Posted on 03/04/2006 4:08:48 PM PST by Lorianne
Atlanta residents now make more money than folks who live in the rest of the metro area.
But the influx of high-income homebuyers to the city is creating unexpected friction with longtime intown residents. Newcomers with deep pockets are tearing down aged bungalows and ranch houses and replacing them with bigger, more eye-catching homes. The outcry from established neighborhoods is the reason Atlanta is revising its zoning codes.
The average income per person in Atlanta in 2004 was 28 percent higher than that of those who live outside the city — $34,304 compared to $26,905, according to an ongoing study of Census reports by urban planning professors William Lucy and David Phillips of the University of Virginia.Just in 1990, the per-person income in Atlanta was 10 percent below the metro area.
The rising affluence bucks a historic pattern called the trickle-down effect of neighborhood change, Lucy said. As houses aged, owners sold them and moved into newer homes, typically in the suburbs. Older intown houses usually were purchased by poorer buyers who often could not afford to maintain them and the neighborhoods would enter a downward spiral.
"That changed in the 1990s and Atlanta was leading the change," said Lucy.
No other city in the nation posted such a dramatic shift in the relative income of residents in the central city compared with its suburbs, he said. Next in line were Seattle and Tampa, at 11 percent each, said Lucy, who included metro Atlanta in a book he and Phillips released this year: "Tomorrow's Cities, Tomorrow's Suburbs." Their unpublished information on Atlanta in the current decade is a continuation of this research.
"The question is why the trend is so strong in Atlanta," Lucy said. "One answer could be that Atlanta has a reputation of being one of the most rapidly sprawling regions in the nation, with traffic problems that are among the greatest in the nation, so people with enough income to choose options are doing so. And they are bidding up the price of older housing at a very rapid rate. That's my guess."
His unpublished study shows that some of the city's hottest areas, including Ansley Park, Virginia-Highland, Candler Park and Lake Claire, are filling up with homebuyers who are building houses that may change the feel of a neighborhood.
The rub between old and new is evident in more than 400 complaints lodged about the new houses during a survey two years ago conducted by Atlanta Councilwoman Mary Norwood as she sought to create new rules to buffer existing residents from new or expanded houses that seemed out of place in the neighborhood. Norwood has a task force working on the issue and Mayor Shirley Franklin's planning commissioner is overseeing a sweeping update of the city's zoning codes, which were last updated comprehensively in 1982.
The entire region is edging into a crossroads as policy makers determine how to regulate the area's expected growth — an additional 2 million people by 2030, up from 4.2 million today. Residents throughout the close-in suburbs, from Smyrna to Sandy Springs to Decatur, also are complaining about the size of new houses and the way a dozen or so are packed onto lots that used to have just a house or two before they were demolished to make way for mini subdivisions.
If you think traffic's bad now ...
Additional traffic is prompting some residents to wonder if they will be able to get home through the congestion that comes with growth. They want policy makers to take action — like improving public transportation " so that every trip doesn't begin by starting an engine.
"The traffic situation can only get 'X' times worse before there won't be any traffic flow at all," said Sally Silver, who lives with her husband in his boyhood ranch home in North Buckhead. "It's all going to come down to transit, and all the forms it takes have to work together or we're sunk. There just aren't enough roads for everybody to get into a car and drive somewhere."
Katherine Ross, who holds an endowed chair at Georgia Tech, is one of many urban planners who've been thinking about the issue for years. She thinks metro Atlanta has a real chance to retool itself because half of the new houses and other buildings for the newcomers have yet to be built.
At the same time, she said, the city will need to add more sidewalks and bicycle trails to encourage alternatives to driving, and more parks because fewer people will have the backyards that used to be common.
Will Colby, of Buckhead, thinks the city needs to develop green spaces and use them as buffers between neighborhoods filled with houses and denser developments of residences and businesses. Colby, an Atlanta native and real estate agent who enjoyed taking his grandchildren to Chastain Park when they were young, supports Atlanta's planned Beltline, which by 2030 is to be a 22-mile circular park with transit running through it and $25 billion worth of new housing and businesses along its flanks.
"The Beltline sounds like it has so much promise for what I'm talking about," Colby said. "Atlanta needs places that invite you to go outside and congregate and communicate and share ideas."
Colby said he lived in Midtown when Colony Square was being built in the early 1970s near spacious homes that were so pastoral some had corn growing in their backyards. Midtown now has a prominent skyline, and its residential neighborhoods are among the most desirable in the region.
"Once you live next to it, a high rise isn't a bad neighbor," Colby said. "You get a lot more trouble from a bad neighbor in a house. Change is going to happen, and growth can be a good thing. Unless we allow for smart growth, we're not going to be able to afford the taxes to live here. Smart growth will give us a higher tax base."
