ATL Urbanist

Mableton could be a prototype for suburban retrofit in Metro Atlanta

Mableton is a typical suburban community in Cobb County. The landscape is car-oriented, with winding residential roads full of detached homes separated from commercial corridors. It’s a sprawling model of the kind of use-based zoning that creates an environment hostile to pedestrians, particularly ones aging in place and increasingly less willing (or able) to drive.

So it’s no surprise that Mableton is getting national attention from a plan that brings dramatic changes, as reported by Atlanta Magazine:

Here’s the hoped-for future: retrofitting a suburban community so it becomes a new incarnation of an old-fashioned, walkable urban neighborhood. The new Mableton will have a town green, shops, and townhomes along a tree-lined boulevard. Parking lots will be transformed into parks. Mableton will become a “lifelong community,” where older residents can walk to a coffee shop, pharmacy, and farmers market while young families can walk to the elementary school, playgrounds, and puppet shows.

It’s a wonderful vision, one that fits in well with the goals found in “Retrofitting Suburbia” by Georgia Tech’s Ellen Dunham-Jones which, among other things, address the documented need for walkable places that accommodate an aging population.

The Mableton plan is long-term and very slow moving — the process of creating a new street grid alone will take several years. It’s entirely possible that another suburban community could pattern this plan and execute it more quickly. But that’s the best thing about what’s happening here: this one community, through its initiative and commitment, has shown what can be accomplished and has formed a blueprint for making it happen, one that can be copied and modified throughout the car-oriented sprawltburbs of Metro Atlanta.

Image credit: Duany Plater-Zyberk

A good mix of people helps neighborhoods and cities

As a downtowner with a kid, I liked reading this call for family-friendly urban places from writer Kaid Benfield in a post about building a smarter smart growth:

Make urbanism more family-friendly, too.  We are building better cities with smart growth, but for whom?  Do we really want to keep turning a blind eye to such a major segment of our population? …I believe we need to change that and, for planners, that means better schools, better parks and playgrounds, and at least some moderate- (rather than high-) density housing with a little yard space.

Walkable, compact urban places are not the exclusive domain of young creative people. They’re great for everyone; singles, couples, families with children, retirees — and all income levels. It’s important to have a good mix of residents from all these groups in a neighborhood because they each bring strengths that benefit not only individual neighborhoods, but overall cities.

Sometimes those strengths and benefits might not be obvious. For example: what strength do you lose when low- and medium-income residents are pushed out due to gentrification and rising home prices? You lose an important, opposing voice to NIMBYism.

As was recently reported by Reuters’ Felix Salmon in a piece titled “Why America’s population density is falling:”

As urban areas become increasingly affluent, filled with wealthy politicians and their wealthier donors, it becomes harder and harder for developers to procure the zoning changes and construction permits they need in order to keep on producing new residential inventory.

When new developments can’t be built, prices skyrocket and low-income people get priced out (and end up in car-centric suburbs, an issue for another post). The problem snowballs as both rising property values and the NIMBYism of affluent residents work together to prohibit anything but more affluence, depleting a neighborhood of diversity and the strengths that come with it.

And obviously, you see a converse and equally stifling effect when a neighborhood has only low-income people.

Good urbanism requires a good mix of residents: renters who allow new developments nearby without shouting “Not in My Back Yard”; owners who keep an eye on long-term livability; singles who are happy to see the new nightlife spots; and families with kids who push for a new park with a playground.

With that kind of diversity, you end up with a healthy neighborhood and a healthy city.

Photo of Streets Alive from Flickr user Atlanta BeltLine

Could new transit-oriented development help ridership numbers in Atlanta?

When recent news reports told of a general rise in transit ridership in US cities for 2012, I knew to be cautious with my enthusiasm. The last time this happened, Atlanta was the odd city out, with a decline in rides that bucked the trend.

And that is, unfortunately, what has happened again. During 2012, while most cities saw encouraging gains in transit rides, Atlanta lost out, as Atlantic Cities reports.

The article offers a potential reason for the loss:

…there’s a close connection between metro areas that declined to pass funding measures tied specifically to transit last year and ridership declines. In Atlanta, which rejected a penny sales tax last summer, subway figures fell 5 percent and total transit 4 percent from 2011. In Memphis, which rejected a penny gas tax increase in November, general transit dropped more than a point and bus ridership slipped five points.

