Cover Story: Mayhem on Moreland
Traffic. People. Big retail boxes. Sembler’s plans for Moreland would change intown Atlanta forever.
Some call it Frankenstein, which gives an idea of just how huge is the development proposed for a blighted tract just south of Little Five Points on Moreland Avenue.
Four retail big boxes would anchor the four corners. A Lowe’s, maybe. A Circuit City, perhaps. A grocery store. And yes, probably a Target.
From the street, though, the stores will be practically invisible, shielded by street-front boutique shops and restaurants. At night, you wouldn’t even have to leave; the complex will boast townhomes and lofts. Picture a combination of Virginia-Highland storefronts and suburban retail giants, bumping up against each other.
To get an idea of the size, picture one of the developer’s other projects — the Borders/Home Depot shopping center on Ponce — and triple it. In sheer size alone, the development will dwarf neighboring East Atlanta and Little Five Points.
Now picture the traffic — 20,000 more cars a day streaming south on Moreland through Little Five Points, or north from I-20. All of them filled with drivers who are relieved they don’t have to drive to Buckhead to shop at Target, or eager to grab dinner at a funky new restaurant on Moreland.
Predictably, the neighbors are fighting back. Or at least using their bargaining power to make the project “less negative” — those are the words of Don Bender, the man largely responsible for the look and feel of nearby Little Five Points.
Paul Thompson, president of Organized Neighbors of Edgewood, represents the area in high-stakes negotiations with the developer, which is eager for the residents’ approval so that it can get permission to build.
The neighbors want less retail space and more grass and trees. They want less traffic.
“We have to think about not only how to preserve our quality of life, but how to enhance it,” Thompson says.
This is not a typical case of the “not in my back yard” syndrome. The development will change irrevocably a big chunk of intown Atlanta.
How this fight turns out will determine the fate of neighborhoods Edgewood, Reynoldstown and Little Five Points, and, to a larger degree, whether intown Atlanta’s character can survive the coming of suburban sterility.
Even if you’ve never heard of Sembler Co., you’ve certainly helped the company’s bottom line.
One of the biggest retail developers in the Southeast, Sembler builds strip malls and stores for retail giants such as Publix, Eckerd and Home Depot. Last year alone, the company built 2.6 million square feet of retail space in metro Atlanta, making it the biggest developer of its kind in Georgia. According to its website, Sembler manages or owns more than 5 million square feet of store space throughout the Southeast.
Like any developer, Sembler goes where the need is greatest. For years, and especially in Atlanta, that has meant the suburbs. Last year, the company stayed true to that vision, building shopping centers in Henry County and in Woodstock.
But it also recently opened Midtown Place, a retail complex anchored by Borders and Home Depot that sits right across the street from Atlanta’s City Hall East. Sembler also built the Publix/Walgreen’s complex at North Avenue and Piedmont.
To Sembler, the developments make sense; they’re designed to fulfill a need created by the vast influx of affluent residents into intown Atlanta. In 2002, more than 8,000 people moved intown.
Sembler, looking to expand its intown presence even more, put in a bid for Atlanta Gas Light’s campus on Moreland last year. AGL is moving its offices to Peachtree Place. If you’re in the development business, the parcel, now just a sea of broken asphalt and stubborn weeds, looks like a potential gold mine. It’s close to the neighborhoods of Candler and Inman parks, and the Marta stations located there. Plus, I-20 is just a mile away. Hip Little Five Points is closer than that.
While the area’s zoning would allow Sembler to plunk down another development like the one it did on Ponce, the company’s ambitions for the Moreland property go far beyond anything it’s done before in metro Atlanta. Besides the four big boxes in the corners, 39 single-family town homes will line the eastern edge; 156 senior citizen units make up the southern border, and a shoe factory built in the 1920s, converted into 40 lofts, will sit in the middle.
