Metropolis: The once and future city

More than a few folks would like to whip me with a Belt(line). It seems my last column — in which I did not depict developer Wayne Mason with horns and pitchfork — jerked some strings. I was even accused by an irate reader of having a “pro-developer slant ... appropriate for Fox News.” Ouch.</
Another Beltline supporter groused that I adroitly manipulated words to influence “uneducated” readers — implying that Atlanta Regional Commission and Georgia Regional Transportation Authority staffers, among others, must be ignoramuses for failing to turn thumbs down on Mason’s plans.</
One more wrote that the city should seize Mason’s land through eminent domain, and contends the “fair market value” of the land would be much less than the value that the developer claims. Oh? Wait for the legal Battle of Atlanta, with Mason’s formidable general, Roy Barnes, leading the charge. The only guarantee will be disastrous costs for taxpayers.</
And a caller blistered me, saying Mason’s planned towers at Monroe Drive and 10th Street would create massive traffic jams.</
And so on.</
My un-fans deserve responses. First, I support the Beltline. Hey, I was one of the first public voices to weigh in on behalf of the proposed 22-mile loop of transit and parks around downtown. That said, the problem with the Beltline isn’t Wayne Mason and his 38- and 39-story residential towers.</
Mason found opportunity where public officials had left a vacuum. City leaders had plenty of opportunity to be the engineers on the Beltline train. They dithered, waffling as recently as 18 months ago on whether the project was merely “theoretical.”</
The city still is nowhere near answering the biggest question surrounding the Beltline: What type of transit? True, in the last year, officials have created a funding mechanism and recently hired a fireball manager for the project. But all of that was after Mason moved into the Beltline neighborhood.</
There’s a profound misunderstanding out there concerning transportation. Mason arch-critic Liz Coyle, with the Neighborhood Planning Unit near Piedmont Park, acknowledges mass transit needs residential densities of 12 units an acre, and chides Mason for proposing eight and nine times that. Coyle said, “We’d be happy to see something in the 10 to 15 [units per acre] range,” and maybe higher densities on other portions of the Beltline.</
Sounds reasonable, right? Well, no. If you want transit to succeed — which clearly MARTA has never been guilty of — you need citywide per acre densities of at least 12 units. The city has a fraction of that average.</
Atlantans want to ditch their cars someday, have a 24-hour city and live in the midst of a progressive cityscape. So we’re going to need a lot more high-rise towers.</
Mason’s plan restricts the development footprint to about half his 72 acres, and leaves the rest for greenspace and transit. He’s proposing a continuous trail (with the exception of a short stretch that would veer into Piedmont Park) along the land he plans to develop.</
Will traffic choke streets? There will be impact, but the doomsayers should look at the Sembler big-box development near Little Five Points. It, too, was predicted by many (Who? Me?) to be a traffic disaster; that didn’t happen. Ditto with Atlantic Station.</
Many folks around Piedmont Park regard it as their private preserve. No parking garages and no high-rises that bring outsiders to “our” park, they say.</
That is one model for decision-making. Fortunately, there are others.</
Most urban transit systems don’t begin with the gift of a route. MARTA is an example. In Miami and Tampa, two cities where I covered transit issues for decades, proposed lines were either politically dictated or the result of corrupt policy-making.</
The Beltline’s route is a given and can’t be altered to any major degree. That’s a gain and a loss.</
What we’ve lost is any consensus on the rationale behind the Beltline. Greenspace advocates preach that the project should be a ring of parks and recreational areas, with some sort of warm and fuzzy transportation, such as trolleys. Others see the potential for transit — but those aspirations collide with the need for much greater density throughout the intown area.</
A ring of parkland, however lovely, will do little if anything to change the way we live and get around. Which raises the question: What do we want in Atlanta? I’d argue that the old rationale for urban concentration — business — is an anachronism. Our bank and corporate headquarters are disappearing from downtown. Big retailers fled long ago.</
Moreover, savvy companies know they don’t need to herd all of their workers into one downtown location, wasting increasingly precious gasoline, not to mention lifetimes spent sitting in traffic jams. True, most bosses don’t trust their peons, suspecting that employees who work on home computers spend much of the day looking at porn and flirting on MySpace.com. So, the companies (such as, to be candid, CL) unnecessarily force legions of workers to commute to offices — where they watch porn and flirt on MySpace.com.</
That will change, and telecommuting will accelerate as a business lifestyle, eventually overcoming the resistance of the downtown boosters who want to preserve the illusion that business must occur in the towers and canyons of an urban center.</
So, then, what’s the city’s purpose if not business? The only answer is lifestyle. We can aggregate culture and entertainment in population centers. What we need to make such dreams work is population density. What the anti-Masonites envision is never-ending single-family neighborhoods. The problem is, that density is too low to be served by anything but automobiles.</
A successful Atlanta of the future needs to look forward and backward. Forward to the day when oil supplies diminish to a civilization-changing crisis. Backward to the urban centers of the early 20th century, built around mass transportation, compact and dense.</
We can have the best of the old — if we have vision. That’s why the Beltline is so vital. Not only will it “connect” the city, it will direct its development. Mason may be motivated only by greed. But his idea of density while preserving much that’s green is what the Beltline can achieve.</
Otherwise, we’re wasting one of the last chances to save Atlanta.</
john.sugg@creativeloafing.com</
To find out more</
· You can find out more about Wayne Mason’s project at his website, www.neatlantabeltline.com.</
· To review the alternatives proposed by Liz Coyle and others, Google “NE Corridor Beltline Development.”</
· The Atlanta Beltline Partnership, www.beltline.org, is the civic organization leading the charge on the Beltline.</
· Citizens for Progressive Transit, www.cfpt.org, advocates for alternatives to the automobile in metro Atlanta.