'Smart' is in the eye of the beholder
Smart growth is a buzzword among urban planners. A layman's definition is that it envisions cities planned the way they were before the car became such an integral part of life. Shops could be in the same block with homes so people could walk for groceries or entertainment. Buildings would be designed to create a harmonious appearance for the community.
Some longtime residents fear that they or their neighbors who live in older homes may give up and move if their neighborhoods keep evolving in ways they consider haphazard and unattractive.
"There's a sense of, 'Let me get out before one's built next to me,'" said Ron Bull, who says about 50 houses out of 250 homes have been torn down and replaced by big ones in his Meadowcliff neighborhood, in DeKalb County's Oak Grove community near Northlake Mall.
Bull and his wife moved to Meadowcliff from a two-bedroom condo in Midtown about five years ago. They were attracted to the neighborhood's serenity and schools. Now their streets are clogged with construction traffic.
"What we're seeing in our neighborhood is a mentality of, 'Where's the neighborhood going?'" he said.
Metro Atlanta's home builders will be able to address the concerns of current of longtime residents and meet the demands of the future, said Chris Burke, a vice president with the Greater Atlanta Home Builders Association. Burke sees a combination of townhouses, residential towers with retail on the bottom floor and houses built on smaller lots than they are today. He expects a continuing demand for homes of up to 5,000 square feet, or three times larger than the typical ranch or bungalow.
"It's all a matter of perception of what is a big house," Burke said. "Homes in Inman Park are huge, but they have a similar historic design and people don't have a lot of issues with Inman Park. That tells you the hullabaloo is all about context. If a house is too big for the neighborhood, architecture doesn't matter. It's just too big. You could take some houses in Virginia-Highland that are deemed too big and put them in Inman Park, and they'd fit right in."
Silver, the Buckhead resident in her husband's childhood home, is confident that Atlanta can meet the challenges created by growth. She's hanging her hat on an improved MARTA, a proposed streetcar on Peachtree Street and transit on the Beltline.
"If we can handle the sewer problem, we can handle transit," Silver said, referring to the city's $3.2 billion sewer upgrade.
But it's going to take hard work and careful thought.
"There's no magic wand here," Silver said. "I used to be angry all the time [about development]. Then I found that it's much more constructive to sit down at the table with folks instead of just hammering on the idea of 'No, no, no.' We all need to recognize that growth is happening and that we all want to make it the best we can. The people living in the new condo towers don't want to sit in traffic any more than I do."
Leftists whine when affluent people move back into the cities. They call it "gentrification."
Trying to get a leftist to stop whining is like telling a dog not to bark.
Gotta just bite the bullet and move to Baltimore or DC. Plenty of ghettos up there.
I don't know about you, but I always thought that run-down crack house on the corner gave this neighborhood its character!
Damn Yankees, wish they'd have never fixed things up!
I just wonder where all the service workers are going to live. And if they can't afford to live near where they work and decide to move, who's going to do those jobs?
I worked on the transmission towers running through Atlanta. The whole place is a pit. (of the georgia peach..get it?)
Same here in Upstate NY.. and VT has completely fallen to the commies etc. (now the CCCP-VT)
Tho morons buy a house in the country and immediately want the services they had in the city.
Leftists whine when affluent people move back into the cities. They call it "gentrification.
That's sure the case here in San Diego. When the downtown area was a decaying, filthy, crime-ridden mess, all one heard was how unfortunate it was that wealthier people had chosen to remove themselves to the 'burbs and let downtown rot, and we should Do Something. Now that there's a new high-rise condo going up on every corner, people are griping about how we're losing pieces of our heritage as the older buildings are torn down, and how the low-income slumdwellers and bums are being displaced.
So typical.
This story can't be true! I mean, everyone knows the housing bubble is about to burst, right? Neil Cavuto and all his wall street buddies told us the bubble was gonna burst, so it's gotta be true. "The Dow will double this year and housing prices will crash," they've been screaming to us.
You mean there's still very high demand for housing in Atlanta? Prices for homes in both the burbs and city are skyrocketing?
I guess the wall street stock & bond peddlers are wrong about the real estate market again. Of course, they've been wrong for several years in a row.
The block is a blight on an otherwise pretty nice area. The slumlord that owns the block was delighted to sell, but now all the local malcontents are up in arms. They had no interest in doing anything with this area in the past half century. But all of the sudden you would think it was a world heritage site, we are accused of trying to dull the cities edge.
As one of our lawyers put it, "If they want to preserve its esesnce, would be happy to piss in a bottle for them."
Democrats like the idea of fixing the inner cities... until they realize that if the cities are fixed... all the people that vote to keep them in office won't be their anymore.
Then they start complaining about affordable housing and such.
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