The scale of the project has met with stiff resistance from neighbors. Sembler’s president of development, Jeff Fuqua, has met more than 40 times with surrounding neighbors, anxious to hammer out an agreement that both sides can live with. Sembler’s concessions have included scaling back the project’s size from 1.3 million square feet to 850,000. The developer threw in a park space, and reduced the number of parking spaces by a quarter, above and below ground.
Together, Fuqua and Paul Thompson have gone back and forth on more than 130 conditions of the rezoning permit all the way down to tree types, tree girth and curb thickness.
“People ask us why we’re making such an effort to work with the neighborhood,” Fuqua says. “Sometimes we ask ourselves that.”
The answer is that, unlike the Borders development on Ponce, the neighbors of the Moreland property have real influence over the future of Sembler’s development. AGL, as a favor to the neighbors it’s leaving behind, wants Sembler’s project to be a mix of residential and retail, to better blend with the neighborhood surrounding it. That, however, requires a zoning change. And Atlanta’s zoning board won’t be as receptive to Sembler’s plans if the neighbors aren’t on board.
So while neither AGL nor Fuqua would discuss the conditions of the sale, AGL’s insistence that the property be rezoned goes a long way to explain why Fuqua is working so hard to make the neighbors happy.
Still, despite all of Sembler’s concessions, the neighbors believe that the development is still just too damn big. Four retail big boxes? Sorry. The neighbors say that’s too much. But on that condition, Fuqua won’t budge.
And then there’s the traffic.
State roads like Moreland get congestion rankings from the Department of Transportation. “A” means the road is congestion-free; “F” means the road is an irredeemable mess.
Currently, Moreland Avenue scores a C on DOT’s congestion report card. Which, if you’ve ever driven on Moreland around rush hour, and been backed up for a quarter-mile at the light at Memorial, you’ll understand.
Sembler’s own traffic study admits, if the development on Moreland goes up, the road’s score will fall to a D; it will be heavily congested throughout the day. Sembler’s traffic study estimates the development will generate up to 20,000 trips a day. Most of those trips will be made in cars.
But Fuqua says Moreland can take it.
“We don’t see traffic as a problem,” Fuqua says. “Moreland will be able to handle it even better than Ponce has.”
The Atlanta Regional Commission thinks otherwise. In a report issued last month, the ARC concluded that Sembler’s proposal is not transit friendly and doesn’t encourage the use of automobiles. For those reasons, the ARC staff says the project fails air-quality benchmarks.
“The traffic impacts could create bottlenecks at some points inside or adjacent to the [area],” the report says. “This development could be modified to help promote development patterns that reduce, not enhance, the current level of congestion on the road network in the area.”
Sembler wants the ARC’s approval, because the agency’s verdict plays a large part in the zoning board’s decision to accept or reject any zoning change. So, just as Fuqua is having to negotiate with neighborhood groups, he’s now forced to wheel and deal with the ARC, which is scheduled to vote Feb. 26.
While the neighbors want less retail and more green space, the ARC wants office space included in the design.
To the ARC, office workers are more apt to use public transportation if their workplace is near a Marta stop. Building office space near public transportation helps to ease congestion overall in metro Atlanta.
“A mixture of office space, combined with the retail and residential, would really help this site out because it’s located between two transit stations,” says Michael Alexander, the ARC’s land-use expert. “And we’re trying to promote transit use and good development around those transit stations so those transit stations get used. That’s also [ARC] policy.”
Fuqua says that adding office space to the property doesn’t make economic sense because the office market in Atlanta is saturated. He’s got a point: The average vacancy rate for downtown office buildings is 20 percent.
Of course, while ARC’s plan might ease traffic problems elsewhere, it can only add to the gridlock on Moreland. One option would be to widen Moreland by adding more lanes.
That worries Don Bender, who rents space to many of the storeowners in Little Five Points. Bender is the chairman of a task force that’s hired a traffic planner to better control traffic flow on Moreland Avenue from North Avenue to I-20. The four lanes already allows cars to zip through L5P at often perilous speeds. It doesn’t much add to a pedestrian’s enjoyment of Little Five, which is one of the few walkable retail neighborhoods in the city.
