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Have you been to Buckhead recently? You might have missed a recent trend. It’s reverting forward. Buckhead is becoming both more urban and more residential simultaneously. It will be fascinating to see what this brings over the next 5-10 years.

If you are a long time Atlanta resident, you likely remember Buckhead’s conversion from Atlanta’s upscale residential neighborhood into it’s go-go party district. This change climaxed with the Olympics and the Superbowl. A number of circumstances lead to rapid change away from Buckhead as party village concept and back toward a residential neighborhood. Now, however, this is a community of high rise urban living, and not of single family houses.

While Buckhead remains a vibrant restaurant and bar district, a majority of construction is residential. Tens of thousands (literally) of condominiums and luxury high rise apartments are being added every year; this trend promises to continue until at least 2008. The result is that of the 50,000 people expected to move into the city each year, 30,000 per year could easily move into Buckhead.

According to an ARC report, there is no longer one Buckhead. Really, there are now at least two. One is the traditional Buckhead Village area anchored by the 5 points intersection of Peachtree, Roswell, and E/W Paces Ferry. The other is the area around Lenox Mall and the GA - 400 interchange.

How will the community handle these new folks? I’m far more optimistic about the village than Lenox. The village already has provisions to work with a pedestrian model. Yes, people may need to drive in and out if they don’t work near their residence, but they can enjoy their non business lives on foot. There are several dry cleaners, food shops, drug stores, news stands, and book stores in the area.

The area around Georgia 400 is much scarier. To live your life, you still need a car: it’s all traffic, all the time. The Buckhead Uptown Connector will help ease business day congestion and provide MARTA connections, but it doesn’t connect to the Buckhead village or run on the weekends. Further, residents are trapped between an office park, shopping mall, and an enormous expressway. Residents will either have to demand intense changes and ensure years of additional construction or the market will collapse. Either prospect is not pleasing.

Those in the village may well enjoy a great quality of life while creating in Atlanta a true urban, elegant, and friendly neighborhood. Old time residents will appreciate it and visitors will too!

One could make the argument that Atlanta is the biggest small town in America. Why? Because Peachtree is our one main street. It runs north-south from south of downtown passed Oglethorpe University. Most important buildings in the city are on this street. Moreover, the city’s other major streets are also North South. Northside Drive, West Peachtree, Spring, Piedmont, and Moreland, all run North South.

Contrast this to Chicago or Chattanooga which have a grid. Not just one North South Street, but a series of North-South & East-West streets that form districts and make them easy for walking people to navigate!

East-West viability is going to be vital to Atlanta if it is going to continue growing in ways that don’t lead to more traffic. Don’t believe me? Look where the housing market is booming… and where it isn’t.

Buckhead Central is developing Housing at every opportunity. People are moving into the central business district of Buckhead as fast of possible precisely because they can walk places. There is enough concentrated into one space that nothing is too far away. To have the concentration, you need two axis, not one.

Look also at East Point. Even with some serious political divisions, the village’s natural layout leads toward success. Yes, it has a main street, but they also have looked east-west and have developed a vibrant community with great loft space that is attracting the best of the creative class.

Contrast with Virginia Highlands, whose housing market has weakened from it’s most intense frenzy. Why? Because walking from one end of the highlands to the other would take well over an hour. Lots of folks visit the district. Fewer want to live there now.

Districts with the grid are going to do well. It’s easy to move about and everything is close. Districts that keep to the one long string theory might well have a harder time.

Having recently written a Rampway article on the latest developments on the Belt Line and Carl Patton’s new involvement with it I spoke highly of Dr. Patton’s vision.

Another demonstration of this vision can also be illustrated by two articles written for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution:

Downtown’s streets are suddenly paved with students. Students who are not spending their gold.

Some 3,000 attend class each day at a new Georgia State University building in a prominent block off Peachtree Street. They have yet — despite expectations — to make a dent in the struggling retail community surrounding the structure.

Boosters of the once controversial building predicted the volume of students coursing through Atlanta’s central business district would spur a resurgence in area restaurants and retail shops. That hasn’t happened in the month the Helen M. Aderhold Learning Center has been open.

– David Pendered for the AJC, October 7, 2002

Today, Pendered ate his words:

Downtown has proved in the past year that it can rebound. A bustling restaurant row has emerged on once-blighted Broad Street, a block west of Peachtree. The catalyst was a classroom building that Georgia State University opened in the historic Fairlie-Poplar District.

– David Pendered for the AJC, May 31, 2004

The city of Atlanta is on the verge of possible transportation progress. Recently, Mayor Franklin and Cathy Woolard held a news conference to update interested folks in the beltline.

Were the full promise of this project realized, I think it could create a second kind of donut around the city.

Right now, I-285 serves as a donut effectively demarkating the city from the burbs. To get outside 285 without a car is really tough. Your options are limited. What the beltline and similar projects may do is create a revitalized city where people who want to live outside their cars move and a group of suburbs where the cul-de-sac mentality pervades.

Some facts:

• If fully realized the beltline will have about 22 miles of track

• The city, as of yet, owns none of the track
• The Atlanta Regional Commission has put the project in its plans to achieve by 2030 and funded $150M worth of developement and research
• Congressman John Lewis (Dem. Ga. 5) and GSU President Carl Patton are on board.
• As planned, the project would also include green space and connections to bike paths.

What was astonishing in the press conference is the number of agencies whose fingers would be in the pie, and the amount of coordination it would take to get something done when the entire project sits in one municipality. In the Press Conference over a dozen agencies were mentioned.

It’s also amazing that the benefit here is not obvious universally. In any situation, it’s key to find the baptists and the bootleggers. The baptists are Mike Kenn, the pavement lobby, and folks in rural Georgia. Right now, it’s tough to tell who the bootleggers are.