benefit is that growth may be better accommodated as it is guided toward existing, but underused, public infrastructure rather than to greenfields where, as Crawford notes, taxpayers would foot the bill for new roads and sewerage.

The LCI grants have put muscle behind the retrofitting of metro Atlanta's earliest communities. As Reuter says, "This represents a way to provide resources for planning and implementation that would not be available otherwise."

According to the ARC, the program has committed a total of $500 million, including $18 million in study funds, from 2000 to 2017; the allocation of $350 million for priority funding of transportation projects that result from LCI studies; and the approval of an additional $150 million for these projects in the 2030 Regional Transportation Plan.

Limits

As the metropolitan planning organization for the Atlanta region, the ARC is responsible for regional planning in a 10-county area and the collection of air quality data in 10 adjoining counties. The organization is relatively well funded, with a 2013 budget of $63 million, compared to a fiscal 2014 budget of about $59 million for the entire Georgia Department of Community Affairs, a state department that manages more than $280 million in state and federal funds as well.

The LCI program is widely regarded as a success for reshaping development patterns, but it has some confines. "It gave us that extra push that helped us get to the finish line, even though we're not there yet," says Lyn Menne, assistant city manager for Decatur. APA named the city's downtown as one of its 10 Great Neighborhoods in the 2013 Great Places in America program.

One limitation is that the LCI program is filled with governments and organizations trying to foster commuting options through mixed use projects and transit-oriented developments. But not all localities are inclined to such projects, and some entities that may want to participate may not have the capacity to produce a successful grant application.

LCI currently covers just five percent of the region's 2,981 square miles in a 10-county region, according to a 2013 ARC report on outcomes in 109 LCI areas. The data show the mindboggling rate of development even in the 2000s, despite the downturn during and after the recession. Those data also suggest that a significant proportion of commercial developments favored a location within an LCI area, while a vast majority of residences were built outside an LCI area:

• Of 491,621 housing units built, seven percent was within an LCI area.
• Of 69.5 million square feet of new commercial space, 24 percent was within an LCI area.
• Of 50 million square feet of office space built, 38 percent was within an LCI area.

The ARC report showed how LCI studies affected policies and regulations of the 91 LCI areas that responded to this section of the survey:

• More than 90 percent of the studies had been incorporated into regulations, and some regulations were changed to support the LCI plans.
• Three-quarters of the respondents had adopted the LCI recommendations into their comprehensive plans.
• Three-quarters of respondents had supported their LCI studies by creating tax increment financing districts or downtown development authorities.

The state of Georgia can push planning only so far. Former Department of Community Affairs Commissioner Mike Beatty says, for example, that his department leaves planning for the state's capital region to the ARC.

Development stories

The Perimeter area is an LCI success story. In the years since Perimeter Mall opened in 1971, the surrounding area has become a premier corporate address with Fortune 500 companies, high-rise apartments, and 123,000 employees. Serving the area are two highways, three MARTA stations, three hospitals, and two community improvement districts — one in DeKalb County and one in Fulton County — that function as a single unit.

The mall was designed as a driving destination, so no sidewalks were initially installed. The Perimeter CIDs won an LCI grant in 2001 that helped design and fund sidewalks and street furniture throughout the business district, and other streetscape projects have been completed since then as well.

"The thing that has transformed the Perimeter market is the [LCI] streetscape project," says Bob Voyles, principal of the Seven Oaks, LLC, acquisition development and redevelopment company and a former senior development officer at Hines who worked on the project as a founder of the PCIDs. "To walk from Ravinia [office complex] to MARTA, you had to walk along the median on Hammond Drive or on the mall parking lot. This was 20 years ago. Today, we've added seven miles of sidewalks and have totally transformed the streetscape in that community."

Decatur is an "overnight" success story that began with the city adopting a strategic plan in 1982. At the time, when the region was flush with public and private funds for skyscrapers and highways and big new subdivisions, little Decatur just wanted help maintaining its downtown shops, offices, and sidewalks. As Menne describes it, "There was no financial support for what we were trying to do and we were branded as anti-development."

Without funds to implement it, Decatur adopted another strategic plan in 2000. The plan was incorporated into the LCI program and subsequent LCI funding enabled Decatur to integrate an intrusive MARTA rail station into a courthouse square area and to provide for bicycle lanes and streetscapes. "We're not a place that wants to widen roads, and we didn't see why we couldn't have access to funding that would support a traditional town center — and that's what the LCI program brought to us," Menne says.

Other LCI studies have a record of mixed success. They are highly praised in areas where they helped to create walkable communities. In areas where the market is not ready to invest, they have had less impact but still foster hope. "The phoenix is rising," says Kay Wallace, a community organizer in Atlanta's West End neighborhood.

About 17 miles south of Perimeter, LCI plans have yet to coalesce for a collection of beleaguered neighborhoods starting with the historic West End — where Joel Chandler Harris wrote the Uncle Remus stories — and continuing several miles south of there. Private equity has not flowed in this area, home mostly to black residents of modest income, despite LCI studies around the West End, Oakland City, and Lakewood MARTA stations.

