Recent Comments
Re: “Beltline officials pray feds will help them mimic Eastside Trail in southwest Atlanta”
To Mr. Peaches - as someone who lives downtown (closer to the area than Sylvan Hills) and who frequents that alignment for groceries pretty often, your comment is garbage. Those are working-class neighborhoods with some rough edges - yeah, they're not gentrified, but they aren't deserving of that level of hyperbole. Your comment speaks volumes about yourself - how much wire do you have around your yard?
Re: “Abandoned Atlanta Constitution building featuring public art catches fire”
Atlanta Backer, good points.
One misperception, though, is that the project is going to be funded by government agencies - it's a GDOT Private-Public Partnership, where a developer would build out the project using private funds (at least in part). This is partially due to the cost - and the likelihood that the state/locals won't have the funds to build it themselves anytime soon. I share your questions (and possibly skepticism) about the timeline. I currently live within walking distance of this building and Five Points too, and agree that it presents problems for improving the area (though it's one of many).
Re: “Abandoned Atlanta Constitution building featuring public art catches fire”
Atlanta Backer, I like how the article explicitly states that "they'd like to preserve or incorporate the building into the terminal's design," which somehow prompted you to state that "nobody will ever want to redevelop it." Is the fact that the MMPT development team does, in fact, currently want to redevelop it somehow confusing you, or do you simply not read before commenting?
Also, and I'm not one to get particularly sentimental on this topic, but the more old buildings we tear down without thinking, the more significant the remaining ones become. It's better to pick the good ones while you have them, and this and the Medical Arts Building are pretty good contenders among what's left.
Re: “Car-rental taxes could help fund transit under new Gold Dome proposal”
Couldn't be used to operate existing bus or rail lines? Adding more buses and trains to crowded or infrequent routes certainly constitutes "improvement" of public transit in my book. The notion that something has to be built, or that something is good enough simply because it already exists, is ridiculous - there's a lot of untapped utility with more frequency on the transit systems we have now. What a stupid restriction.
Re: “Ponce City Market vision could include new 16-story tower hugging Beltline”
This immediately springs to mind: http://homer.gsu.edu/blogs/library/wp-cont….
Image from the 1961 Atlanta Regional Comprehensive Plan: Rapid Transit. Read the whole thing at GSU's online library archives at http://homer.gsu.edu/blogs/library/2012/10….
Re: “Midtown to add new bicycle, streetscape projects”
So you agree then that it's bad and ineffective policy? While you may be making the point, it's moot if it doesn't work. Legislative changes can be made, or the role of the City DPW can be clarified to include some maintenance with funding to back it. The City has done supplemental sidewalk maintenance before, so it's a current practice - one that should be expanded.
I'm not saying that the propertied class shouldn't pay; I'd be all for having some property tax (which I pay, by the way) go directly to a sidewalk budget, and it'd probably capture revenue from absentee owners and landlords too (not to mention banks who own vacant/foreclosed homes). But I don't think that having property owners contract, coordinate, and finance the work directly themselves is the way to go, because it simply doesn't happen most of the time.
To further illustrate the equity point, I've been in neighborhoods all over this city, particularly south and west, where people can barely afford to maintain their houses, much less sidewalks. And I've been (and lived in) neighborhoods north and east - notably Peachtree Hills, Midtown, Inman Park and Candler Park - where people who could clearly afford to simply don't keep the sidewalks in good shape (on my old street in Candler Park, one neighbor with a great house liked to park a 3rd car across the sidewalk daily, actually).
And to echo Broch's point but on the sidewalk issue, it's not as simple as it seems. Say that my old neighbor should want to fix the sidewalk in front of his house. It's an old sidewalk, and a street tree in the City right-of-way has large roots that have broken it up. In order to fix that, permission from the City would need to be granted to do the work in the ROW; additionally, the City arborist may be needed to approve any plans that would affect the tree. Not to mention that your everyday homeowner isn't exactly an expert in the ADA, so they may not be the best person to oversee construction/repair on sidewalks, which must be built (or rebuilt) into ADA compliance when any work is done. I should also mention that the City is on the hook for lawsuits if sidewalks and curb ramps aren't built compliant, so it should have an interest in making sure things are built properly - maybe this is part of permitting though. In any case, an everyday citizen could go through those extra layers of City bureaucracy - or it could be greatly streamlined if the City would just handle it in the first place using allocated funds.
Re: “Beltline officials pray feds will help them mimic Eastside Trail in southwest Atlanta”
Peachy - I see that you build a nice straw-man. I said nothing to imply that anyone should put up with crime. Not everyone thinks the convenience (notice I didn't use your quotes) of living in-town is worth any additional risk, though people feel differently about how much extra risk there actually is. Anyway, nice try turning this into some kind of ITP/OTP pissing match - not gonna bite further.
Back the key points:
Calling those neighborhoods a "DMZ" - which I assumed you were using shorthand for demilitarized zone, like no man's land, North/South Korea, battlefield imagery - is absolutely hyperbole. It's annoying, condescending, and inaccurate. It reinforces a lot of unmerited cheap stereotypes about the city for people who are happy to embrace such lazy thought about what are complicated issues with serious ramifications for literally hundreds of thousands of residents. So yeah, it's hyperbole, and at best it doesn't advance the discussion about troubled parts of town; at worst, it damages and breaks the discussion down.
Also, I was making the point - which still stands - that Sylvan Hills is not part of this project. Read the article, and look at the map. It's adjacent to Adair Park, which is at one of the termini of this trail (shown on the map to be at Murphy Crossing Park). So while you casually denigrate the whole area traversed by this project, you lived somewhat near one end of it. That hardly makes you experienced in what it's like living in Westview or the other areas along the trail.
What I get from this is that living in that part of town obviously wasn't a good fit for you, and that there is a lack of affordable, nicer areas in the city that you could move to. Which relate to totally legitimate policy issues - more effective efforts at cleaning up rough areas are required, as well as more work on affordable housing. Those are all legitimate problems, and it sucks that they led to a severe loss on your part. I hope you are happy wherever you are now, and that you have recovered from that experience. But your DMZ/concertina rhetoric is distracting and annoying, and pretty insulting to those who live there (by choice or by circumstance).