The EPA obstructed Atlanta road maintenance and expansion since 1978. UN Agenda 21 implementation spawned grants to academic urban planners and Georgia politicians caved in to federal extortion. This article gives us an unobstructed view of their plan. Norb Leahy
Smart Growth in Atlanta - A Response to Krieger and Kiefer, by Ellen Dunham-Jones 2004
Living in Atlanta, a city whose reputation as the poster
child for sprawl precipitated significant ongoing public and private
"Smart Growth" initiatives, I have "situated knowledge" of
specific examples to both corroborate and question Alex Krieger's and Matthew
Kiefer's more general comments on the discourse on sprawl and Smart Growth. As
both authors point out, Smart Growth is difficult to define precisely.
Atlanta's attempts to put Smart Growth into practice reveal
"In Atlanta a
crisis generated the political will to institute regional planning, while recognition of the growing market for more urban living generated the
popular will to support a
growing number of mixed - use , higher density, and often transit-oriented
developments . " Atlanta, Georgia. an even messier, one-step-forward,
two-steps-back, multi-pronged effort involving U.S. government-pressured
regional planning on the one hand and market-driven individual development
projects on the other. The marriages and divorces of environmentalists,
business leaders, and planners have made for strange bedfellows and unintended
political consequences. Successes and failures have occurred at both the
regional and the project scales. The battle against sprawl is not being
won—yet—(nor is Smart Growth likely to alter the vast established physical
pattern, 1) but its multiple manifestations have already succeeded in
providing Atlantans with a much broader array of living, working, and
transportation choices.
Krieger and Kiefer make similar points about the
wide-ranging and often ill-defined terms of the debates over sprawl and Smart
Growth, and both rely rather extensively on Randal O'Toole just to make sure
there is a debate. 2 (Krieger especially seems to relish playing academic
contrarian by giving the conservative O'Toole significant airtime but without
rigorously analyzing his often questionable statistics or claims.3) Both ask,
"If sprawl is so terrible, why is it also so popular?" Krieger
explores this question by focusing on the past and present historiography and
on the battle for the public imagination. He emphasizes the need for political
will in order to enact progressive policies, but is skeptical that they can be
realized. Kiefer asks pragmatic questions about the costs of redevelopment versus
new development, about the real causes and cures of the problems, and what
precisely distinguishes sprawl from smarter growth (not as simple a question as
it may seem). If Krieger focuses on the role of policy to advance Smart Growth,
Kiefer focuses on the need for Smart Growth alternatives to prove themselves
to be more successful than sprawl in the marketplace. The brief history of
Smart Growth in Atlanta confirms that Krieger and Kiefer are both right. A
crisis generated the political will to institute regional planning (even if it
isn't yet as effective as it might be), while recognition of the growing market
for more urban living generated the popular will to support a growing number of
mixed-use, higher density, and often transit-oriented developments (even if
they aren't as progressive as they might be.) Recognizing that no-growth
policies were out of the question in booming Atlanta in 1995, The Georgia
Conservancy, an environmental advocacy organization, partnered with the Atlanta
chapters of the Urban Land Institute and the National Home Builders Association
to host a series of symposia on combining environmental preservation with
community planning.
4 Metro Atlanta's failure to meet ozone standards since
1978 was not at that time the principal focus of many of those concerned with
the region's growth. However, it quickly became the sword of Damocles that
transformed discussions of Smart Growth into actions. In 1996 the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) warned Metro Atlanta that it would use
its powers under Clean Air Act amendments to block future federal funding for
highway construction unless the region took significant steps to reduce high
ozone and smog levels. Despite attempts by the Atlanta Regional Commission
(ARC) to produce an acceptable transportation plan intended to bring the
region's air quality into compliance with state standards by 2005, in 1998 the
region lost $700 million in federal transportation funds.
5 When this loss was followed by a front page story in the Wall Street Journal proposing that Atlanta's problems with sprawl might surpass those of Los Angeles and rumors that major companies had already decided against relocating to the region, top business leaders and government officials convened a series of "summit" meetings that led to the creation in 1999 of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA).
5 When this loss was followed by a front page story in the Wall Street Journal proposing that Atlanta's problems with sprawl might surpass those of Los Angeles and rumors that major companies had already decided against relocating to the region, top business leaders and government officials convened a series of "summit" meetings that led to the creation in 1999 of the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA).
6 GRTA
was charged with coordinating the planning and funding of transportation
through the region. And while not specifically charged with connecting transportation
and air quality to land use, GRTA leaders made this part of their mission in
2000 so that they could leverage transportation funding to steer local planning
in accordance with the ARC's ten-county Regional Development Plan.
That plan
generally promotes Smart Growth development around existing activity centers
and proposed transit stops and the protection of watersheds but otherwise lacks
regulatory power or more specific locational criteria for targeting where
growth should and should not occur. However, regional planning was given
further leverage in 2001 with the creation for a sixteen county area of another
regional planning agency, the Metropolitan North Georgia Water Planning
District.
7 More recent regional
initiatives have formed, focusing on open space acquisition, the arts,
homelessness, governance, and interdisciplinary research and planning. All
these coalitions are too new to have yet lived up to their potentials, let
alone coordinate their planning with each other, but they have already fostered
significant recognition of common agendas.
