Burglaries, break-ins, beatings.

A lot of what we report about Capitol View and surrounding SW Atlanta neighborhoods has an unfortunate tendency to be crime related. Doom and gloom. Seems unfair. A nice thing: Perkerson Park, the 50-acre greenspace in the heart of Capitol View, is getting a splash pad.

From the Atlanta Beltline ...

On May 19, a new splash pad will open in Perkerson Park at a community event at 1:30 p.m. Event highlights will include games for children, music, light refreshments, and Italian ices. Guests are encouraged to stay in the park for a jazz festival starting at 3 p.m.

The splash pad features the artwork of Maria Artemis in a series of granite boulders that form a fountain and double as seating. In-ground spray elements are designed for three age groups: young children, four to seven years old, and eight years and up.

It's the third splash pad that's been built in parks along the Beltline (the others are in D.H. Stanton Park and Historic Fourth Ward Park). It was funded by Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation.

• Joeff Davis/CL File
• Ain't happenin'!

You'll recall that SOTG almost didn't happen last year because of similar issues but was saved at the last minute — to much fanfare — by corporate sponsors. Anyone wanna bet some companies learned a valuable PR lesson and try to do the same?

• CL File
• No cars allowed, just people

Streets along the event will be shut down to automobile traffic for four hours and reclaimed by cyclists, exercisers, kung fu masters, lollygaggers, flaneurs, and all other walks of life. From the Atlanta Streets Alive blog:

Atlanta Streets Alive takes a valuable public space – our city’s streets – and opens them up for people to play, walk, bike, breathe, and make their own. Atlanta Streets Alive is an event inspired by open streets projects all over the world. The idea originated in Bogotá, Colombia, where neighborhood activists open 70 miles of streets every Sunday for over 800,000 people to bike, skate, or use any human powered means of transportation.

Amusing activities are planned all along the route including the Great Atlanta Bicycle Parade, a walking play produced by Wonderroot, StoryCorps, Tactical Urbanism, laughter yoga, salsa, double dutch, boot camp, Soccer in the Streets, kung fu, tai chi, cornhole, a bicycle rodeo and so much more. Starting at Virginia Ave near Murphy’s restaurant, the route traverses five Atlanta neighborhoods: Virginia Highland, Atkins Park, Poncey-Highland, Inman Park, and the Old Fourth Ward, ending at the Highland Bakery. The route connects to the popular Freedom Park Trail and the Atlanta BeltLine project.

The route was chosen, according to event organizer Atlanta Bicycle Coalition, because of its extraordinarily high bicycle crash rate. Enjoy!

As construction activity in Atlanta slowly starts to rebound from the economic crash, we once again face questions about how our neighborhoods will change. Here's one of 'em.

Midtown Patch's Hunt Archibold on Friday reports that intown development behemoth Novare Group will pitch its proposal for a 23-story, mixed-use building along 6th and Juniper streets to a neighborhood group.

We should be thrilled that the infill developer founded by Jim Borders, the former lawyer who saved the Biltmore and helped revive Midtown living with skyscrapers aplenty, is building dense deep intown. Retail on the ground floor, apartments up top. All replacing dilapidated, vacant buildings. All that sounds wonderful.

Yes, Novare's buildings usually have a cookie-cutter" design. (Maybe it'll come with little spire up top!) But we're also nervous about one pesky detail. Via Archibold:

Parking will be in an adjacent deck at the southwest corner of 7th and Juniper streets according to the application.

Does Juniper Street really need, especially along this stretch, a parking deck to accompany all the nearby parking lots? Building a parking deck along the street, which Novare is also doing with its West Peachtree Street high-rise currently under construction, could turn that stretch of the busy thoroughfare into a dead zone (and an obstacle course) for pedestrians.

