Peach Cobbler
Oct 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Elaine Misonzhnik
Mention Atlanta and images of uncontrolled urban sprawl and descriptions of hellish commutes inevitably arise. For years the city, the ninth largest in the United States, served as the poster child for unchecked growth. In fact, the metro area is so spread out today that at 8,400 square miles it rivals the entire state of Massachusetts.
But Atlanta's civic and business leaders have made a sharp turn in recent years to prevent further sprawl and instead refocus attention on in-fill projects. As the city continues to add residents — in the past seven-plus years, the population of the inner city alone has grown another 11.5 percent to 464,200, according to the Atlanta Regional Commission — public and private forces have teamed up to turn the Big Peach into a mixed-use mecca as a host of live/work/play projects crop up in and around Atlanta.
The current growth initiative began in the early 2000s with Atlantic Station, a joint venture redevelopment effort between AIG Global Real Estate Investment Corp. and Atlanta-based Jacoby Development, Inc. The $2 billion project, touted as one of the largest brownfield redevelopments in the country at 138 acres, turned the 100-year-old Atlantic Steel Mill near downtown Atlanta into a model mixed-use community, complete with 6 million square feet of Class-A office space, 2 million square feet of retail and entertainment venues, 5,000 residences, 1,000 hotel rooms and 11 acres of public parks.
The verdict on the Atlantic Station is still out — the property attracts healthy, but hardly spectacular, foot traffic, according to Brian Lefkoff, senior vice president with Atlanta-based brokerage firm Colliers Spectrum Cauble. But the developers set the tone. All around Atlanta, construction crews are working on mixed-use developments, with the city itself planning to integrate high-priced condominiums and office space along the main thoroughfare of Peachtree Street into an urban retail environment on par with Madison Avenue in New York and the Magnificent Mile in Chicago.
Last year, for example, Atlanta-based developer Sembler Co. completed the 452,000-square-foot Perimeter Place, which in addition to its retail component, features 550 residential units. In the fall of 2008, the firm plans to complete the redevelopment of the Prado, a 345,000-square-foot shopping center, into a mixed-use property, combining retail, restaurant and office space. And in the spring of 2009, Sembler will deliver Brookhaven Village, a project located on Peachtree Road, which will contain 600,000 square feet of big-box retail and restaurants and 1,500 residential units.
Meanwhile, another local developer, Ben Carter Properties, recently started construction on the Streets of Buckhead, in Atlanta's affluent Buckhead District. The project, which will contain a total of 800,000 square feet of commercial space, will feature 500,000 square feet of luxury retail, 300,000 square feet of Class-A office space and 1,000 residences when it opens in the fall of 2009.
Lured by the area's high income levels and traffic counts — Ben Carter estimates that 50,000 people pass through Peachtree Road every day — such upscale names as Hermès, Etro and Bottega Veneta are already committed to the project.
“We are seeing a lot of mixed-use here,” says Jackie Wammock, senior vice president with Atlanta-based development firm Ronus Properties. Wammock believes that Atlanta's high land prices play a role in developers' decisions to invest in vertical, mixed-use projects rather than traditional shopping centers and malls. In some areas of Atlanta, land zoned for retail development currently sells for $1,000 per square foot, according to a report from NAI Brannen Goddard, an Atlanta-based real estate brokerage firm.
Creating a masterpiece
The true test of Atlanta's ability to turn itself from a fuel-addled sprawl capital into a pedestrian-oriented city will be the public/private project unfolding in the midst of the city's famous Peachtree Street. Earlier this spring, the Peachtree Corridor Task Force, chaired by Cousins Properties' chairman and CEO Tom Bell, unveiled the final plans for the creation of the Midtown Mile, a 14-block-long stretch of Peachtree Street the task force would like to turn into a cosmopolitan shopping district.
The task force estimates that the area currently contains more than 36 percent of Atlanta's retail space and 24 percent of its office space, housing 220,000 workers, or 50 percent, of Atlanta's jobs. Meanwhile, the number of residents in the neighborhood doubled to 30,000 since 2000 and will grow another 73 percent by 2016, to 52,000 people. By spearheading the creation of accessible, street-level retail on the ground floors of office and residential buildings, the task force hopes to create a pedestrian enclave within the city's central district, while simultaneously connecting the neighborhoods of Buckhead, Midtown, Downtown and Ft. McPherson.