8 In July 2000, the EPA eased its restrictions on federal transportation funds based on GRTA's agreement to enforce ARC's 1999 25-Year Transportation Plan, designating approximately $40 billion towards over 2,000 transportation projects and programs intended to increase mobility and reduce harmful emissions, including major transit projects, bicycle paths, and sidewalks. Meanwhile another lawsuit is holding up $400 million worth of transportation funding, the EPA has further extended the Metro Atlanta deadline for air quality attainment to 2004, and the new Governor just cut state funding from all but bus related transit projects. Despite these significant setbacks, acceptance of the value of regional planning and Smart Growth objectives has grown tremendously.
8 In July 2000, the EPA eased its restrictions on federal transportation funds based on GRTA's agreement to enforce ARC's 1999 25-Year Transportation Plan, designating approximately $40 billion towards over 2,000 transportation projects and programs intended to increase mobility and reduce harmful emissions, including major transit projects, bicycle paths, and sidewalks. Meanwhile another lawsuit is holding up $400 million worth of transportation funding, the EPA has further extended the Metro Atlanta deadline for air quality attainment to 2004, and the new Governor just cut state funding from all but bus related transit projects. Despite these significant setbacks, acceptance of the value of regional planning and Smart Growth objectives has grown tremendously.
In the late 1990s, several
influential developers, most notably John Williams, CEO of Post Properties, one
of the largest REITs in the country, and Chair of the Metro Chamber of
Commerce, committed themselves to New Urbanism and Smart Growth with in-town,
urban, mixed-use projects.
9 Williams endowed a professorship at Georgia Tech to direct a new research Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development. In 1997, the Midtown Alliance, joining residents and business owners, began a community-based planning process that resulted in a coherent urban vision of pedestrian-friendly streets; creation of a Midtown Improvement District that is planning $41 million in sidewalks, streetlights, and street trees; the largest rezoning in Atlanta's history; a Transportation Management Association; and a valuable model of redevelopment and urban living for other areas in the region. Over the past four years, the ARC's Livable Centers Initiative (LCI) has seeded revitalization planning for over forty projects in the region. This year the ARC began distributing implementation funds for the best LCI plans, most of them providing infrastructure to attract redevelopment of dead malls, vacant transit-stops, or blighted commercial strips into mixed use, pedestrian-friendly destinations.
10 This past year also saw the first express bus service between Atlanta and several suburban counties; three new live-work, mixed use, and multifamily zoning ordinances in the City of Atlanta; a mixed use redevelopment zoning overlay in Gwinnett County; approval of the first Transfer of Development Rights ordinance in the state (to preserve 40,000 of 60,000 acres in south Fulton County by directing growth to three new high-density urban villages); completion of over 5,000 new residential units (mostly multifamily) in Midtown since 1997;
11 and construction on two particularly large transit-oriented redevelopments: Atlantic Station and Lindbergh City Center. Much of the credit for public interest and understanding of these initiatives is due to the excellent coverage since 1997 of development issues in the weekly Horizon section of the Atlanta Journal- Constitution.
12 A thirty-acre underground parking garage at Atlantic Station has been constructed, and this is an example of Smart Growth and New Urbanism that far exceeds Krieger's concern that such projects are often simply prettily dressed up suburbs in town-like iconography. Across a major highway from Atlanta's Midtown neighborhood and adjacent to Atlanta's Amtrak station, Atlantic Station is billed as the largest brownfield redevelopment project in the country. Construction of its two levels of parking and one level of building services is almost complete, and a dozen floors of the first office tower have been poured. The garage is simultaneously the containment cap over the contaminated soil from the site's former life as the Atlantic Steel Mill and the base for eight million square feet of retail, entertainment, office, hotel, and residential development. The rest of the 140-acre site calls for substantial amounts of housing, as well as lined, big-box retail, all aspiring for LEED energy-efficiency certification. As a model of Smart Growth, the $2 billion project was able to receive substantial public subsidies, including $38 million for a major bridge to Midtown, by convincing the EPA that the project's compactness and mixed uses would reduce vehicle trips enough to mitigate the region's poor air quality, thereby allowing it to bypass EPAJS freeze on federal transportation funds and earn EPAJS first Project XL designation—for excellence in public health and environmental protection cost effectiveness given to a real estate project. Several firms participated in the urban design, including TVS Architects of Atlanta and Duany PlaterZyberk of Miami. Krieger's article concludes with the discerning assertion that the benefits of sprawl tend to accrue to Americans individually, while the costs tend to be borne by society as a whole. This is certainly a perception most Atlantans have long shared. The region's explosive growth during the '90s is largely attributed to the ease with which employers were able to attract immigration due to the area's vaunted "quality of life."
