Atlanta, the Next Chapter

By Michael E. Kanell

Atlanta has always told the world that it is a city reduced to ruins — whether by war or economy — that raises itself from the embers: steady, serious, and focused.

"The city too busy to hate," Atlanta proclaimed itself during the civil rights turmoil — taking unsubtle digs at places like Birmingham, with its truncheons, fire hoses, and cartoonish villains. The message, of course, papered over the deep racial divides among Atlantans, but it also reflected a social consensus. Then, as now, race mattered — but not enough to trump what was really important: business. More than a real peace, Atlanta had an accord.

"To me, the big story in the long sweep of things is that this place has typically been pragmatic," says Bruce Stiftel, FAICP, who heads the planning department at Georgia Tech. "There has usually been a bipartisan way to figure out [how] to go forward despite the fragmented jurisdictions."

Being practical meant making a few visionary choices — and getting a few good breaks. It also meant confronting a sometimes bitter divide with rural Georgia, which dominated the state legislature and was often stingy with support for its largest, most prosperous city. As the population sprawled out of the city, it sometimes came to mean facing the neighbors' resentment and disdain.

Geography matters, however. Atlanta's location makes it a natural crossroads, but the real multiplier was building a huge airport that came to be the home hub of Delta Air Lines.

Atlanta has cycled through success and stagnation. It stumbled badly in the 2001 downturn, which hammered the hospitality and travel sectors. Then, after a few years of hesitant growth, Atlanta was hit with the Great Recession. Unemployment more than doubled, soaring to double digits. Thousands of home owners defaulted on mortgages or plunged into Chapter 11 or both. Developers, too, headed for bankruptcy court. Now, joblessness and financial stress remain, but signs of change are obvious. As it says on the city's seal: resurgens. Atlanta is rising again.

Drive time

Late on a Friday in early October, a scene that could take place any time of the day or year, the view headed south on the Connector — the highway cutting through town — is a river of red lights. And out on I-285, the beltway that many use to avoid the city, drivers are not moving any faster.

"Transportation may be the largest story we've got going now," Stiftel says. "You can't talk about Atlanta development and not talk about congestion and about under-investment in mass transit. We are just choking on congestion."

Atlanta has had mass transit for nearly four decades. It is called MARTA, the Metropolitan Area Rapid Transit Authority. The anti-Atlanta bloc in the legislature made sure it was always going to be crimped for money. The suburbanites ensured it would be narrow in scope, with several counties voting against taking part. Unsurprisingly, it has been plagued by funding issues and has always been a limited part of the transit picture.

Most of the traffic clogging the big highways is headed around or through, not to, Atlanta — to homes in the suburbs and exurbs, to jobs along the north end of I-285. And in the morning, yes, they are increasingly heading to jobs inside the city. To the many corporate offices in Buckhead, at the city's north end. To the Federal Reserve Bank in a suddenly vibrant Midtown and to a stubbornly survivalist downtown, led by the expansion of Georgia State University.

The city took a horrific pounding during the Great Recession, with the number of employed residents plunging by about 26 percent, according to the state Department of Labor. But the data shows a recent uptick — 10,000 more working people since 2010.

Resurgens rests largely on those jobs and those centers of work in the city, the return of what Mayor Kasim Reed has called "the official bird of Atlanta," that is, the construction crane. But in many ways, the more compelling signs are the many nodes of new expansion that signal something new about Atlanta: that it's a great place for city living.

The livability factor

Perhaps more than ever before, Atlanta is starting to make that case. Atlanta for many years was seen as unsafe and unfun, a place where you needed a car and couldn't raise a family. But now, you have to wonder: If traffic is choking the metro area, could it be the exurbs and suburbs that gasp for breath and the center city that breathes free?

If the future depends on drawing the right demographic of young professionals and "creatives" and holding on to those who emerge from schools here, then maybe Atlanta can compete. A couple of miles away from the stalled commuters on the Connector, pedestrians on the south side of Clifton Road are waiting for a light to change, standing in the still-warm, late-in-the-day sunshine. Behind them, the Centers for Disease Control; in front of them, the new development known as Emory Point. They might be heading to an early dinner at one of the restaurants. They might be shopping. They might be heading home.

Home, that is, to a 443-unit apartment complex that is just across the street from the CDC and within walking distance of Emory University and its hospitals. And while all those things have been there a long time, there seems now to be a hunger for living like that, says David Kirk, FAICP, a partner at the law firm of Troutman Sanders and a former deputy chief of transportation planning for the Atlanta Regional Commission. "The residential units sold out before they were even completed. You could live there and have very little use for your car," he says.

Atlantic Station takes a more self-contained approach than Emory Point — and it's much bigger. The project packs hotel, office, retail, entertainment, and hundreds of apartments and condos — not to mention parking for more than 7,000 vehicles — on 138 acres. The massive project offers a historical transition, since it is built on the former site of Atlantic Steel. But the symbolism is also current: Atlantic Station towers over those crawling cars on the Connector. All told, in the past two years, the city of Atlanta has added about 5,300 more apartment units and 443 single-family homes and town houses.