In a perfect world, Atlanta developers would follow other cities' examples and construct the parking underground. Or integrate it into the building's interior. (In a truly perfect world, living without a car in metro Atlanta wouldn't be so difficult.) As the economy slowly starts to improve and new construction permits start getting filed, perhaps city officials should consider a program or legislative fixes to encourage developers to build fewer parking decks — especially in parts of the city such as Midtown, which has made great strides to create a walkable community.

• Georgia Department of Revenue
• Errrr

2. Despite talk of cutting waste, state lawmakers are still using public cash — putting us in debt is more like it — to pay for pet projects in their districts.

3. ICYMI: Last week we marked CL's 40th anniversary. Staff Writer Chad Radford rappelled into the paper's archives and spent much of Friday flipping through CL's first issue — all four pages of it. Among the award-winning contents: A column by Gene Siskel, a piece about sailing on Lake Lanier, and the true definition of a "creative loafer." It's the first of many installments by Radford about the paper's past.

4. French President Nicolas Sarkozy was defeated on Sunday by Socialist candidate Francois Hollande to become the latest European leader to lose office after the global financial crisis. Among Hollande's more outrageous proposals: a way-too-high tax on top earners and rolling back the retirement age for some workers.

• Google Maps
• GSU would most likely house Honors College in insurance company's Auburn Avenue headquarters

The five-story building on Auburn Avenue between Courtland Street and Piedmont Avenue has been the home of one of Atlanta’s premier African-American companies since 1980. The company was founded as a life insurance enterprise by Alonzo Herndon 107 years ago.

It is a significant change for Atlanta Life, which has been located on that block since 1920. In fact, the former home for Atlanta Life still stands, but the neo-classical building is boarded up and vacant.

Egbert Perry, who is board chairman of Atlanta Life and CEO of Integral Group, said the life insurance company and its related businesses are using only one and a half floors of the 105,000-square-foot building.

Saporta says the Atlanta Life property, which includes a 250-seat auditorium, dining hall, and other features that could be used by the university, would most likely become the home for GSU's Honors College, an exclusive program aimed at "offering talented and motivated undergraduate students an opportunity to be part of a small college yet have access to any of the university’s 62 undergraduate majors as well as other enhanced programs and services." Housing services would possibly be located in Integral's offices.

Thankfully, both businesses plan to stick around downtown. Maybe they could help kickstart the wonderful area south of Five Points?

• Joeff Davis
• The Occupy Atlanta press conference on Monday at Pamela Flores' Vine City home.

Occupy Atlanta has swept into Vine City to fight Bank of America over the foreclosure of Pamela Flores's house. La’die Mansfield, spokesperson for Occupy Atlanta, led a press conference Monday in front of Flores's nicely kept red brick home across from Kennedy middle school in Vine City. Mansfield announced that Occupy Atlanta would set up tents at Flores house and that her home would become a "hub" to fight foreclosure in Vine City. For the press conference, OA brought together a city councilman, a pastor from a local church and a certified mediator to join the fight.

Occupy Atlanta has fought several battles this year, building coalitions and bringing attention to issues that negatively effect Atlanta: the foreclosure crisis, economic disparity, job layoffs, and the anti-first amendment SB469 bill. They have done so by setting up camps in various places and occupying them to raise awareness of the issues and to try to bring about change. All the while, putting their lives on hold, risking arrest, and sleeping in the most uncomfortable of situations.

Occupy’s latest battle is against Bank of America and other banks who they say are “stealing people’s home’s by making people pay inflated mortgages that are often three or more times more than the current value.” The group also rails against CEO salaries at banks and Wall Street. Their current motto in the foreclosure fight is “we bailed them out and now they have bailed on our communities.”

In choosing Vine City to fight the foreclosure battle, OA has entered ground zero for the housing crisis in Georgia, which has the 4th largest foreclosure rate in the country. Driving the streets of the neighborhood, one is shocked by the number of boarded up houses — on many streets more houses are boarded up than are lived in.