13 From McMansions on "green breasted lawns" 14 in Buckhead and Alpharetta to endless new, amenity-laden suburban and exurban houses and apartments on lush lots with access to good schools, new malls, and swank office parks, Atlanta has a particularly large supply of amenity-rich, upscale versions of the American Dream embedded within pompously named developments complete with country clubs and implied or functioning gated entries. This private version of The Good Life and its cheaper variants were built according to conventional auto-dependent, low-density, suburban planning with separated uses and limited connectivity, contributing to all the usual regional-scale problems associated with sprawl. If the public problems of sprawl began to interfere with an individual's good life, the answer was simply to outrun it. This worked for quite a while and propelled Atlanta to its current twenty-nine-county, over 100-mile diameter. However, as commutes lengthened, so did Atlantans' driving. In 1999 they drove an average of thirty-five miles per person per day, the highest average daily vehicle miles traveled in the U . S .
15 Despite the fact that the highway system grew 16% faster than population between 1982 and 1996 (and counter to the conclusions of the study cited by O'Toole) congestion has continued to rise, especially on the suburban arterials.
16 By 2000, Atlantans were spending fifty-three hours in traffic per year, up from twenty-five hours at the beginning of the '90s, the fastest increase of any metro area.
17 Atlantans widely recognize this cost and in what is sometimes called "the Atlanta effect," it is credited with helping lead the revival of interest in in-town living and working. Other significant if far less recognized personal costs of sprawl are mounting. In 1998, the average metro Atlanta household spent 21.7% of its monthly income on transportation, second only to Houston's 22% and, surprisingly, more than the 19.6% they spent on shelter.
18 When I've shared these statistics with local friends or citizen groups, they invariably produce an initial reaction of disbelief followed by nodding comprehension. Suddenly the big house on the big lot with the big cars and the big commute may not seem such a bargain, nor do the smaller in-town houses and condos in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods close to transit seem quite so overpriced. Similarly under-recognized are the costs to personal health associated with sprawl's heavy reliance on cars. Some of these are direct. In 1998, Atlanta had the highest automobile rider and pedestrian fatality rates of any major U.S. city.
19 Suburban teenagers with increasingly powerful vehicles are particularly accident-prone. The relative dearth of sidewalks on suburban roads may be partly to blame for the high pedestrian fatality rate. It is also cited by public health officials as one of the factors contributing to the higher rates of obesity associated with sprawl neighborhoods than urban neighborhoods.
20 Twenty-three percent of the Atlanta population (25% of fourth graders) is obese. 21 Public health researchers are increasingly studying the related health impacts of different physical environments, sedentary lifestyles, and long commutes. 2 2 If the costs of sprawl to individuals tend to go unnoticed, so do the benefits to individuals of Smart Growth. Both Kiefer and Krieger cite the many arguments about the collective environmental, aesthetic, sociological, and economic benefits of Smart Growth but conclude that it won't be successful until it is more in the short-term self-interest of individuals and the market. They also both reference concern that the only self-interests that Smart Growth serve are those of existing elitist suburbanites trying to stop anyone else from enjoying their lifestyle and further exacerbating the traffic, overcrowded schools, and loss of open space. The curious aspect of this rather common critique is that, at least in Atlanta, there is little evidence of this constituency among the Smart Growth allies. 2 3 Quite the opposite.
9 Williams endowed a professorship at Georgia Tech to direct a new research Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development. In 1997, the Midtown Alliance, joining residents and business owners, began a community-based planning process that resulted in a coherent urban vision of pedestrian-friendly streets; creation of a Midtown Improvement District that is planning $41 million in sidewalks, streetlights, and street trees; the largest rezoning in Atlanta's history; a Transportation Management Association; and a valuable model of redevelopment and urban living for other areas in the region. Over the past four years, the ARC's Livable Centers Initiative (LCI) has seeded revitalization planning for over forty projects in the region. This year the ARC began distributing implementation funds for the best LCI plans, most of them providing infrastructure to attract redevelopment of dead malls, vacant transit-stops, or blighted commercial strips into mixed use, pedestrian-friendly destinations.
10 This past year also saw the first express bus service between Atlanta and several suburban counties; three new live-work, mixed use, and multifamily zoning ordinances in the City of Atlanta; a mixed use redevelopment zoning overlay in Gwinnett County; approval of the first Transfer of Development Rights ordinance in the state (to preserve 40,000 of 60,000 acres in south Fulton County by directing growth to three new high-density urban villages); completion of over 5,000 new residential units (mostly multifamily) in Midtown since 1997;
11 and construction on two particularly large transit-oriented redevelopments: Atlantic Station and Lindbergh City Center. Much of the credit for public interest and understanding of these initiatives is due to the excellent coverage since 1997 of development issues in the weekly Horizon section of the Atlanta Journal- Constitution.
