My Athens

My "Athens Rising" Archive

For a few months last year, I helped write the Athens Rising column--an opinion  column about local  development, planning and architecture issues--for Flagpole Magazine, the weekly alternative newspaper here in Athens, Ga.

The column's main writer--Kevan Williams--had asked me to write the column every other week while he traveled out West to places like Portland, Ore. And that's what I did--having fun, mostly--from August through December 2010.

Kevan's back in town now, and I'm off traveling abroad and happy--for now at least--to be free of deadlines.

Here are the columns I wrote:

• August, 25, 2010:  Future of Downtown Athens

• September, 8, 2010: A Look at a Complex Zoning Decision

• September 22, 2010: Exploring an Overlooked Neighborhood

• October 6, 2010: Adding Affordable Housing, Avoiding Gentrification

• October 20, 2010: Tapping Students for Downtown Density

• November 3, 2010: Grocery Store Dreams, Part 1

• November 17, 2010: Grocery Store Dreams, Part 2

• December 1, 2010: Dilapidated Buildings, Factories and Cities

 

Wet Leaves on Boulevard Sidewalks

Photos by Dan Lorentz

The Bread Basket on Boulevard

A sketch—not particularly accurate—of the Bread Basket store/Chevron gas station combination at 723 Boulevard in Athens, Ga.  Image by Dan Lorentz

Pole, Insulators, Power Lines, Guy Wires, Sky

This is a photoshopped image of a utility pole at the intersection of Satula Ave. and Nantahala Ext. in Boulevard, which is adjacent to a Georgia Power Co. substation. Image by Dan Lorentz

The House at 420 Boulevard

I walk past this house, on the corner of Boulevard and Beulah here in Athens, Ga., nearly every day. It stimulates my imagination every time I see it though I can't exactly say why. It's a pretty house, sure, but there are lots of those. Is it the expanse of the lawn? Its open sunniness contrasting to the rest of the tree-shadowed street? The combination of white paint, blue skies and dark windows? [Photoshopped image by Flickr user Dan Lorentz ]

Boulevard Dreams, Version 1.0

This map depicts changes I’d like to see in Boulevard, the Athens, Ga. neighborhood I live in. (Click here to view larger version of the map on screen. Or click on the map to download a copy.)

The changes I propose—which are tagged with numbers in the map above and described in this post below—aim at making Boulevard an even more walkable neighborhood than it is now. (Because I haven't figured out how to embed links to text in the map, the best way to read this post is to either: (1) download and print the map above and then refer to the numbered descriptions below; or (2) print this post and then click on the map above to enlarge it and consult the printed post for the descriptions.)

Increasing density

Mainly, I propose making Boulevard more walkable by increasing residential and commercial densities. More people living in new infill homes and new apartments will support more grocery stores, restaurants, coffee shops, convenience stores and pharmacies. In turn, these new commercial destinations—combined with a few other amenities like a dog park, new pedestrian paths, better bus service—will make the neighborhood even more attractive to people looking for a walkable place to live. As Christopher Leinberger puts it in his book The Option of Urbanism: Investing in a New American Dream: "In walkable urban places, more is better. Adding more density and uses makes life better and real estate values climb higher. It is an upward spiral of value creation."

Over time, if my proposals—or better ones with the same aim—are implemented, Boulevard will become the kind of neighborhood where you don’t need to get into a car more than once every other week. Anyway, that’s my dream for Boulevard.

Boulevard is good as is, but…

Don’t get me wrong: I really like my neighborhood as it is right now. It’s close to downtown and campus. It’s practically bursting with trees and flowers. It’s infested with good neighbors and their dogs, sprinkled with wonderful old and new houses and favored by some really good spots to eat. But even so, there’s room—plenty of room, really—for improvement and especially for more neighbors.

These are the pipe dreams of a newcomer

I’d like to think many of the changes I propose would be fairly easy and uncontroversial to implement. But I acknowledge some of these proposed changes—while technically feasible—might not be politically feasible for now. 

Please note everything I propose here is based on my informal impressions—and not on detailed site surveys analyzed in the context of current zoning regulations.  Also, I’m pretty sure my own thoughts about how to make Boulevard more walkable will change as I learn more about the neighborhood, topography, politics, etc. This is merely the first version of this dream.

Please comment

I’d like to know what people think of my suggestions. And I want to hear about your dreams—wild or practical—for Boulevard. Let me know. I'd like to do a future post that compiles these ideas.

KEY TO NUMBERED ITEMS ON MAP

1.  My house. This is where my house is located, at 325 Lyndon Ave. The yellow circle on the map represents a half-mile radius from my house. A half-mile is considered by many urban planners and observers to be a relatively easy, convenient distance to walk.

2.  Infill housing and “granny” flats.  Here the parcel is divided in two, and two appropriately scaled single-family homes are built. I’d bet there are at least 25 parcels—if you subdivide some of the larger parcels—throughout the Boulevard neighborhood that could support new single-family homes. In my dream, all these parcels would be built on. And I’d also like to allow some of the larger lots the opportunity to build small single-family homes behind existing homes, and to sprinkle in low-income units.