The funding-woes theory makes sense, but I wonder if there’s a common denominator fueling both a decline in rides AND a low level of support for transit funding. Could it be our stubborn car-dependent development style, lingering even in many MARTA-served areas? And maybe the lack of attractive, walkable, compact (meaning moderately-dense) neighborhoods near train stations?

I have no stats to back it up, but that’s my guess.

Which is why I’m excited to read in the Atlanta Business Chronicle that MARTA is making tracks (see what I did there?) with their effort to convert parking lots around train stations into transit-connected neighborhoods. Importantly, most of these projects have the ability to blend in with other compact urban neighborhoods in areas surrounding the stations — creating a connective urban fabric that is much needed in the Atlanta transit network.

MARTA photo by Tumblr blogger Kevin Dowling

Entertainment districts are dying, but better urban neighborhoods are growing

The Atlanta History Center blog offers another great entry in its Then & Now series, showing the 1890s activity around what is now Underground Atlanta.

Take a look at the number of people in this spot 120 years ago versus what we see regularly today. Despite the city pumping $8 million annually into Underground Atlanta, a development designated as a state Entertainment District, the area is relatively slow much of the week. On weeknights, as I saw recently, it’s downright serene.

Which proves a point made on the Strong Towns blog this week in a post titled Let’s End “Entertainment Districts.”  It explores the failures of the downtown entertainment zones, produced by 1970s urban-renewal efforts to bring suburbanites into cities that were emptied by White Flight and disinvestment.

With Underground Atlanta, we offered people in the metro a variation on a suburban mall, but more nightlife-focused. We accommodated suburbanites’ needs by providing behemoth parking decks nearby where grand downtown buildings once stood. It’s been a failure. One that has resulted in dead zones where there should be none.

Strong Towns director Charles Marohn writes this in the comments of the post:

…every area where there is people should be an “entertainment district”, or at least a district where one can go to a coffee shop, get a bite to eat and enjoy the trappings of urban life. Only in the Suburban Experiment do we take cities where this is happening along subsidized highway strips and then try to establish a competing, auto-oriented cluster in a target renewal area and call that great planning.

But a better scenario is occurring all over downtown and other intown neighborhoods. Instead of focusing heavily on the needs of car-bound suburbanites, we’re building new and better urban neighborhoods with an eye on livability.

My family lives downtown and we walk to restaurants, bars (<— not with the child), parks and stores. People in Midtown, Old Fourth Ward and elsewhere are increasingly doing the same — living near places where they have entertainment and other amenities nearby.

The old model of single-use districts — separating purely residential areas from purely commercial ones — still hangs on stubbornly in many intown areas. But in others, it’s visibly disappearing and being replaced with something more sustainable: places where people want to live, not just visit; where residents can get around to “entertainment” and more without getting in a car for every trip.

Will big-box retail spoil the walkability of Glenwood Park? (updated)

When blogger Kaid Benfield wrote about Glenwood Park in 2009, he was effusive in his praise for its walkability and the sustainable nature of its construction:

If you’re looking for an example of a newly designed and built neighborhood that embodies just about all things smart and green, I know of few that can rival Glenwood Park in Atlanta….it’s one of the best places in the city to live, and also one of the most environmentally sustainable in the country.

Soon after, a widely circulated video by American Makeover found Glenwood Park to be a perfect example of a new-urbanist antidote to car-centric sprawl in the US.

So you can bet that many people will be concerned to find out that, next door to this walkable paradise, a new development may bring the kind of big-box retail that not only favors car traffic but makes safe pedestrian travel difficult.

Thomas Wheatley reports that a developer is planning a large-scale retail development that will abut not only Glenwood Park but the Atlanta Beltline path. One of the rumored retail tenants is Walmart, though nothing is confirmed. 

To prevent this pedestrian/bike friendly space from having its potential compromised by car traffic and infrastructure — the type that usually (though not necessarily) accompanies big-box stores — the developer will have to be committed and the community will have to be assertive. WIll this be the exception to the big-box rule in Atlanta, where large retail spaces throw pedestrians a bone but stop short of good connectivity and safety, or will this development spoil Glenwood Park’s record of walkability? Stay tuned.

GP photo by Flickr user peterlfrench

——— UPDATE ——-

Wheatley has now posted images of the project, sent by the developer.

The group of images contains neither the parking nor the big-box anchor store. It pretty much just shows the smaller retail spots and the sidewalks. But from what is shown, it looks promisingly walkable. This could end up being pedestrian-friendly after all, but I want to see the rest of the plan.