12 A thirty-acre underground parking garage at Atlantic Station has been constructed, and this is an example of Smart Growth and New Urbanism that far exceeds Krieger's concern that such projects are often simply prettily dressed up suburbs in town-like iconography. Across a major highway from Atlanta's Midtown neighborhood and adjacent to Atlanta's Amtrak station, Atlantic Station is billed as the largest brownfield redevelopment project in the country. Construction of its two levels of parking and one level of building services is almost complete, and a dozen floors of the first office tower have been poured. The garage is simultaneously the containment cap over the contaminated soil from the site's former life as the Atlantic Steel Mill and the base for eight million square feet of retail, entertainment, office, hotel, and residential development. The rest of the 140-acre site calls for substantial amounts of housing, as well as lined, big-box retail, all aspiring for LEED energy-efficiency certification. As a model of Smart Growth, the $2 billion project was able to receive substantial public subsidies, including $38 million for a major bridge to Midtown, by convincing the EPA that the project's compactness and mixed uses would reduce vehicle trips enough to mitigate the region's poor air quality, thereby allowing it to bypass EPAJS freeze on federal transportation funds and earn EPAJS first Project XL designation—for excellence in public health and environmental protection cost effectiveness given to a real estate project. Several firms participated in the urban design, including TVS Architects of Atlanta and Duany PlaterZyberk of Miami. Krieger's article concludes with the discerning assertion that the benefits of sprawl tend to accrue to Americans individually, while the costs tend to be borne by society as a whole. This is certainly a perception most Atlantans have long shared. The region's explosive growth during the '90s is largely attributed to the ease with which employers were able to attract immigration due to the area's vaunted "quality of life."
13 From McMansions on "green breasted lawns" 14 in Buckhead and Alpharetta to endless new, amenity-laden suburban and exurban houses and apartments on lush lots with access to good schools, new malls, and swank office parks, Atlanta has a particularly large supply of amenity-rich, upscale versions of the American Dream embedded within pompously named developments complete with country clubs and implied or functioning gated entries. This private version of The Good Life and its cheaper variants were built according to conventional auto-dependent, low-density, suburban planning with separated uses and limited connectivity, contributing to all the usual regional-scale problems associated with sprawl. If the public problems of sprawl began to interfere with an individual's good life, the answer was simply to outrun it. This worked for quite a while and propelled Atlanta to its current twenty-nine-county, over 100-mile diameter. However, as commutes lengthened, so did Atlantans' driving. In 1999 they drove an average of thirty-five miles per person per day, the highest average daily vehicle miles traveled in the U . S .
15 Despite the fact that the highway system grew 16% faster than population between 1982 and 1996 (and counter to the conclusions of the study cited by O'Toole) congestion has continued to rise, especially on the suburban arterials.
16 By 2000, Atlantans were spending fifty-three hours in traffic per year, up from twenty-five hours at the beginning of the '90s, the fastest increase of any metro area.
17 Atlantans widely recognize this cost and in what is sometimes called "the Atlanta effect," it is credited with helping lead the revival of interest in in-town living and working. Other significant if far less recognized personal costs of sprawl are mounting. In 1998, the average metro Atlanta household spent 21.7% of its monthly income on transportation, second only to Houston's 22% and, surprisingly, more than the 19.6% they spent on shelter.
18 When I've shared these statistics with local friends or citizen groups, they invariably produce an initial reaction of disbelief followed by nodding comprehension. Suddenly the big house on the big lot with the big cars and the big commute may not seem such a bargain, nor do the smaller in-town houses and condos in walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods close to transit seem quite so overpriced. Similarly under-recognized are the costs to personal health associated with sprawl's heavy reliance on cars. Some of these are direct. In 1998, Atlanta had the highest automobile rider and pedestrian fatality rates of any major U.S. city.
19 Suburban teenagers with increasingly powerful vehicles are particularly accident-prone. The relative dearth of sidewalks on suburban roads may be partly to blame for the high pedestrian fatality rate. It is also cited by public health officials as one of the factors contributing to the higher rates of obesity associated with sprawl neighborhoods than urban neighborhoods.
20 Twenty-three percent of the Atlanta population (25% of fourth graders) is obese. 21 Public health researchers are increasingly studying the related health impacts of different physical environments, sedentary lifestyles, and long commutes. 2 2 If the costs of sprawl to individuals tend to go unnoticed, so do the benefits to individuals of Smart Growth. Both Kiefer and Krieger cite the many arguments about the collective environmental, aesthetic, sociological, and economic benefits of Smart Growth but conclude that it won't be successful until it is more in the short-term self-interest of individuals and the market. They also both reference concern that the only self-interests that Smart Growth serve are those of existing elitist suburbanites trying to stop anyone else from enjoying their lifestyle and further exacerbating the traffic, overcrowded schools, and loss of open space. The curious aspect of this rather common critique is that, at least in Atlanta, there is little evidence of this constituency among the Smart Growth allies. 2 3 Quite the opposite.
The newest suburban
homeowners, often those trying to outrun sprawl by leapfrogging to the exurban
fringe, are in fact the most likely to take a no-growth stance and raise
vehement opposition to Smart Growth policies and higher density, mixed-use New
Urbanist developments. Hall County, about sixty miles north of the city of
Atlanta and currently the third fastest growing county in the nation, voted to
try to slow development, not by adopting Smart Growth strategies but by trying
to slow growth and decrease density by increasing the minimum residential lot
size from 25,000 to 35,000 square feet.