At the start

Known originally as Terminus, Atlanta started as the spot in the forest where the rail lines ended and the loading of lumber began. And 176 years later, the foundation of the economy is still transportation and the movement of materials and people.

The city became a hub for Confederate shipments during the Civil War, which is why Union forces destroyed it. After the war, businessman and journalist Henry Grady led an effort to proclaim a New South that was fit for investment. He boasted to northern businessmen that Atlanta workers were easily managed. But it wasn't until after World War II that northern capital began to see the advantages of doing business in the South. The region no longer seemed distant or challenging once there was both a national highway system and the widespread use of air conditioning. Atlanta boomed — and kept on booming through the 1960s and 1970s.

By Atlanta, we mostly mean metro Atlanta. Suddenly, Americans had roads and cars, and like many cities, Atlanta saw much of its white middle class head for the suburbs. Yet it was also about class: Many middle-class blacks also left for places like Stone Mountain — ironically, once the home of the Ku Klux Klan. For many in the suburbs, Atlanta became a pariah. Local news, especially television, was filled with stories of violence, adding to the centrifugal force of sprawl. Increasingly, people would dare to slip inside the city limits only for a shopping expedition at Phipps Plaza mall or a Braves game, shunning the very idea of the city. Interstate 285, which encircles the city, quickly came to be known as The Perimeter.

Yet Atlanta was still the brand that strangers recognized. People never said they were from Alpharetta or Norcross or Roswell or Dunwoody. Where are you from? I'm from Atlanta. But the economics of flight and sprawl were irrefutable. The suburban population surged while the city grew poorer, smaller, less diverse — meaning less white. Between 1970 and 1990, most American cities were losing population. Atlanta lost more than most, shrinking by more than one-fifth.

Then, after a quixotic campaign — complete with some slick sales, some stumbles by rivals, and the astute use of former mayor Andrew Young's international prestige — the Olympic Games were awarded to Atlanta in 1990. "The Olympics came at the moment of greatest need for the city," says Leon Eplan, FAICP, who was commissioner of planning and development in the 1990s. (He now heads Urban Mobility Consult in Atlanta.)

But did it matter? After years of preparation, several billion dollars in investment — most of it private money — and ever-rising expectations, the Olympic Games came to Atlanta in the summer of 1996. Afterward, many residents expected to see a different city and were disappointed.

The leftovers include the Olympic park and Turner Field, the former Olympic stadium turned over to the Braves, Atlanta's professional baseball team. When it was being built, there was talk of how much the stadium would mean to the neighborhood. But the idea of a mass transit link evaporated along the way. On game days, the vast majority of fans — more than 90 percent, according to most estimates — come to the game by car.

Good times, then not

But there was much that went unnoticed: Olympic-caliber sports venues at a number of schools, hundreds of dormitories that would be turned over to Georgia Tech, and an invisible injection of capital into the city's economy. Add to that the unquantifiable impact on Atlanta of being the home to CNN and thus the hub of global news — a bona fide international city. And, not to be underestimated, a national growth spurt. The late 1990s were good times.

"I can't prove the cause and effect," Eplan says. "All I know is that people were moving back to the city, converting offices to housing, and it all started at the time of the Olympics after 40 years of decline."

People were pouring in. Companies were expanding. Metro Atlanta was becoming home to one of the largest collections of corporate headquarters. There was telecom, technology, spin-offs from Georgia Tech, the buying spree of Y2K, and Wall Street's willingness to toss money at the likes of Webvan.

The bubble burst in 2000. And the aftermath — the evaporation of money, the recession the next year — was not so good for Atlanta. Little companies died and some very big ones were gobbled up. But easy credit and cheap land fueled the next bubble — this one in housing, and mostly in the suburbs. Between 1990 and 2005, metro Atlanta was in the top three metros for housing starts, often leading the nation. When the collapse came, it was monumental.

Unlike the loss of manufacturing, the drug war violence, or globalization, this time the suburbs and exurbs were hit harder than the city. This time, many areas around Atlanta looked devastated: empty subdivisions, vacant apartments.

Interestingly, the city recovered faster.

Last laugh?

It is hard to know if this transition is illusory or temporary, but after decades, the balance has shifted to the city. The locus of innovation — and therefore, the source of new growth — is more likely to be near Georgia Tech in Midtown than some suburban cul-de-sac. People aren't so willing to drive everywhere, either.

It is the moment when the city might pull into the fast lane. Yet the city of Atlanta sometimes seems to be fumbling with the gears. Experts have said the region underinvested in transportation and pretty much everyone in power understood: Congestion hampered growth. Investment in transportation would pay off. They got the message, but they couldn't sell it.

Business and political leaders recommended a T-SPLOST — a special-purpose local-option sales tax to pay for transportation. It went down to defeat at the polls in 2012.

And traffic isn't the city's only burden. The private schools of Atlanta and its suburbs are legion and often excellent. In contrast, the city public schools have long been seen as places for those who can't afford the alternative. And business people have long understood that the schools' reputation was a liability.