Perhaps most significantly, the LCI study completed in 2004 of the Oakland City and Lakewood MARTA stations area covered 1,022 acres, but made just passing reference to its westerly neighbor Fort McPherson, a 487-acre military base that was closed as part of the Base Closure and Realignment and Commission recommendations in 2005. Likewise, the state's base redevelopment plan did little to leverage the two MARTA stations or take into account the neighborhoods surrounding the fort.

But MARTA released studies in 2013 that show potential for public-private partnerships to create transit-oriented developments at Lakewood and Oakland City stations, although not at West End. Still, some area residents remain optimistic.

"Revitalization of the commercial district, in concert with the residential revitalization, is what will make it happen," says Wallace, who views West End as regionally significant because it's the southern gateway to downtown Atlanta. "There's the perfect opportunity for the mayor, for Invest Atlanta [Atlanta's development authority,] and for the current commercial property owners to get innovative and change the landscape."

Race counts

The issues of race and class are never far from the surface in metro Atlanta, which regards itself as the cradle of the civil rights movement. The fact that private development seems to follow LCI studies done in predominately white and affluent neighborhoods, but not in predominately black, less wealthy neighborhoods, isn't overlooked but likewise hasn't been resolved.

Advocates say that Atlanta's investment in the BeltLine may promote a more even distribution of redevelopment efforts. Voyles suggests that the success of the BeltLine itself may be a byproduct of the LCI program, though it is not an LCI project: "I'm not certain the BeltLine concept would have come off as well as it has, had it not been for the LCI grants program that helped soften people's attitudes to more pedestrian- and urban-oriented development patterns."

Milton Little, president of the United Way of Metropolitan Atlanta, says the region's historic development patterns have accelerated the spread of poverty throughout the region. Anything the LCI studies can do to promote access to jobs and human services will help ease the problem.

"Part of what we need to do is blend education, economic development, and workforce strategies" so that people have access to resources, support, and jobs, Little says. Transportation is a knotty problem, he adds, but one approach is to help people qualify for low-interest car loans so they can access good jobs in places "beyond the bus."

Next steps

LCI's widespread popularity all but ensures its continuation. One of its merits is that "the LCI process has brought various stakeholders together earlier in the process, as opposed to the previous model, where the winner gets all and the loser gets nothing, because it was primarily a confrontational process," says Crawford, the developer, who contends that LCI studies have reduced the reliance on litigation to resolve disputes over development proposals.

One emerging effort is to use LCI studies to influence broader community improvement programs. The Atlanta TOD Collaborative is including LCI studies in its evaluation of opportunities to promote an equitable distribution of transit-oriented developments around the region. The ARC is leading the effort along with seven partners, including Enterprise Community Partners, Georgia STAND-UP, and Partnership for Southern Equity.

The collaborative hopes to build on metro Atlanta's success in creating walkable communities, which Christopher Leinberger, the urban strategist and developer, identified in his 2013 report, "The WalkUP Wake-Up Call: Atlanta," on Atlanta's WalkUPs (walkable urban places). Leinberger based his research on LCI grants to show that private investment in the region has indeed shifted from sprawl to walkable communities as the proportion of real estate investments in such areas grew from 13 percent in 2000 to 60 percent in 2013. "Metro Atlanta, the ‘poster child of sprawl,' is now experiencing the end of sprawl," Leinberger wrote.

Leinberger also predicted that most of the region's emerging and potential walkable neighborhoods would locate in the more affluent northern suburbs. Four WalkUPs are emerging in the Perimeter area, and most others are near MARTA stations and along highways in the north. Community developers hope the trend can be expanded to lower income communities.

"To stop being a 'tale of two cities,' we need to invest where investment is needed rather than where investment already is," says Deborah Scott, Georgia STAND-UP's executive director and founder of the workforce development program TRADE-UP. "The LCI studies have done their job in areas like Buckhead, Brookhaven, and Dunwoody [Perimeter Mall]. ... By flipping the script, the LCI studies can show where developments would do the greatest good."

Back in Decatur, LCI grants are seen as a catalyst for equitable development. The program helped restructure a MARTA station that had diminished Decatur's quality of life. No help was in sight because all public resources were focused on road construction, according to Menne, the assistant city manager. An LCI grant helped fix the station, and provided something intangible. 

"The money is important, but more than that was the recognition that what we'd been trying to do, ever since we adopted our plan in 1982, was the right way to grow," Menne says. "For an organization like the ARC to say that what Decatur had been trying to do for all those years was the right way, well, it really helped a lot."

David Pendered is an Atlanta-based journalist who specializes in government, politics, and urban public policy.

Resources

Images: Top — Woodstock's vibrant downtown — with condo stacked over street-level shops, pedestrian-friendly streets and sidewalks, and a leafy canopy — provides the lifestyle many are looking for. Photo by Donita Pendered. Middle — Midtown is a mix of stately old buildings, gleaming office towers, and arts and cultural hotspots. Photo by Donita Pendered. Bottom — Sidewalks and street furniture lure pedestrians to the Perimeter Center Parkway — a spot that motorists and cyclist also enjoy. Photo courtesy Perimeter CIDS.