24 The primary beneficiaries of Smart Growth in Atlanta have not been the self-protective existing suburbanites but the consumers who now have considerably more (and more attractive) choices of where to live and/or work. The changes have been most dramatic intown. They're evident in the rebuilt public housing projects at Centennial Place and Eastlake, the several new high-rise office and condo towers, the numerous "faux lofts" (since most of the old warehouses have already been converted), Technology Square (the mixed-use, urban expansion of Georgia Tech), and the countless new restaurants, cafes, and revitalized neighborhood centers. The new residents reversed the City of Atlanta's population decline, and whether they've been attracted by the urbanity of the new projects or the shortness of their commutes, their numbers are continuing to grow steadily.
25 Despite the economic downturn, urban development, in Midtown especially, has done well, if not thrived, and has revealed an eager market of consumers delighted to be offered more urban versions of the American Dream. The near doubling in aggregate property values in five years in Midtown, and less dramatically in other in-town neighborhoods is raising concerns about gentrification (with many poorer residents being forced out to declining first-ring suburbs). But, as Kiefer suggests, it is also further legitimizing the value of welled signed urban redevelopment following Smart Growth principles. There have also been increasing efforts to expand Smart Growth projects into the suburbs. The twin fourteen-story office towers of Phase I of Lindbergh City Center's grayfield retrofit of forty-seven acres along an in-town suburban strip are complete. An existing suburban MARTA rapid rail stop's parking lot is being redeveloped into several urban blocks with continuous ground floor retail and five-story building heights fronting a Main Street and lining the taller commercial and residential towers. Master planned by Cooper Carry Architects in Atlanta, the primary tenant is BellSouth, Atlanta's second largest employer. BellSouth's decision in 1999 to consolidate 13,000 employees from seventy-five offices throughout Atlanta into three complexes at MARTA stops made headlines as an example of both good business (a hightech company choosing urban locations to improve employee retention while also achieving the benefits of consolidation) and transit-oriented Smart Growth.
26 Despite evidence of a suburban market for walkable, compact, mixed use communities, 27 developers have been reluctant and/or unsuccessful at delivering more suburban greenfield New Urbanist mixed-use projects like New Manchester and Ridenour. These projects and efforts to incorporate housing into existing suburban office parks have met substantial community and financing opposition.
28 Eventually, Ridenour may get a commuter rail stop on a proposed line and completion of office buildings as planned, better connecting it to the region. New Manchester, designed by Peter Calthorpe, connects its open space to a state park, expanding the benefits of both. These are key efforts to link these two projects to larger regional systems while also accomplishing Smart Growth goals within their boundaries. However, they remain relatively isolated islands of compact planning and preserved open space in the midst of conventionally zoned landscapes. To return to Kiefer's question about distinguishing sprawl and Smart Growth at a regional scale: are these the nodes of a pattern of healthy poly-nucleated growth or just aberrant reconfigured clusters of as-of-right development with minimal impact on the overall pattern? The difficulty of assessing whether a greenfield project is smart "enough" is fundamentally a question of whether it only serves its immediate inhabitants or serves the larger region. In other words, without a more developed regional plan to show how a single development, no matter how noble its intentions, significantly connects its roads, buildings, and open space to larger transportation, economic, and environmental systems, can we really determine how smart or sprawling such growth is? These questions, and the example of Atlanta, reveal the messiness of Smart Growth in practice and what a long way we have to go to understand, let alone balance, all of the costs and benefits of sprawl and Smart Growth. The books reviewed by Krieger and Kiefer are a start and reflect the same kind of interdisciplinary conversations that have characterized Smart Growth discussion in Atlanta, but there is considerable need for continued design and research. Design visions of Smart Growth at all its scales and in all its varieties, from the region to the neighborhood to the building and from the urban to the suburban, are essential tools in helping build the popular will to support political action for growth that happens by choice, not chance. Similarly, continued research is needed into the complex interactions between design, density, transportation, public health, environmental sustainability, demographics, behavior, economic feasibility, law, and implementation. Unfortunately, our most reliable research methods have tended to be limited to questions of the narrowest scope. Designers' skills at synthesizing multiple agendas need to be brought into collaboration with research analysis, performance modeling, and policymaking. Ultimately, Smart Growth's greatest impact may not be in its immediate consequences for the built environment but rather in breaking down the academic and professional barriers of specialization that have helped to produce our current landscape. •
24 The primary beneficiaries of Smart Growth in Atlanta have not been the self-protective existing suburbanites but the consumers who now have considerably more (and more attractive) choices of where to live and/or work. The changes have been most dramatic intown. They're evident in the rebuilt public housing projects at Centennial Place and Eastlake, the several new high-rise office and condo towers, the numerous "faux lofts" (since most of the old warehouses have already been converted), Technology Square (the mixed-use, urban expansion of Georgia Tech), and the countless new restaurants, cafes, and revitalized neighborhood centers. The new residents reversed the City of Atlanta's population decline, and whether they've been attracted by the urbanity of the new projects or the shortness of their commutes, their numbers are continuing to grow steadily.