Business leaders urged improvement, and the national obsession with testing offered a way to measure progress. The city needed good news and sure enough, a new school superintendent led the schools through several years of improvement that seemed too good to be true. It was, alas, as schools-related scandals and trials continue today.

In fact, the big Atlanta story is mostly a collection of small stories with one thread: the BeltLine.

Downtown has the Olympic park, and there is growth around it. A few blocks away is one of the city's new landmarks: a giant aquarium that opened in 2005, built with money from Home Depot's cofounder, Bernie Marcus.

In the opposite direction is the Georgia Dome, where the Atlanta Falcons play; it is the pet project of owner Arthur Blank, Home Depot's cofounder.

The Dome is part of a compound including the Philips Arena — used for sports and entertainment — and the massive convention center. Blank has recently negotiated a deal to build a new stadium on the site of a church that sits at the edge of Vine City, a mostly black neighborhood that has been struggling for many years. The deal calls for the neighborhood to get help, but, as with Turner Field, there isn't a great track record on local redevelopment from that kind of construction. 

Midtown, an area that was speckled in decay two decades ago, is increasingly crowded with condos and restaurants. Much of it is the flow of demographics: What had been something of a gay enclave was an obvious choice for young professionals who didn't want to live 20 miles out of town.

Hip begets hip — and it helps that there are bike lanes and sidewalks. But the history of today's Midtown begins with the Woodruff Arts Center, a museum, art, and performance complex that was established in the late 1960s largely as a tribute to more than 100 of Atlanta's cultural elite who were killed in a Paris plane crash. In 1978, the Midtown Alliance was founded to revitalize the place. Now the area has the highest concentration of culture and arts in the Southeast, along with a series of corporate and law offices.

Toolbox

The city has a couple of big tools for targeting improvement.

The Community Improvement District is a self-taxing device that can be created by a vote of commercial property owners. Drawing the borders of a CID is up to those who organize it. The idea is to fund the take-for-granted amenities like sidewalks and lighting and security that make an area more walkable, more urban, and more desirable. The city's CIDs include affluent, retail-centric Buckhead, but also downtown and Midtown.

The tax assessment district, on the other hand, is created by local government, which draws the boundaries and then issues bonds to pay for improvements. The TADs' agent is Invest Atlanta, formerly the Atlanta Development Authority. Atlantic Station is one of Atlanta's TADs, as is the BeltLine.

But the TADs and CIDs are in a continual dance with the private sector — in a developers' town. With housing, it has meant endless subdivisions and spectacular traffic jams on what had been country roads. With retail, it has meant strip mall mania — and after recession, an archipelago of vacancies. The overall vacancy rate for retail metro Atlanta space is nearly 10 percent, declining only slightly in recent months, according to the CoStar Group. On the north side, affluent Cobb County's rate is six percent.

With commercial building, it has meant spasms of construction with hardly a nod to traffic mitigation. "Planning follows projects," says Barbara Faga, a local planning consultant and AECOM fellow, as well as coeditor of Planning Atlanta, a book being published this spring by APA Planners Press. "It's like the new (Falcons) stadium. Did we do a plan for the stadium?" No, not really.

Neither was there any plan that included the $672 million construction of a new stadium north of the city and the shift of the Atlanta Braves to a new location in Cobb County, at the junction of two busy highways. That plan, sprung on the public in mid-November, came after months of secret talks between team and county. There was some talk about improving the area's already congested roads, but nothing about public transit.

Atlanta may be gaining something, too. The new park in Cobb County is to include an array of extra attractions that were never part of the in-town site, but Atlanta at least has an opportunity to build something at the abandoned site that does more for the local community than the stadium has done.

Other high-profile developments include:

THE STREETCAR, set to open later in 2014, will run a 2.7-mile loop that connects Centennial Olympic Park, the historic Sweet Auburn Market, the Martin Luther King Jr. historic site, and the area around the new aquarium. The route is mainly through tourist and commercial areas, although it is close to housing in a few places.

PONCE CITY MARKET, an ambitious reuse of a 1.1 million-square-foot building (once home to Sears, Roebuck) that will include 260 residential units, stores, restaurants, and offices.

THE ATLANTA BELTLINE, the most far-reaching project. Using old railroad corridors, the 22-mile network will wind through 45 neighborhoods with a chain of trails and parks. There is hope too for light rail someday, but no money yet.

So with the recession fading, the next chapter for Atlanta is being crafted from a mix of demographics, developer dreams, and a handful of ambitious public projects. It will be interesting to see how much the poor neighborhoods benefit. Still, the larger, louder tale right now is resurgens: rising again. It is the story that Atlanta tells itself.

Michael E. Kanell is an economics and business writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He previously worked in journalism in New England.

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Resources

Images: Top — Built on an old steel mill site, Atlantic Station makes a case for returning to the city. The compact development fits hotel, office, retail, entertainment, and hundreds of housing units onto a 138-acre site. Photo courtesy www.atlanticstation.com. Bottom — East of downtown, Atlanta's Little Five Points neighborhood has a funky, alternative vibe. Photo by Rafterman Photography. Map By David Foster.