Residential Towers and the Mark of the Devil
Residential towers are not such a terrible thing, especially when placed appropriately — near existing transit stations. If the market for retail space isn’t saturated, put in some retail space on the ground floor, and you have a mixed-use site with great amenities. In Atlanta, this gives us the embryonic stages of a great street life.
In Manhattan, meanwhile, a great street life is not everywhere. For years, the business district has had a reputation for shutting down completely during non-business hours. I took this photo of a New York City block in the middle of a business day:
Someday, this may change, as new residential towers are rising in south Manhattan.
Atlanta developers, take note: Not all your condo towers have to be all glass-and-steel structures! No matter how tall the building, you can incorporate brick, such as in these examples:
A walk through Manhattan’s business district today reveals new high-density residential towers rising, and new retail spaces to support them.
What will the downtown and midtown sections of Peachtree Street look like 20 years from now, with all that transit running through it? What will the Beltline look like, if transit runs through it?
These areas will not by any means look anything like the two photos above. Atlanta is not an island like Manhattan. Atlanta has no growth boundary — natural or lawful. Rather, Atlanta’s growth boundary is defined by human patience and tolerance for the traffic that accompanies long-distance commutes.
In any case, through great upheval, New York long ago learned the lessons that overcrowding wrought on America’s cradle of capitalism. Is Atlanta now learning the lessons of undercrowding? Are Sunbelt cities like Atlanta perhaps an overreaction based on the myths of higher density development?
Today, the Atlanta Regional Commission is on a planning rampage, trying to facilitate a vision for what the region will look like in the year 2030. Individual counties and cities are also making their own plans. For everyone these days, it seems 2030 is the year of Armageddon. That is when the world will end, so there is currently no need to make any plans where the horizon stretches beyond that mark. There is even a name for this planning process: Envision 6! (Does the 6 mean a population of 6 million, or is it really Satan?)
It’s a bit of a shame, really. Today, Atlanta is at a crossroads where we have several new opportunities to think about transit and a new vision for the region. Is 25 years the most optimal horizon to use in a cost-benefit analysis? What horizon did New York have in mind when they leveled out the entire island of Manhattan and laid out a tight grid of streets north of the spaghetti bowl that is lower Manhattan?
Even in the most technical analysis possible, there remains at least a shred of subjective thinking: what value do we place on the various forms and shapes of infrastructure we could build over this time? That is, are we willing to pay for busses that would attract fewer riders than trains? Or, are we willing to pay the slightly higher price tag for trains that happen to attract more riders? Should we focus first on expanding the existing system to more far-flung places? Or, should we focus first on strengthening the existing system in the city’s core?
In New York, the subway and commuter rail system was built as a solution to overcrowding. As the system spread out, dense development spread out with the system, though the density was much lower than the old tenement days. So long as local city councils and county commissions are not hostile to denser development, a rail system can also become Atlanta’s solution to undercrowding.