If anything, Bender wants fewer lanes on Moreland. That, he says, would slow traffic down and maybe force drivers just passing through to find other routes.
To say the Sembler project sets back that fight is an understatement. Already, Bender has fought the DOT three times in the past 25 years to keep the agency from widening Moreland to six lanes, a move that would call for paving over Little Five Points landmarks.
To widen the lanes to accommodate more traffic for Sembler’s project, Bender says, “is going in the wrong direction.”
While Bender frets about the future of Little Five Points, the neighbors closer to ground zero are positively agitated.
From her front porch at the corner of Flora and La France streets, Judy Butler can count the cars that pass by her home on an average day. But she’s just a short block from where Sembler has earmarked space for a 133,841-square-foot home improvement store, according to a recent draft of the site plan.
The developer’s study says the home improvement store alone would generate more than 4,000 car trips a day. A good bet is that many of those cars will pass by Butler’s home.
Butler is not naíve. She knows something is bound to go up here, and soon. But what Sembler wants, she believes, is bad for the neighborhood.
“We should be working to get a development that could be a showcase for this neighborhood and for the city. We shouldn’t be getting a development that the neighborhood has to settle for,” she says.
Butler points to Green Street Properties, a new development company formed by eco-minded former EarthLink chief Charles Brewer, and its 28-acre Glenwood Park project. Unlike Sembler’s project, Glenwood Park will have office space. And there will be no big boxes there, just 94,000 to 114,000 square feet of retail space. Sembler’s plans call for more than 800,000 square feet.
Last summer, Butler helped form Scale, a neighborhood group that’s fighting the development head on. In November, Butler circulated two petitions, each of which has gained 354 signatures. The first demands that Sembler block tractor-trailers from using neighborhood streets.
The second petition requests a 40-foot swath of green space to serve as a buffer on the east side of the development.
While the opposition is in its early stages, it appears to be gaining steam. Experienced activists in nearby neighborhoods, like Inman Park, who cut their teeth on the fight against the old Presidential Parkway, now are a part of the effort.
To raise money for a possible legal battle, Butler’s group is selling T-shirts for $10 each. Outback Bikes and Junkman’s Daughter have already agreed to sell them. The shirts show an enormous, menacing joker, a la a jack-in-the-box, popping out of a big box retail shop. The joker, labeled Sembler, is holding a car the way Zeus wields lightning bolts, and looks wickedly down on a terrified-looking pedestrian walking along Moreland Avenue.
Even if it’s controversial, at least the squabble over the Sembler proposal is unlikely to get as ugly as an earlier skirmish in the same neighborhood. Almost 140 years ago, the first shots of the Battle of Atlanta were fired on the spot where the development is planned. Together with the area that’s now Candler Park, Edgewood was its own city with its own school system until 1908, when residents petitioned successfully to be annexed into Atlanta. Most of the homes that now line these streets were built between 1895 and 1930.
In the 1980s, Atlanta Gas Light razed a dozen or so homes just off Moreland and tore them down to make room for its offices and maintenance facilities. Now that AGL is leaving, the property has become a wasteland, an industrial blight in an otherwise residential district.
Next door, across Caroline Street from the AGL property, is the U-Haul storage property, which is included in the Sembler development site plan.
But within a three-mile radius, the average household income is more than $50,000. In that same circle, more than 130,000 people live. It is perfectly situated for a spectacular new development that could somehow redefine urban life on the Moreland corridor.
Thompson, the neighborhood leader, is pragmatic. He doesn’t want another Little Five Points, and he doesn’t especially mind the fact that there will be big boxes there. The area, for all its urban squalor, could become as popular as Virginia-Highland in terms of sidewalk strolls and nightlife.
But it’s the size. And the traffic.
“There are still some issues unresolved, and I would probably vote against it,” he says.