25 Despite the economic downturn, urban development, in Midtown especially, has done well, if not thrived, and has revealed an eager market of consumers delighted to be offered more urban versions of the American Dream. The near doubling in aggregate property values in five years in Midtown, and less dramatically in other in-town neighborhoods is raising concerns about gentrification (with many poorer residents being forced out to declining first-ring suburbs). But, as Kiefer suggests, it is also further legitimizing the value of welled signed urban redevelopment following Smart Growth principles. There have also been increasing efforts to expand Smart Growth projects into the suburbs. The twin fourteen-story office towers of Phase I of Lindbergh City Center's grayfield retrofit of forty-seven acres along an in-town suburban strip are complete. An existing suburban MARTA rapid rail stop's parking lot is being redeveloped into several urban blocks with continuous ground floor retail and five-story building heights fronting a Main Street and lining the taller commercial and residential towers. Master planned by Cooper Carry Architects in Atlanta, the primary tenant is BellSouth, Atlanta's second largest employer. BellSouth's decision in 1999 to consolidate 13,000 employees from seventy-five offices throughout Atlanta into three complexes at MARTA stops made headlines as an example of both good business (a hightech company choosing urban locations to improve employee retention while also achieving the benefits of consolidation) and transit-oriented Smart Growth.
26 Despite evidence of a suburban market for walkable, compact, mixed use communities, 27 developers have been reluctant and/or unsuccessful at delivering more suburban greenfield New Urbanist mixed-use projects like New Manchester and Ridenour. These projects and efforts to incorporate housing into existing suburban office parks have met substantial community and financing opposition.
28 Eventually, Ridenour may get a commuter rail stop on a proposed line and completion of office buildings as planned, better connecting it to the region. New Manchester, designed by Peter Calthorpe, connects its open space to a state park, expanding the benefits of both. These are key efforts to link these two projects to larger regional systems while also accomplishing Smart Growth goals within their boundaries. However, they remain relatively isolated islands of compact planning and preserved open space in the midst of conventionally zoned landscapes. To return to Kiefer's question about distinguishing sprawl and Smart Growth at a regional scale: are these the nodes of a pattern of healthy poly-nucleated growth or just aberrant reconfigured clusters of as-of-right development with minimal impact on the overall pattern? The difficulty of assessing whether a greenfield project is smart "enough" is fundamentally a question of whether it only serves its immediate inhabitants or serves the larger region. In other words, without a more developed regional plan to show how a single development, no matter how noble its intentions, significantly connects its roads, buildings, and open space to larger transportation, economic, and environmental systems, can we really determine how smart or sprawling such growth is? These questions, and the example of Atlanta, reveal the messiness of Smart Growth in practice and what a long way we have to go to understand, let alone balance, all of the costs and benefits of sprawl and Smart Growth. The books reviewed by Krieger and Kiefer are a start and reflect the same kind of interdisciplinary conversations that have characterized Smart Growth discussion in Atlanta, but there is considerable need for continued design and research. Design visions of Smart Growth at all its scales and in all its varieties, from the region to the neighborhood to the building and from the urban to the suburban, are essential tools in helping build the popular will to support political action for growth that happens by choice, not chance. Similarly, continued research is needed into the complex interactions between design, density, transportation, public health, environmental sustainability, demographics, behavior, economic feasibility, law, and implementation. Unfortunately, our most reliable research methods have tended to be limited to questions of the narrowest scope. Designers' skills at synthesizing multiple agendas need to be brought into collaboration with research analysis, performance modeling, and policymaking. Ultimately, Smart Growth's greatest impact may not be in its immediate consequences for the built environment but rather in breaking down the academic and professional barriers of specialization that have helped to produce our current landscape. •
NOTES 1. Georgia
Tech Professor Steve French's urban design students studied alternative
scenarios and found that even if the next million households in Atlanta locate
only at existing activity centers, along existing corridors, or within an Urban
Growth Boundary, and try to maximize ecological sustainability, several
performance criteria would marginally improve, but the overall (sprawl) pattern
established by the existing four million households would not significantly
change. Alternative Land Use Futures, Metropolitan Atlanta 2025, Report from
"Regional Land Use Studio," City and Regional Planning Program,
College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, Fall 2002.
2. The debate may be becoming a battle. In the April/May
2003 issue of the New Urban News, Philip Langdon in "The Right Attacks
Smart Growth and New Urbanism" reports that a conference O'Toole convened
in February 2003 on "Preserving the American Dream of Mobility and Homeownership"
was principally devoted to laying the groundwork for a campaign aimed at
stopping Smart Growth. He quotes David Strom of the Taxpayers League of
Minnesota: "We often make the mistake of assuming this is a battle over
who has the better facts." Langdon
goes on to write, "Quite the contrary, he explained, policies aimed at
shaping development are more likely to be defeated if voters get the impression
that the typical smart growth leader is 'a pointy-headed intellectual fascist'
trying to ruin people's lives."
Adding further confusion to the debate, Duany spoke at the conference and emphasized
the common interest between New Urbanism and the libertarians in free markets
while de-emphasizing the common interest between New Urbanism and Smart Growth
in linked urban and environmental regulation.
3. For a response to O'Toole's (and others) critiques of
Portland's problems with affordable housing see Arthur C. Nelson, Rolf Pendall,
Casey J . Dawkins, and Gerrit J . Knapp, "The Link Between Growth
Management and Housing Affordability: The Academic Evidence," Discussion
Paper, Brookings Institution Center on Urban and Metropolitan Policy, February
2002. In addition to presenting considerable evidence that market demand, not
land constraints, have been the primary determinant of housing prices in
Portland and elsewhere, the authors point out that lower-middle and lower income
families are more often priced out of areas that lack any growth management
measures.
