Cover Story: Deconstructing DeKalb

It’s a few minutes till 10 on a Tuesday morning and the three northbound lanes of North Druid Hills Road have achieved their rush-hour rhythm: stacking up with cars, then flowing fitfully as impatient commuters travel the last few hundred yards to I-85.

On the other side of the busy road, a line of drivers makes the right-hand turn into Loehmann’s Plaza, some using its expansive parking lot as a cut-through to avoid the traffic signal at Briarcliff.

Apart from a few new shops and chain restaurants, little has changed around here in the past decade. The strip centers, low-slung office parks, aging apartment complexes and ranch-home subdivisions that make up the landscape bring to mind a concept of progress from an earlier era.

Local traffic likewise has been consistent – consistently congested.

Mike Jacobs, a state House member who lives in nearby Merry Hills, counts himself among those worried that plans for millions of square feet of new stores, condos and office space will overwhelm this corner of DeKalb County.

“There are some people who look at this intersection and say it’s run-down and out-of-date,” Jacobs says, as he nurses his coffee in a bagel shop with a picture-window view of the creeping traffic. “On the other hand, there are a lot of folks who like it as it is.”

He’s acknowledging widespread apprehension over a plan by the Sembler Co., metro Atlanta’s largest retail developer, to build a $1 billion, live-work-shop complex on 100 acres at the southwest corner of Briarcliff and North Druid Hills.

“It’s an insane amount of density,” Jacobs says.

When neighbors first learned of the proposal last summer, many were horrified at the thought of thousands more cars feeding through the already clogged intersection, making an awful traffic situation worse and effectively destroying the area’s suburban feel.

But planning experts and county leaders say central DeKalb’s long era as a semibucolic community of quiet cul-de-sacs and midcentury shopping plazas is drawing to a close. With 1,000 new residents moving into its boundaries every month, simply locking out new projects isn’t a practical – or legal – option. Instead, they argue, the county must grow in a way that eases congestion and enhances quality of life, but doesn’t smother existing neighborhoods with more traffic.

“Some people just want us to say no to new development, but we can’t do that,” county Commissioner Kathie Gannon says. “DeKalb is changing from a bedroom community to an urban county. How do we do this in a way that protects single-family housing? If we don’t have those kinds of plans, then we develop willy-nilly and get more of what we have now. And folks understand that what we have now is gridlock.”

In aging suburbs such as central DeKalb, the old-fashioned planning rules that gave us automobile-centric places like the sprawling Toco Hill shopping center and Buford Highway may already be dead on the side of the road. But how do you convince homeowners to accept denser developments of stores, offices and condo towers when they’re already mired in traffic? And how can a county pay for new roads and mass transit to handle all that new development before it develops the tax base to pay for the roads and transit?

Those questions don’t just apply at North Druid Hills and Briarcliff. They’re part of a larger challenge facing DeKalb and, indeed, much of metro Atlanta. Namely: Is it possible to transform the region’s suburbs into the kind of vibrant, walkable communities touted by advocates as “smart growth” and “new urbanism”?

Jim Smith insists he’s not anti-growth. He understands that redevelopment is coming to central DeKalb, that changes are coming to residents’ way of life. But Smith, a foe of the Sembler project and leader of an activist group called StandUp DeKalb, argues that the proposal is simply too big, too dense — too much for a neighborhood already overwhelmed by traffic and development.

“To put something like that next to single-family homes really isn’t fair to homeowners,” he says. “The intersection isn’t even the main issue. It’s the wrong size development for that location.”

Smith, who lives about a mile to the southeast, and his cohorts have been focusing their blocking maneuvers on the most immediate battleground, the DeKalb Board of Education, which has a tentative agreement to sell Sembler 30 acres of land fronting North Druid Hills Road. StandUp argues that the deal would displace three public schools and a football stadium at a time when many students around the county are housed in trailers. The site’s other 70-plus acres are currently occupied by the aging, 1,000-unit Park at Briarcliff apartment complex owned by the DeKalb Housing Authority. The company has a contract to buy that property contingent on a successful rezoning.

Sembler wants to place a half-million square feet of office space, 3,700 condos and mixed-income apartments, and 1.5 million square feet of retail on those 103 acres.

