AUDASE

September 6, 2006
The Greening of Downtown Atlanta
By SHAILA DEWAN
ATLANTA, Sept. 5 — Snaking through this city named after a railroad is a ring of mostly unused track, a kind of citywide gutter that for decades has divided neighborhoods and attracted only kudzu and trash. But lately parcels of land on either side of this forgotten alley have skyrocketed in value.
That is because the city and a host of nonprofit groups have begun what urban planners say is a singularly ambitious municipal undertaking, transforming the railroad right-of-way into a 22-mile loop for hikers and bikers; a mass transit route; and a green corridor that strings together many of the city’s parks and serves as a framework for new ones.
In a city choked by its dependence on cars, the Beltline, as it is called, will provide a sanctuary, weaving its way over and under city streets, between decrepit loading docks and behind leafy backyards. It will link with the city’s existing transit lines, but unlike many projects in the Atlanta area it is not aimed primarily at commuters or suburbanites. Within a two- to four-mile radius from downtown, the corridor links the city’s old, historic neighborhoods, skirting attractions like the Carter Center and the Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Site.
“This will change the character of life in Atlanta 25 years from now,” said Alexander Garvin, the urban planner who was a crucial figure in the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and New York’s bid for the Olympics, and who did a study of potential park enhancements along the Beltline. Already the city has spent $40 million to acquire one of the parcels of land he identified: a stunning 137-acre quarry that will be, when additional land is added, the city’s largest park.
The $2.8 billion Beltline began life humbly, as a thesis project for Ryan Gravel, a graduate student in architecture and urban planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology. That was seven years ago.
But it has taken on a life of its own, exhibiting a rare power to capture the imagination of diverse interest groups, from cyclists to powerful developers, and to flatten opposition. It overcomes the traditional competition between trails and transit, for example, by combining the two.
“It’s very important that cities and communities go for a big vision,” Peter Calthorpe, an urban planner based in San Francisco, said in a telephone interview. “Cities need these bold moves and elements to make them exciting places to live. It’s exactly the kind of thing that will differentiate a city from the suburbs. Suburbs are the sum of a lot of little ideas.”
In 2001 Mr. Gravel, sensing a window of opportunity, began circulating the Beltline proposal. At the time city leaders were beginning to talk about how to expand the focus of transportation planning from the time-honored problem of moving commuters to include projects that would serve in-town Atlanta residents. Huge development projects like Atlantic Station, a dense new neighborhood on the site of a former steel mill near downtown, were on the horizon. New construction — condos, rentals, “loftominiums” — was untrammeled.
A City Councilwoman, Cathy Woolard, who became the council’s president in 2002, seized on the Beltline idea, which has also been pitched as an economic development engine that will create 30,000 jobs and 28,000 housing units, along with restaurants, shops and cultural sites. But perhaps more to the point, the Beltline provides a tool to organize and control development around a public amenity.
“The neighborhoods just loved it instantly,” said Mr. Gravel, now the senior project manager for the Beltline team at the city’s Bureau of Planning. “It’s a pretty exciting city to be in when you can live in a house with a yard a couple of blocks from a much larger building with shopping and access to transit.”
Yet the many feasibility studies that have been done read like a litany of impossibilities. The loop, consisting of four different rail lines, does not link up smoothly. Different sections of the right-of-way are owned by different entities. Federal money for transit projects is scarce. Some parts of the track are still in use; at one point, near the historic Oakland Cemetery, there is a major transfer yard where containers are moved from trains to trucks.
Last October Mayor Shirley Franklin urged community leaders to take a “leap of faith.” She has a history of such exhortations: more recently, she persuaded businesses and wealthy donors to spend $32 million to save the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s papers from auction and keep them in the city.
“Here’s our dilemma,” she said in October, according to a news report at the time. “Despite the sense of unreadiness, the opportunity to create the Beltline will slip away if we don’t act now.”
She was right: the timing of the Beltline is so perfect as to be almost late. Atlanta the city, as opposed to Atlanta the metropolitan blob, is growing in population for the first time in decades, and growing fast. In the next decade it is expected to increase to nearly 650,000 residents from just under 500,000. More Atlantans now live in multifamily buildings than in single-family homes.
That shift increases the importance of public space. And Atlanta lags far behind other major cities in land devoted to parks; it has 3.8 percent, compared with 18.9 percent in New York, 10 percent in Los Angeles and 8 percent in Chicago.
In some ways the Beltline has been its own enemy. The proposal has increased property values along the route, making parkland acquisition more expensive. The Trust for Public Land, which tries to help slow-moving governments in just these circumstances, is itself scrambling to buy the lots identified in Mr. Garvin’s report. It has spent $22 million so far on land it intends eventually to sell to the city.
A developer, Wayne Mason, has already bought the northeast quadrant of the Beltline, saying he intends to donate the right-of-way to the city. But the two sides have argued over issues like just how wide that right-of way needs to be. Another developer, Charles Brewer, who has expressed opposition to the transit component of the Beltline, has left only a two-lane street where the Beltline was projected to run; the Trust for Public Land bought the property behind his to accommodate a detour.
The city grasps the need to act quickly. Last year Ms. Franklin and the Beltline’s advocates won the fight to approve a special tax district that will funnel money into the project. The first tangible results, to be completed in the next five years, will be two sections of trail; the transit component will be the costliest and take the longest.
“Never in my professional life,” Mr. Garvin said, “did I come up with a set of proposals and find that a year later they’d been adopted by the local government and that 18 months later they were buying property.”

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company