4. This strategy of shifting environmentalist opposition
to growth to support for targeted growth linked to targeted conservation
paralleled EPAs Smart Growth efforts at the time and coordinated with H U D and DOT. The breadth of interdisciplinary
collaboration achieved in T he Georgia
Conservancy's Smart Growth-oriented symposia, called Blueprints for Successful
Communities, is reflected in the partners added since 1995: the AIA, ASLA, Atlanta
Neighborhood Development Partnership, Georgia Trust for Historic Preservation,
Georgia Planning Association, Institute of Transportation Engineers, the Consulting
Engineers Council, and the National Association of Industrial and Office Properties.
According to The conservancy's website, (www.gaconservancy.org) over 4,000
people have attended the symposia, on topics from transportation alternatives
to statewide planning for water.
5. The State environmental protection division rejected
aspects of the plan, and a group of environmentalists successfully sued EPAs
acceptance of "grandfathered" projects.
6. The Metro
Atlanta Chamber of Commerce forwarded its Metropolitan Atlanta Transportation
Initiative to then Governor-elect Roy Barnes in 1998 . Its recommendations were
incorporated into the Governor's 1999 legislation creating GRTA.
7. In addition to its problems with air quality, Atlanta's
growth has contributed to problems with water quality and quantity. The Atlanta
region relies on surface water for 9 8%
of its needs, 80% of which comes from the Chattahoochee River, one of the
smallest rivers to supply a major metropolitan area in the U.S. Atlanta is
predicted to be the first East Coast city to engage in West Coast-style water wars.
See the North Georgia Water Management website, <www.northgeorgiawater.
com> and Douglas Jehl, "Atlanta's Growing Thirst Creates Water War,"
The New York Times, May 27, 2002.
8. In addition to the single-issue, regionally focused
initiatives described above, several Atlanta-based interdisciplinary groups
have formed to address the interconnectedness of growth-related issues:
Sustainable Atlanta Roundtable, The
Smart Growth Partnership, T he Georgia
Quality Growth partnership, and the already mentioned Blueprints for Successful
Communities.
9. In Atlanta, "in-town" refers to the several
municipalities and neighborhoods within the 35 mile circumference Perimeter
Highway, route 285. Approximately half of this area is occupied by the city of
Atlanta and its three most developed neighborhoods: Downtown, Midtown, and
Buckhead. Much of in-town's character is suburban, but it is generally
perceived to be more urban than the suburbs beyond the Perimeter in the now
twenty-nine county area that constitutes metro Atlanta.
10. Recognizing the potential role of livable, mixed use
development associated with transit to improving regional transportation (and
air quality), the A R C, in its 1999 2 5-Year Regional Transportation Plan,
approved $1 million per year for five years for the LCI grants program and $350 million for implementation. The grants provide funding to local communities
for redevelopment plans that are mixed-use, enhance street scaping and
sidewalks, emphasize the pedestrian, improve access to transit and other
transportation options, and expand housing opportunities. Twenty-five
communities will receive a total of $27 million in federal transportation funds
for implementation this year. Communities must match 2 0% of the funds. See <www.adantaregional.org/qualitygrowth/lci>
and Janet Frankston, "ARC ready to bestow grants," The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, May 19, 2003, El.
11 . This significantly surpasses the goal of 4,000 new
residential units by the year 2017 set
by Midtown Alliance, a powerful neighborhood civic group, during its Blueprint
Midtown planning process in 1997 .
Midtown Journal, Spring 2003.
12. Journalist David Goldberg's development of and writing
for the Horizon section has achieved state-wide and national recognition. In
1999 when the Georgia State Legislature created GRTA it also passed a
resolution commending his leadership and the Radio-Television News Directors
Association and Foundation invited him to write Covering Uivan Sprawl:
Rethinking the American Dream, An RTNDF Journalist's Resource Guide, available
at www.rtnda.org.
13 . In 2002, Atlanta surpassed Chicago as home to the
third-largest collection of Fortune 500 companies. Russell Grantham,
"Atlanta Now No. 3 as Headquarters City," The Atlanta
Journal-Constitution, April 2, 2002, C
I. Lawrence D. Frank, Kevin Green, David Goldberg, Gregg Logan, and Todd Noel
report that between 1990 and 2000 the Atlanta region added 671,700 net new jobs, leading the nation in
job creation, and led all U.S. housing markets with a total of 457,557 new housing units. "Trends,
Implications & Strategies for Balanced Growth in the Atlanta Region," T he SMART RAQ research program at the Georgia Institute of Technology, 2002.
Census data reveals that those homes are larger than the national average:
"The average Georgia "housing unit" grew from 5.52 rooms in 1990
to 6.24 rooms in 2000 —a 13% jump.
Metro Atlanta averages 6.27 rooms, significantly higher than the
national average of 5.3 rooms." Marlon Manuel, "Built with rooms to
grow: Metro area homes bigger," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, September 21,
2002 , .