As if that weren’t enough to deal with, neighbors learned in late summer of another major project just a stone’s throw away, at Executive Park. Built in the mid-’60s as Atlanta’s first suburban office park, the low-slung, 70-acre complex is showing its age. Its new owners are proposing to redevelop it for 1 million square feet of offices, 772 apartments or condos, nearly 700,000 square feet of shops, and several restaurants.

Sembler needs a rezoning to build anything other than housing on its site, and Executive Park requires approval to add residential and retail. But, given the current push for mixed-use and the fact that Executive Park is nestled against the expressway, the smart-growth money is on the green-lighting of a substantial portion of the redevelopment plans for the aging office complex.

Together, the Sembler and Executive Park projects aim to drop nearly the equivalent of Lenox Square and Phipps Plaza combined into an area already cited as a traffic nightmare – and that’s just the retail component.

Gannon says she had an inkling the Briarcliff/North Druid Hills area was ready to explode when another developer filed an application for a 12-story high-rise just northeast of the intersection. After encountering resistance, the developer withdrew his proposal, but the existing zoning allowed him to tear down a church and begin work on a 38,000-square-foot shopping center and a stand-alone pharmacy.

The episode is emblematic of zoning problems at the other end of the spectrum from Sembler’s proposal: There’s little to stop individual developers from taking advantage of existing zoning to clutter the roads with more small shopping strips that can only be reached by car.

“The zoning that’s already in place allows lots more construction,” Gannon says. “We’d have to plan for the redevelopment of that quadrant even without Sembler.”

That’s why she and fellow Commissioner Jeff Rader organized a planning process last spring for 500 acres around the intersection. Prominent New York consultant Alex Garvin, who helped Atlanta design its Beltline plan, was hired over the summer to lead a series of public presentations and to deliver a proposed solution to the area’s traffic woes.

Now back in New York preparing a final draft, Garvin says future planning in DeKalb will have to be innovative – perhaps even a bit extreme, at first glance – to manage growth in a way that enhances residents’ quality of life, rather than degrading it. He says he didn’t begin with the assumption that the area could handle the additional density of the Sembler and Executive Park projects. In the end, though, he determined that it could handle them, so long as the development is accompanied by road improvements and mass transit.

He’s proposed a complete overhaul: turning the intersection into a European-style two-lane roundabout and encircling that with a bypass to allow local traffic to skirt the vortex altogether; creating an inner grid of connecting streets; widening North Druid Hills into a tree-lined boulevard; and building a tunnel under Briarcliff Road to carry traffic unimpeded to and from I-85. His plan also calls for a swath of green space following a stream from county-owned Kittredge Park, north through the Sembler site and across Briarcliff into the Executive Park property. He suggests funding the improvements by using two methods that have become increasingly popular in metro Atlanta:

• A tax-allocation district, or TAD, which pledges revenue from rising property-tax assessments; and,

• A community-improvement district, or CID, in which commercial landowners agree to tax themselves.

Garvin’s ideas have drawn skepticism from neighborhood groups already on the warpath against the Sembler project. Some point to the fact that the study’s $332,000 cost was picked up by the company and other prospective developers.

Flo Wolf, homeowner association president for Merry Hills, a neighborhood of mostly ranch-style homes adjoining the site, didn’t feel Garvin paid enough attention to community input. The infrastructure changes he proposed are estimated to cost about $185 million and are so far-reaching that Wolf suspects the study was “geared to the interests of the developer.”

But Gannon and Rader say much of the criticism is off-target. Rader would’ve preferred that the county, the school board and the housing authority picked up the tab for the study. But the public agencies balked, so the hat was passed to the developers.

Gannon acknowledges that the process didn’t spend much time inviting residents to say what kind of growth they’d like to see in their neighborhood, but she argues that Garvin had to move quickly because a private developer’s plans already were on the table.

“We have a gorilla on our backs in the form of Sembler,” she says.

But Garvin argues that the county should pursue his recommendations even if the Sembler project falls through.

“These are changes,” he says, “that will help bring the area into the 21st century.”

DeKalb is unique among Georgia’s 159 counties.

With more than 720,000 residents, it’s the state’s most densely populated county. Yet fewer than 15 percent of its residents live in incorporated areas.

It’s Atlanta’s first truly suburban county. But it’s dominated by an older – you might even say quaint – style of development compared with the big-box retailers, multilane parkways and far-as-the-eye-can-see subdivisions that characterize newer suburbs in Cobb, Gwinnett and North Fulton.