In this latest occupation they are trying to help Miss Flores keep the home she bought in 2006. According to Miss Flores, she attempted to get a loan modification with Bank of America through the "Making Homes Affordable" program. The bank told her to qualify for the loan modification she needed to miss a few mortgage payments. During the time she did not make the payments, she claims, at the bank's request, she fell into foreclosure.

Now eligible for "Making Homes Affordable" program Flores began a trial payment period in August 2009. Bank of America, instead of granting the loan modification, notified Flores in January 2010 that she would be ineligible for a permanent loan modification on the grounds that she had missed four out of five trial payments. During the time Bank of America was locating payments based on the receipts Flores provided, Bank of America started the foreclosure process. Although she was able to stop two previous auctions by filing bankruptcy, her home is once again up for auction in May. She could be thrown out of her home anytime, and says she cannot sleep at night because she is afraid the Marshal will evict her, she was also recently denied her student loan on the grounds that her home was up for foreclosure, she was a graduate student at Emory University. All this despite, according to Flores, having paper work that proves that she has made all the payments except the ones Bank of America told her to miss. Flores is hoping that she can receive the loan modification Bank of America promised her and stop the foreclosure process on her house. She wants Bank of America to grant the loan modification using the houses current value of $38,000 rather than the value that she bought it at which was $180,000.

CBS news reached out to Bank of America, which says Flores was a month late on her first payment to the modification program, which led to their denial of her continuance in the modification program.

Meanwhile, Occupy Atlanta has started to go door-to-door in Vine City trying to organize the neighborhood to take on some of the housing issues that confront residents. “Pamela Flores is choosing to fight back and occupy Atlanta will stand with her every step of the way.” Says a flyer OA is currently posting in the neighborhood and handing out going door to door in the community, “Its time for Vine City residents to come together and create a community where our neighbors can’t just slip through the cracks.” OA is organizing community meetings to discuss housing issues where a lawyer and a community moderator will be there to help residents. The first one is this Thursday at 7 p.m. at Flores house on 245 Griffin street in Vine City.

In Oct. 2010, the New York Times published a story about Jennifer Kuzara's experience of buying a foreclosed home in Atlanta's Edgewood neighborhood. It wasn't a cautionary tale, exactly, but more like a case study in the time and tenacity required to take advantage of bargain basement real estate prices. Caveat (prospective) emptor.

Here's how money columnist Ron Lieber described Edgewood (you'll like this):

It is one of those places where you can walk a few blocks to the left and find two stores with a fine malt liquor selection, then stroll 10 minutes to the right to Bed Bath & Beyond for high thread-count sheets to sleep off the hangover.

In a column published yesterday, Kuzara checks in to talk about the process of refinancing and the positive effect she believes her home purchase had on the neighborhood at-large based on a recent appraisal.

After the first article ran, people apparently voiced the opinion that Kuzara was of the ilk that caused the housing crisis to begin with. Kuzara writes ...

In October 2010, The New York Times ran an article describing my adventures, and after it ran, some readers voiced concerns. Some people said that my decisions were precisely the kind that led to the housing crash. After all, given the ubiquitous threat of unemployment, homeownership was too risky for most people, let alone for someone like me who could afford only the cheapest of properties and smallest down payment.

The risk Kuzara took: So she could buy the house with cash — the only form of payment the bank that owned the home would accept — her parent's borrowed against their retirement funds and life insurance policies. Meanwhile, Kuzara kept her fingers crossed that renovations would increase the value of the home enough that she could pay them back outright when she applied for her mortgage.

Ultimately, she says it all worked out, evidenced by a recent appraisal that increased 15 percent. Kuzara says ...

Remembering how certain I was just three years ago that the American dream had drifted out of reach, it feels remarkable to look around at my little home, my growing equity, my affordable cost of living and my lovely neighbors, some of whom have lived here for nearly 70 years.

Sure, I haven’t forgotten the guts it took for my parents to do what they did, nor the hundreds of hours of manual labor I poured into every corner of my home. Still, it’s hard to imagine a more favorable market for young Americans and middle-class families to try to do what I did.