14. A phrase from Tom Wolfe's fictional but insightful
description of the residential landscape in Buckhead, one of Adanta's more
upscale neighborhoods. A Man in Full (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
1998).
15 . T he Texas
Transportation Institute, Urban Mobility Study: 2000 (College Station, Texas: November,
2000)
16. "Over the 15 years from 1982 through 1996, the period
covered by the report, Atlanta built more new lanes on its freeways and
arterial roads than all but the nation's three largest metro areas. Atlanta was
one of the few places whose highway system grew at a faster rate than its
population: 6 9% vs. 5 3 %. The region
now has more miles of freeway lanes per 1,000 residents than any place but
Dallas,Texas." From David Goldberg, "Study Certifies It: Adanta
Traffic Stinks," The Atlanta Journal and The Atlanta Constitution, November
18, 1998, A l , referring to the Texas
Transportation Institute's annual report on urban mobility.
17. Kelly Simmons, "Adanta Tailgating L.A. on Gridlock,"
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution,
May
8, 2001 , A l , referring to the
Texas Transportation Institute's annual report on urban mobility.
18. The average
American household spent 1 8% of its
income on transportation in 1998, but the figure rose 8% between 1990 and 1998
and is likely to have continued to rise at this rate. Charles Longer, Tom
Lalley, and Barbara McCann, "Driven to Spend: T he Impact of Sprawl on Household Transportation
Expenses," Surface Transportation Policy Project Report, November 2000,
<www.transact.org>.
19. National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, 1999,
as quoted in Dr. Richard Jackson, "Rebuilding the Unity of Health and the
Environment," in Health and the Environment in the Southeastern United
States, H. Frumkin, R. Jackson, and C. Coussens, eds. (Washington, DC: National
Academies Press, 2002).
20. Richard J .
Jackson, M D , M P H, and Chris Kochtitzky, MSP,
"Creating a Healthy Environment: T
he Impact of the Built Environment on Public Health," Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse
Monograph Series, November 2001 .
2 1 . Elizabeth Lee, "37% of Children in Georgia Tip
the Scales Too Far," Atlanta Journal Constitution,May 16, 2003, A l .
22. It is not a coincidence that one of the leading researchers
in this field lives in Atlanta. Dr. Richard Jackson, the Director of the
National Center for Environmental Health at the Centers for Disease Control and
Prevention, had an epiphany regarding the unrecognized but substantial impact
of the physical design of the environment on mortality while stuck in traffic
on Buford Highway, a suburban arterial in the region with a burgeoning
immigrant population, no sidewalks, and one of the highest pedestrian kill
rates in the country. He saw a pedestrian struggling in the heat and realized
that if she died, the cause of death would simply read heat stroke, not poor
urban design—no crosswalks, sidewalks, or shade trees—or unreliable bus
service.
23. It's easy to take pot shots at suburban environmentalists
driving SUVs with Sierra Club bumper stickers and concoct conspiracy theories.
But it is important to distinguish the no-growthers from the Smart Growthers.
In Atlanta, the Georgia Conservancy is an important advocate for regional planning,
transit-oriented development, suburban redevelopment, and other Smart Growth
strategies that the organization believes will help improve air and water
quality in the region.
24. Janet Frankston, "Hall votes to increase minimum
lot sizes," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, M a y 9, 2003, C3 .
25. U.S. Bureau of Census's latest statistics are for 2000
to 2001 and show Atlanta receiving an average of 502 new residents every day,
the fifth highest in the country. Of those, eighty-three a day chose to live in
the City of Atlanta. Julie B. Hairston, Maurice Tamman, "502 move in
Daily," The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, May 21, 2003, This is a rapid increase. From April 1998 to
April 1999, the City only grew by 900 residents, or an average of less than three
per day. David Firestone, "Suburban Comforts Thwart Atlanta's Plans to
Limit Sprawl," The New York Times, November 21,1999.
26. See Matt Grove, "BellSouth Plan Tackles Transportation
Troubles," Atlanta Business Chronicle, March 6, 2000, and David Goldberg,
BellSouth's Atlanta Metro Plan: A Case Study in Employer-Driven Smart Growth,
Sprawl Watch Clearinghouse Report, <www.sprawlwatch.org>.
27. Based on soon-to-be-published data collected for a
Persona] Preference and Behavior Survey of 800 Atlanta households, by Dr.
Lawrence Frank's SMART RAQ research project at the Georgia Institute of
Technology.
28. The cost of structured parking, even when shared
between commercial and residential, tends to raise rents beyond competitive rates
in the suburbs, where land is cheap and surface parking is the norm. This
contributes both to the decentralization of Atlanta's office market and the difficulties
of building more compact developments in the suburbs. Only 11.3% of Atlanta's
metro employment is within three miles of the Central Business District,
while 61.9% is outside a 10-mile ring.
Edward L. Glaeser, Matthew Kuhn, and Chenghuan Chu, "Job Sprawl: Employment
Location in U.D. Metropolitan Areas," The Brookings Institution, Survey
Series, May 2001.
Source: Smart
Growth in Atlanta, Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2003 Winter 2004, A Response to Krieger and Kiefer, by Ellen Dunham-Jones
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