Central DeKalb was largely built out 30 years ago as a bedroom community with winding streets, neighborhood shopping centers and a handful of semiregional malls. Instead of spending freely on its paved infrastructure, DeKalb invested in MARTA rail. While other counties were adopting new local sales taxes to widen roads, DeKalb voters dedicated bounty from a Homestead Option Sales Tax toward lightening the property-tax burden on homeowners and to buy parkland.

Now that the outer suburbs have knotted themselves in congestion, and the momentum of development is turning back toward the inner city, DeKalb stands at a crossroads: It can try to maintain the model of strip centers, vast parking lots and single-family houses that is sure to produce more and more traffic. Or it can attempt to overlay the suburban landscape with such new urbanist ideas as mass transit and dense, mixed-use development.

The latter route won’t be easy, says Otis White, an Atlanta-based public-policy consultant. And, at first, it won’t be pretty. But one way or another, White argues, it’s inevitable.

“DeKalb is at the beginning of the transition from ’50s suburbia to a more urban environment,” he says. “For a long time, that will mean busier streets.

“The biggest problem is not, ‘Can it be done?’” White explains, “but, ‘How much of this will people accept?’ because the people who live there came with a different set of expectations.”

The push toward more compact, pedestrian-friendly development isn’t simply a case of know-it-all urban planners and political elites trying to tell people how they should live. Demographic trends show that many people already are making that decision for themselves.

“The market for single-family homes is drying up across the country,” says Ellen Dunham-Jones, director of Georgia Tech’s architecture program. “As the population ages, there are fewer households with kids. People don’t want the McMansion in the exurbs anymore; the new lifestyle is condo-oriented.”

Compelling evidence lies just a few miles south of Briarcliff, in Decatur. With 19,000 residents packed into four square miles, the longtime county seat is the most densely developed city in Georgia. Surrounded by busy roads, it’s several minutes’ drive from a major highway, yet plans for new blocks of condominiums are welcomed and property values continue to soar.

That’s because Decatur has made the transition from a sleepy suburban town to a bustling urban center that offers shopping, dining, entertainment and services within easily walkable distances. Downtown dwellers can take MARTA to work, stroll to dinner and shopping, run errands on a bike, visit galleries and enjoy live concerts on the courthouse square – all without getting into their cars.

No one’s suggesting that central DeKalb’s cul-de-sac neighborhoods be razed for rows of condos. But Dunham-Jones stresses that the guiding principles of new development will be much like those that have made Decatur so popular: density, diversity of uses, walkability and transit choices.

She’s been busy on a forthcoming book, Retrofitting Suburbs, about how smart growth can be applied to residential environments. As people demand a more urban experience, at home and in the workplace, with close-in amenities that reduce time spent traveling, she says, “developers now are looking for ‘underperforming asphalt’ – old strip malls, garden apartments, empty parking lots – to transform into mixed-used projects.”

Sounds nice, but that process is seldom without controversy. Anxious homeowners often react to any proposed development as if it were a threat. And developers’ interests aren’t always in sync with what homeowners want and local officials believe is reasonable.

The Sembler site is hardly ideal from a planning perspective. It backs up to single-family homes. Other than sporadic bus service, there’s no public transportation and little hope of light rail. It’s close to I-85, but doesn’t enjoy the same ease of access as Executive Park. Briarcliff’s two lanes are frequently jammed with cars, and North Druid Hills isn’t much better.

“We need to put development where we already have MARTA rail or a highway, such as at the GM plant or at Northlake” says StandUp’s Smith, who argues that Sembler shouldn’t be allowed to crowbar a huge project into a location where it doesn’t fit the setting.

The North Druid Hills project has followed a familiar pattern – just on a larger scale. Much as it did two years ago with the Edgewood Retail District on Moreland Avenue in Atlanta and, more recently, with a $400 million mixed-use project on Peachtree Road in Brookhaven, Sembler took the public and local officials by surprise when it announced it had found the location for another major development.

In Brookhaven, the community had just spent months taking part in a Livable Centers Initiative study that recommended much lower density for the area than what Sembler was seeking. But Sembler skated through the zoning process, aided by the county’s delay in adopting a comprehensive plan for Brookhaven that imposes restrictions on new development. County CEO Vernon Jones joined Sembler President Jeff Fuqua at a groundbreaking last week for the Brookhaven project, which will include 600,000 square feet of retail, 1,500 housing units and upward of a dozen new restaurants.