3.  Apartments. This new two-story 12-unit apartment building follows the scale of the adjacent Calais Apartments.

4. Coffee shop with upstairs apartments.  Built to meet the sidewalk with parking in back—not on the street front—this new coffee shop features free wi-fi and four apartment units upstairs.

5. Cohen/Cain Pedestrian paths. These two paved paths open pedestrian and bike access between Chase St. and Cohen and Cain Sts, enhancing walkability.

6. Dubose Pocket Park. With a park bench, a picnic table, a flower bed border and a modest-sized open patch of lawn, this simple pocket park is well-used by neighborhood kids and adults.

7.  The Black Panther Restaurant with Outdoor Café.  The beautiful long windows of this restaurant housed in a renovated building overlook a shady, paved outdoor seating area on this busy corner.

8. Apartments. After the car repair shop moved to a new neighborhood site (see item 28), a new three-story, 24-unit, street-fronting apartment building was built.

9. The Bread Basket, transformed. There’s still a gas station here, but it’s moved behind the new street-fronting main feature—an expanded Bread Basket food counter and convenience shop. The same down-home fare is served along with new menu items.

10. Dubose St. (re?)extension. Looks to me like Dubose St. connected to Nacoochee Av. in the past, and it does so again. Why?  Because doing so provides greater inter-connectivity and opens-up new space for development by busting-up a huge, traffic-clogging block.

11. Mixed-use development #1. On the ground level, this small cluster of street-fronting new two-story buildings is mainly occupied by medical offices, but there are also a few other kinds of offices, and some small retail shops. On top, there are condo units.

12. Mixed-use development #2. Green Thrift Grocery occupies a corner building at the intersection Dubose and Chase Sts. Other buildings house a mix of offices, retail and apartments. All structures are two-story and street-fronting.

13. Mixed-use development #3. This project includes a three-story street-fronting building devoted mainly to medical offices and apartments.

14. Mixed-use development #4. Three new two-story, street-fronting buildings with office and retail space on the ground level and apartments above.

15. Mixed-use development #5. This cluster of new two-story, street-fronting buildings features a mix of commercial, retail and medical office space with apartments on the second-story.

16. Bus shelter, better bus service. A large bus shelter offers plenty of seating and guaranteed access (or you get a free ride) to a bus every seven minutes every day from 6 a.m. to midnight.

17. Mixed-use development #6. A couple new three-story, street-fronting buildings provide retail space on the ground floor, and two stories of apartments above.

18.  Single-family homes and condominiums.  Two sets of two single-family homes are built are Dubose St.—one set on each side of the new Virginia Av. extension (see item 19). Behind the single-family lots, are three three-story condo buildings.

19. Virginia Av. extension. Pushing Virginia Av. through to Prince Av. opens-up new commercial and residential space and enhances connectivity and walkability.

20. Dubose St. pedestrian/bike path. The car part of Dubose ends when it hits the new Virginia Av. extension but continues as a paved pedestrian/bike path and eventually hooks up with Pope St. and Barber St.

21.  Mixed-use development #7.  This important gateway corner (like its sister corner, see item 22) is now anchored by a well-designed—actually, quite dashing—street-fronting contemporary building. Restaurants, shops (including thrift shops) and other retail store occupy the ground floor of this three-story structure. There are offices on the second floor and condominiums on the third floor.

22. Mixed-used development #8. Like the mixed-use development across Barber St. from it, this site now features an elegant, street-fronting contemporary building housing a mix of retail, commercial and residential uses.

23.  Apartments. Perched atop this exquisitely re-landscaped site marking the beginning of Boulevard is a 54-unit apartment building with an underground parking lot.

24. Barber St. Park. This park, located where Boulevard begins, starts with street-facing benches and a small picnic area on the part that fronts Barber St., but then devotes itself to a beautiful shade garden and walking trails.

25. Light industrial development #1. A sleek, low-cost structure offers space for a business incubator program as well as for light industry, warehousing, artist/crafting studios and commercial offices.

26. Light industrial development #2.  The same as item 25 above, except bigger.

27. Stream Track Park. This narrow park includes a paved bike path and unpaved hiking trails—both of which follow the streambed. At the trackside part of the park, is a small fenced-in dog run area.

28. Light industrial development #3. A series of compact, low-cost/low-rent and very modern-looking buildings to house light industry, commercial offices and artist studios.

29. Three Players Av. Named in memory of the three Town and Gown players murdered near where this new road begins, Three Players Av. runs parallel to Prince Av. and cuts across four over-sized blocks to slant up to a connection with Hiawassee Av. The new road activates lots of space for useful development and enhances walkability.

30. Mixed-use development #9.  Some of the new two-story buildings in this cluster take advantage of the new street frontage offered by the new Three Players Av. (see item 29). All buildings are street-fronting and contain a mix of retail, commercial, medical office and residential uses.

