‘You can’t say no to growth’: After cityhood fails, Buckhead looks to future

For years, the tree-canopied neighborhoods and high-rise commercial district have coexisted in Buckhead, but not always harmoniously.

Traffic. Density. Crime.

At various times, those issues exposed tension between the priorities of the neighborhoods and the commercial core. The Buckhead cityhood movement intensified the conflicts, which were rooted in pressures from rapid growth. Now months after the attempt to divorce Atlanta’s wealthiest district from the city died in the Georgia legislature, Buckhead business leaders want to move forward.

“We’ve got to get the message out that we are all working together now,” Jim Durrett, president and CEO of the Buckhead Coalition, told Atlanta Business Chronicle this past week.

For most of this year, Durrett and business leaders that make up the Buckhead Coalition, a 35-year-old nonprofit of elite executives, have engaged the neighborhoods in dialogue.

“We want to listen,” Durrett said. “Maybe together we can find things to work on.”

That work will likely center on understanding why Buckhead has lost momentum to more dynamic intown Atlanta districts and how it plans to regain it.

Here are some of the strategies.

1. Create a more connected commercial core.

Giant malls, sprawling parking lots and retail plazas are reminders of Buckhead’s suburban past. But, without making its streets more walkable and creating gathering places in the heart of the commercial core, Buckhead leaders put the vitality of the business district at risk, Durrett said.

For now, pedestrians cannot use Lenox Road to walk from the Lenox MARTA station to Piedmont Road. They are unable to navigate the Georgia 400 interchange. Within five years, that will change, Durrett said.

A component of the enhanced mobility plan for Lenox includes elevated pedestrian bridges that link to the Path 400 Greenway.

2. Adding housing at prices that are more accessible.

“The majority of people living in the city today are living in housing that is not affordable,” said Amanda Rhein, recently named ULI Atlanta chair of mission advancement. Few places in Atlanta have underscored Rhein’s point better than Buckhead. Thousands of its retail and hospitality workers have not been able afford to live in the district.

With so many commuting to and from Buckhead every day, it exposed the lack of capacity in the road network. Previous Atlanta Planning Commissioner Tim Keane advocated for using density. City planners joined him in expanding the issue to consider how past racism was inherent in city zoning.

But the ideas did not gain traction in Buckhead.

Any hope for progress was likely undermined by the inability of people to meet and talk about those issues during the isolation of the pandemic. Crime took center stage but discord over zoning lay in the background of the Buckhead City movement. A big complaint was the threat residents felt to the single-family neighborhoods that Buckhead is famous for, Durrett said.

Today, leading voices in Atlanta’s real estate industry see the lack of housing as an economic development issue.

“We’ve got to find ways to build more housing that is accessible, dollarwise, where it makes sense,” Durrett said. “That means on the transportation corridors, close to MARTA stations.”

In coming months, the city will undertake a rewrite of its comprehensive development plan that will involve a series of neighborhood meetings about the future of its intown districts including Buckhead.

It will come as regional planners forecast record annual population growth in the city. While Buckhead neighborhoods will be protected from denser zoning, Durrett said, “We need to accommodate more people. You can’t say no to growth.”

3. The ‘grand central station of multi-use trails.’

Anyone driving through Buckhead on Georgia 400 can see construction equipment on a steep ridge overlooking the highway. That is work on a new section of the Path 400 trail system that is crawling north to its junction with Sandy Springs.

Another important connection lies to the south in the Lindbergh area of Buckhead. That’s where Path 400 will link to the Confluence Bridge and trail system that includes the Atlanta BeltLine.

The nonprofit overseeing the BeltLine just landed a $25 million grant through the Rebuilding American Infrastructure with Sustainability and Equity (RAISE) program. The funding will help build the northeast section of the BeltLine that will connect to the Confluence Bridge.

Durrett said, “That’s going to become the Grand Central Station of multi-use trails in the city.”

 

Original Article by Douglas Sams, Editor-in-chief, of the Atlanta Business Chronicle

Published on 09/11/2023 and can be found HERE.