The developer-driven zoning process frustrates Gannon. Instead of seeing the county always playing catch-up, she’d like DeKalb to get ahead of the curve by identifying areas where high-density projects would be appropriate and by setting the stage with special “overlay” plans.

“We need to concentrate growth and redevelopment on corridors and nodes that have the potential for transportation improvements,” she explains.

It’s not hard to imagine where outdated sprawl might be converted to urbanized “nodes.” Potential targets range from the Northlake area that straddles I-285 to the juncture of Lawrenceville Highway and Stone Mountain Freeway, which is now occupied by a series of tired strip centers and the retail ghost town known as North DeKalb Mall. A bit of tweaking might also turn suburban strips like Memorial Drive, Peachtree Industrial Boulevard and, most prominently, Buford Highway into densely developed, transit-and-pedestrian-friendly boulevards surrounded by rising property values.

The county has begun to push for such conversions. Planners recently proposed designating several locations in DeKalb as new “town centers” to invite higher density. But even that process typically comes in response to a request by a developer, as in the case of the old Suburban Plaza shopping center at North Decatur Road and Church Street owned by Selig Enterprises.

Gannon feels such plans also don’t offer enough guidance on what form that density should take. Recently, she’s been trying to organize a task force of experts to develop an overlay plan to help Buford Highway become an attractive, efficient, high-capacity thoroughfare. Unfortunately, though, when it comes to funding such an effort, the county’s cupboard is bare.

“We’ve got activity centers, we’ve got corridors, we’ve got neighborhood centers – tons of places that are ready and waiting for more detailed overlay planning,” Gannon says.

“But we don’t have the resources to do it,” she says. “We don’t have the staff and we don’t have the money to hire consultants to determine how much development can go where and what kind of transportation and public improvements are needed to maintain or improve our quality of life.”

A decade ago, DeKalb County became a laboratory for a new kind of tax reform.

By a 71-29 margin, voters approved the reduction of property taxes for homeowners in exchange for the 1-cent Homeowners Option Sales Tax. When he took office in 2001, CEO Jones started steering some of the money to road improvements.

Still, as a revenue producer, the penny sales tax proved to be something of a flop. It’s generated only about $18 million a year for roads – far less than other counties have raised with a sales tax dedicated solely to infrastructure. But that option is off the table in DeKalb, because the county dedicates its optional penny tax to property-tax relief.

In fact, the unique tax structure has created one hell of a Catch-22: The county needs to bring in a great deal more retail development before it can afford to plan where that development should go.

Jones hasn’t been shy about his support for the Sembler proposal as a vehicle for boosting county tax revenues. Putting retail at that location would corral shoppers who otherwise drive to Buckhead to spend their money, he says.

If the Sembler plan is realized, the anticipated property taxes could be as high as $15 million, a far cry from the $720,000 the county now collects. The company estimates the sales-tax revenue at $50 million a year – though that figure doesn’t factor in the loss of business at existing DeKalb centers.

Jones also argues that bringing in new commercial developments will improve DeKalb’s quality of life by giving residents more local shopping and restaurant options, and will limit drive times by putting more amenities and employers closer to home.

“For decades, there was no effort to bring new business to DeKalb,” Jones says. “That’s what I’m supposed to do – bring prosperity to the county. And that project is good for DeKalb.”

Jones says he respects residents’ concerns about living next to high-density projects. But, he argues, “you can’t pick and choose where development is going to go. We want to protect neighborhoods, but development is coming, regardless. Do we keep the county like it is and cut our nose off to spite our face?”

One way to pay for transportation improvements around the Briarcliff/North Druid Hills intersection is through a tax-allocation district, which would capture a future windfall from the rising value of the property.

Not surprisingly, Sembler’s Fuqua supports Garvin’s call for a TAD. After all, Sembler would have to pay property taxes on the site anyway. Why not steer that money toward roads and other projects that would enhance the area’s infrastructure?

“If this project goes forward, it’ll fix problems with these roads that would probably not be fixed otherwise,” Fuqua says. “It’s really a great opportunity for the county.”

Jones isn’t so TAD-friendly. Obviously, he notes, Briarcliff/North Druid Hills doesn’t need such incentives to lure developers. Also, a TAD would mean less money flowing into county coffers. The county school board, which relies even more heavily on property taxes, has been vocal in its opposition to TADs anywhere in the county.