He’ll get his chance Monday, Feb. 24, when the next formal step is taken toward the big change. That’s when the neighborhood will take an up-or-down vote on the project. The ARC will vote two days later. Both those votes will serve as recommendations to the zoning board.
michael.wall@creativeloafing.com
Four retail big boxes would anchor the four corners. A Lowe’s, maybe. A Circuit City, perhaps. A grocery store. And yes, probably a Target.
From the street, though, the stores will be practically invisible, shielded by street-front boutique shops and restaurants. At night, you wouldn’t even have to leave; the complex will boast townhomes and lofts. Picture a combination of Virginia-Highland storefronts and suburban retail giants, bumping up against each other.
To get an idea of the size, picture one of the developer’s other projects — the Borders/Home Depot shopping center on Ponce — and triple it. In sheer size alone, the development will dwarf neighboring East Atlanta and Little Five Points.
Now picture the traffic — 20,000 more cars a day streaming south on Moreland through Little Five Points, or north from I-20. All of them filled with drivers who are relieved they don’t have to drive to Buckhead to shop at Target, or eager to grab dinner at a funky new restaurant on Moreland.
Predictably, the neighbors are fighting back. Or at least using their bargaining power to make the project “less negative” — those are the words of Don Bender, the man largely responsible for the look and feel of nearby Little Five Points.
Paul Thompson, president of Organized Neighbors of Edgewood, represents the area in high-stakes negotiations with the developer, which is eager for the residents’ approval so that it can get permission to build.
The neighbors want less retail space and more grass and trees. They want less traffic.
“We have to think about not only how to preserve our quality of life, but how to enhance it,” Thompson says.
This is not a typical case of the “not in my back yard” syndrome. The development will change irrevocably a big chunk of intown Atlanta.
How this fight turns out will determine the fate of neighborhoods Edgewood, Reynoldstown and Little Five Points, and, to a larger degree, whether intown Atlanta’s character can survive the coming of suburban sterility.
Even if you’ve never heard of Sembler Co., you’ve certainly helped the company’s bottom line.
One of the biggest retail developers in the Southeast, Sembler builds strip malls and stores for retail giants such as Publix, Eckerd and Home Depot. Last year alone, the company built 2.6 million square feet of retail space in metro Atlanta, making it the biggest developer of its kind in Georgia. According to its website, Sembler manages or owns more than 5 million square feet of store space throughout the Southeast.
Like any developer, Sembler goes where the need is greatest. For years, and especially in Atlanta, that has meant the suburbs. Last year, the company stayed true to that vision, building shopping centers in Henry County and in Woodstock.
But it also recently opened Midtown Place, a retail complex anchored by Borders and Home Depot that sits right across the street from Atlanta’s City Hall East. Sembler also built the Publix/Walgreen’s complex at North Avenue and Piedmont.
To Sembler, the developments make sense; they’re designed to fulfill a need created by the vast influx of affluent residents into intown Atlanta. In 2002, more than 8,000 people moved intown.
Sembler, looking to expand its intown presence even more, put in a bid for Atlanta Gas Light’s campus on Moreland last year. AGL is moving its offices to Peachtree Place. If you’re in the development business, the parcel, now just a sea of broken asphalt and stubborn weeds, looks like a potential gold mine. It’s close to the neighborhoods of Candler and Inman parks, and the Marta stations located there. Plus, I-20 is just a mile away. Hip Little Five Points is closer than that.
While the area’s zoning would allow Sembler to plunk down another development like the one it did on Ponce, the company’s ambitions for the Moreland property go far beyond anything it’s done before in metro Atlanta. Besides the four big boxes in the corners, 39 single-family town homes will line the eastern edge; 156 senior citizen units make up the southern border, and a shoe factory built in the 1920s, converted into 40 lofts, will sit in the middle.
The scale of the project has met with stiff resistance from neighbors. Sembler’s president of development, Jeff Fuqua, has met more than 40 times with surrounding neighbors, anxious to hammer out an agreement that both sides can live with. Sembler’s concessions have included scaling back the project’s size from 1.3 million square feet to 850,000. The developer threw in a park space, and reduced the number of parking spaces by a quarter, above and below ground.