Gannon and Rader are drawing a bit more of a line in the sand for Sembler. They say flat-out that the project won’t happen unless there’s funding in place to fix the roads, and to create transit options to get cars off the road. It would make sense, for example, for the company to pay to link the site into the busy Emory/CDC shuttle system that operates on nearby Clifton Road, and to launch shuttle service to the Lindbergh and Lenox MARTA stations.

Under a policy unique to DeKalb, the two local commissioners can kill a development even if it’s supported by the other five board members. That clout made it easy for Gannon and Rader to win Sembler’s cooperation with Garvin. But they insist that the project is by no means a done deal.

Rader says his decision will depend on the concessions he can wring from the company for infrastructure improvements and transit. Or perhaps he’ll vote to limit the size of the project if convinced it’s too dense after all.

“There’s a lot we can exact from them,” he says. “Sembler might not get everything they want. It’s possible that, once we put in our stipulations, they might not even want to develop it.”

Regardless of their stance, Gannon and Rader have taken political heat from some neighbors over the way the Garvin study unfolded, and activists have been vocal in their suspicions about ties between Sembler and county officials. They took notice last fall when Sembler associates contributed nearly $4,000 to Rader’s election effort.

They were even more critical after learning that Jones’ campaign for the U.S. Senate received more than $18,000 in donations from founder Mel Sembler, his top executives and their families – as well as nearly two dozen real-estate attorneys with the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan, which is advising Sembler on the project.

“I’m very concerned about Sembler spreading money around in the community,” Smith says. “It has to taint the process.”

Eyebrows also were raised last year when the housing authority fired its director only days after she shared information with reporters that showed the organization had agreed to sell its 70 acres to Sembler for less than the property’s appraised value.

And most recently, neighborhood activists were outraged to find that Sembler had given $20,000 to the booster club at Lakeside High School, where Commissioner Elaine Boyer’s two daughters are cheerleaders. The club, for which Boyer is listed as a contact, had solicited the donation; company spokesman Angelo Fuster says Sembler was not attempting to influence her zoning vote.

Given the politicized backdrop, it hasn’t helped boost the credibility of Garvin’s recommendations that Fuqua touts it as the “operating plan” for the project. Homeowners in the area, like others across metro Atlanta, have grown jaded seeing developers largely get their way, while roads have gotten increasingly crowded. And they’re skeptical that local governments can make high-minded smart-growth ideas work as advertised.

Smith criticizes the Garvin plan – with its tree-lined boulevards, new highway ramps and tunnel under Briarcliff – as unrealistically ambitious.

“I’ve seen them in Europe, but I don’t think Atlanta drivers can deal with a two-lane roundabout,” Smith says.

That lack of faith frustrates some smart-growth advocates. “We should get over the ‘We’ve never done that before’ idea,” says Jim Durrett, executive director of the Livable Communities Coalition, which coordinated the Garvin study. “For redevelopment to work, we need to get innovative.”

Whether the Briarcliff/North Druid Hills area eventually serves as a model for such innovations, for more gridlock-inducing development, or for a status-quo standoff between neighborhoods and developers should become clearer in the coming months. Both the Sembler and Executive Park plans are under review by the Atlanta Regional Commission, which is responsible for determining whether a development is in “the best interests of the region.” But, of more than 50 proposals considered in the past year, the ARC has rejected only one, for a private airstrip subdivision in Henry County.

The Sembler project, tentatively called Briarcliff Town Center, has yet to be formalized in a rezoning application. That likely won’t happen until the school board decides whether to accept Sembler’s offer for its property. The board has set no deadline for its decision, but it has made clear it won’t close the deal until it finds a replacement site for Adams Stadium.

If the company loses the school land, it will need to regroup and come up with a reduced development plan – and the process will begin anew. Only after a formal plan has been submitted will the debate move to the county commission.

Meanwhile, Smith and his fellow activists are busy gathering petitions and holding protests to persuade the board of education that the school property is too valuable a community asset to be sold.

Find out more:

The Garvin study: www.briarcliffnorthdruidhills.org

Sembler’s proposal for Briarcliff/North Druid Hills: http://briarcliffnorthdruidhills.org/2007/07/19/public-meeting-iv-addendum-sembler-presentation

StandUp DeKalb: www.standupdekalb.org

Information about the Brookhaven overlay: www.brookhavenlci.info