Together, Fuqua and Paul Thompson have gone back and forth on more than 130 conditions of the rezoning permit all the way down to tree types, tree girth and curb thickness.
“People ask us why we’re making such an effort to work with the neighborhood,” Fuqua says. “Sometimes we ask ourselves that.”
The answer is that, unlike the Borders development on Ponce, the neighbors of the Moreland property have real influence over the future of Sembler’s development. AGL, as a favor to the neighbors it’s leaving behind, wants Sembler’s project to be a mix of residential and retail, to better blend with the neighborhood surrounding it. That, however, requires a zoning change. And Atlanta’s zoning board won’t be as receptive to Sembler’s plans if the neighbors aren’t on board.
So while neither AGL nor Fuqua would discuss the conditions of the sale, AGL’s insistence that the property be rezoned goes a long way to explain why Fuqua is working so hard to make the neighbors happy.
Still, despite all of Sembler’s concessions, the neighbors believe that the development is still just too damn big. Four retail big boxes? Sorry. The neighbors say that’s too much. But on that condition, Fuqua won’t budge.
And then there’s the traffic.
State roads like Moreland get congestion rankings from the Department of Transportation. “A” means the road is congestion-free; “F” means the road is an irredeemable mess.
Currently, Moreland Avenue scores a C on DOT’s congestion report card. Which, if you’ve ever driven on Moreland around rush hour, and been backed up for a quarter-mile at the light at Memorial, you’ll understand.
Sembler’s own traffic study admits, if the development on Moreland goes up, the road’s score will fall to a D; it will be heavily congested throughout the day. Sembler’s traffic study estimates the development will generate up to 20,000 trips a day. Most of those trips will be made in cars.
But Fuqua says Moreland can take it.
“We don’t see traffic as a problem,” Fuqua says. “Moreland will be able to handle it even better than Ponce has.”
The Atlanta Regional Commission thinks otherwise. In a report issued last month, the ARC concluded that Sembler’s proposal is not transit friendly and doesn’t encourage the use of automobiles. For those reasons, the ARC staff says the project fails air-quality benchmarks.
“The traffic impacts could create bottlenecks at some points inside or adjacent to the [area],” the report says. “This development could be modified to help promote development patterns that reduce, not enhance, the current level of congestion on the road network in the area.”
Sembler wants the ARC’s approval, because the agency’s verdict plays a large part in the zoning board’s decision to accept or reject any zoning change. So, just as Fuqua is having to negotiate with neighborhood groups, he’s now forced to wheel and deal with the ARC, which is scheduled to vote Feb. 26.
While the neighbors want less retail and more green space, the ARC wants office space included in the design.
To the ARC, office workers are more apt to use public transportation if their workplace is near a Marta stop. Building office space near public transportation helps to ease congestion overall in metro Atlanta.
“A mixture of office space, combined with the retail and residential, would really help this site out because it’s located between two transit stations,” says Michael Alexander, the ARC’s land-use expert. “And we’re trying to promote transit use and good development around those transit stations so those transit stations get used. That’s also [ARC] policy.”
Fuqua says that adding office space to the property doesn’t make economic sense because the office market in Atlanta is saturated. He’s got a point: The average vacancy rate for downtown office buildings is 20 percent.
Of course, while ARC’s plan might ease traffic problems elsewhere, it can only add to the gridlock on Moreland. One option would be to widen Moreland by adding more lanes.
That worries Don Bender, who rents space to many of the storeowners in Little Five Points. Bender is the chairman of a task force that’s hired a traffic planner to better control traffic flow on Moreland Avenue from North Avenue to I-20. The four lanes already allows cars to zip through L5P at often perilous speeds. It doesn’t much add to a pedestrian’s enjoyment of Little Five, which is one of the few walkable retail neighborhoods in the city.
If anything, Bender wants fewer lanes on Moreland. That, he says, would slow traffic down and maybe force drivers just passing through to find other routes.
To say the Sembler project sets back that fight is an understatement. Already, Bender has fought the DOT three times in the past 25 years to keep the agency from widening Moreland to six lanes, a move that would call for paving over Little Five Points landmarks.
To widen the lanes to accommodate more traffic for Sembler’s project, Bender says, “is going in the wrong direction.”
While Bender frets about the future of Little Five Points, the neighbors closer to ground zero are positively agitated.
From her front porch at the corner of Flora and La France streets, Judy Butler can count the cars that pass by her home on an average day. But she’s just a short block from where Sembler has earmarked space for a 133,841-square-foot home improvement store, according to a recent draft of the site plan.
The developer’s study says the home improvement store alone would generate more than 4,000 car trips a day. A good bet is that many of those cars will pass by Butler’s home.
Butler is not naíve. She knows something is bound to go up here, and soon. But what Sembler wants, she believes, is bad for the neighborhood.
“We should be working to get a development that could be a showcase for this neighborhood and for the city. We shouldn’t be getting a development that the neighborhood has to settle for,” she says.
Butler points to Green Street Properties, a new development company formed by eco-minded former EarthLink chief Charles Brewer, and its 28-acre Glenwood Park project. Unlike Sembler’s project, Glenwood Park will have office space. And there will be no big boxes there, just 94,000 to 114,000 square feet of retail space. Sembler’s plans call for more than 800,000 square feet.
Last summer, Butler helped form Scale, a neighborhood group that’s fighting the development head on. In November, Butler circulated two petitions, each of which has gained 354 signatures. The first demands that Sembler block tractor-trailers from using neighborhood streets.
The second petition requests a 40-foot swath of green space to serve as a buffer on the east side of the development.
While the opposition is in its early stages, it appears to be gaining steam. Experienced activists in nearby neighborhoods, like Inman Park, who cut their teeth on the fight against the old Presidential Parkway, now are a part of the effort.
To raise money for a possible legal battle, Butler’s group is selling T-shirts for $10 each. Outback Bikes and Junkman’s Daughter have already agreed to sell them. The shirts show an enormous, menacing joker, a la a jack-in-the-box, popping out of a big box retail shop. The joker, labeled Sembler, is holding a car the way Zeus wields lightning bolts, and looks wickedly down on a terrified-looking pedestrian walking along Moreland Avenue.
Even if it’s controversial, at least the squabble over the Sembler proposal is unlikely to get as ugly as an earlier skirmish in the same neighborhood. Almost 140 years ago, the first shots of the Battle of Atlanta were fired on the spot where the development is planned. Together with the area that’s now Candler Park, Edgewood was its own city with its own school system until 1908, when residents petitioned successfully to be annexed into Atlanta. Most of the homes that now line these streets were built between 1895 and 1930.
In the 1980s, Atlanta Gas Light razed a dozen or so homes just off Moreland and tore them down to make room for its offices and maintenance facilities. Now that AGL is leaving, the property has become a wasteland, an industrial blight in an otherwise residential district.
Next door, across Caroline Street from the AGL property, is the U-Haul storage property, which is included in the Sembler development site plan.
But within a three-mile radius, the average household income is more than $50,000. In that same circle, more than 130,000 people live. It is perfectly situated for a spectacular new development that could somehow redefine urban life on the Moreland corridor.
Thompson, the neighborhood leader, is pragmatic. He doesn’t want another Little Five Points, and he doesn’t especially mind the fact that there will be big boxes there. The area, for all its urban squalor, could become as popular as Virginia-Highland in terms of sidewalk strolls and nightlife.
But it’s the size. And the traffic.
“There are still some issues unresolved, and I would probably vote against it,” he says.
He’ll get his chance Monday, Feb. 24, when the next formal step is taken toward the big change. That’s when the neighborhood will take an up-or-down vote on the project. The ARC will vote two days later. Both those votes will serve as recommendations to the zoning board.
michael.wall@creativeloafing.com