31. Yonah Av. pedestrian/bike path. This short paved extension of Yonah Av. allows pedestrians and bicyclists to enter the new Hiawassee Urban Nature Center (see item 33) and to connect through to Hiawassee and the new Three Players Av. (see item 29).

32. Mixed-use development #10. This series of two story buildings—some of which are substantially renovated existing structures—offer retail and commercial space on the ground level and office and residential space above.

33.  Hiawassee Urban Ecology Center and Park. The urban nature center takes this place as its model, and is dedicated to preserving the natural features of this stretch of streambed and educating residents, especially the kids at nearby Chase St. Elementary School, about the ecology of the stream. Kevan Williams, the architecture/development columnist at Flagpole Magazine, informs me that the Boulevard neighborhood was originally platted with a park in mind at this location—which explains the origins of bordering “Park” as a street name.

34. Condos. This contemporary-design, two-story, street-fronting condo building features 20 dwelling units.

35.  Off leash dog park/expanded White Tiger patio. A fence surrounds this plot, giving dog owners a secure area to let their dogs run off leash. Thanks to the adjacent White Tiger—a restaurant and coffee shop—people in the park can also access a patio overlooking much of the park and order food or coffee. 

36.  Street and path extensions. A new street—called Electric Av.—cuts around the Georgia Power sub-station to connect first to an extended Chattooga Av., then to an extended New Av. and finally to an extended Nantahala Av. There’s pedestrian path and stairway to connect Nantahala Av. proper to the old Nantahala Extension.

37. Apartments. With a design inspired by the electric power sub-station it overlooks, a very modern-looking three-story, street-fronting apartment building offers 24 dwelling units.

38.  Light industrial development #4. Same description as item 25, except smaller.

Green Thrift Grocery to Open in Athens

By Dan Lorentz

[Here’s a news story I’d like to read one day…]

ATHENS, GA.  (PDN*) — Green Thrift Grocers, Inc., a national franchise specializing in neighborhood grocery stores featuring locally grown produce at discount prices, today announced plans to open a small-format store here.  Company officials said they had acquired a site for a 10,000 square foot store in Boulevard, a largely residential neighborhood just northwest of downtown.

Future site of Green Thrift Grocery

Boosting walkability is part of mission

Green Thrift started in Philadelphia, Pa. in 1999 as a non-profit organization dedicated to bringing fresh, affordable produce into low-income urban neighborhoods not being served by larger grocery stores.

Since then, the mission has broadened—and so has the customer-base.

“We quickly realized that grocery stores don’t just help people get access to food,” explained Darrell Evans, Green Thrift’s founder and chief executive officer. “They can also spark economic activity, perk up property values, and create a more walkable, healthier neighborhood.”

Green Thrift still serves low-income neighborhoods with limited access to fresh foods. But now the organization—which has become a very profitable, for-profit corporation—seeks out what it calls “tipping point” neighborhoods to locate in.

In Green Thrift’s corporate parlance, “tipping point” neighborhoods are compact, well populated mixed income neighborhoods with a strong identity. Typically, they are also already fairly walkable, but require a full-service grocery store to make it possible for residents to take care of most of their daily needs without a car or other transportation.

Once such a neighborhood is identified, Green Thrift works with neighborhood residents, local investors and local farmers to gauge the interest in and the financial feasibility of opening a grocery franchise there. If local interest from residents, investors and farmers is sufficient, Green Thrift will move forward with the project.

“Low-income folks love what our stores bring into the neighborhood, but so do plenty of middle and upper income folks,” Evans said. “And more and more of them are looking for walkable neighborhoods to live in. They also don’t mind the lower prices for locally grown food.”

Neither a Kroger’s nor a hippy co-op

Fresh, locally grown foods sold in season at low prices—that’s the message Green Thrift highlights in its advertising. But customers can also pick up a gallon of non-organic milk or bleach because the stores also offer much of what conventional grocery stores stock, including cheese and deli meats, dry groceries like pasta, spices, sugar bread and other baked goods, wine and beer, frozen foods, cleaning detergents and paper products.

To keep costs down, Green Thrift avoids fancy displays and like other grocery franchises, uses its buying power to leverage lower prices.

The store encourages walking by allowing customers to roll their grocery carts home and have them retrieved by the store. The carts have air-inflated tires and a simple suspension system so they are easy to push and steer in the store’s aisles and on sidewalks and streets.

On average, Green Thrift grocery stores are about 10,000 square feet. Many conventional supermarkets are at least 30,000 feet. More intimate feeling, the small-format Green Thrift stores often evokes memories among older customers of neighborhood groceries from the 1940s and 1950s.

Residents welcoming, says neighborhood leader

“For the most part, people living in the neighborhood are really excited about the Green Thrift store,” said Elliot Mattison, president of the Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition, a group representing more than 250 neighborhood residents.

Daily Groceries Co-op, located near the Boulevard neighborhood, already provides residents with access to fresh, local produce. But because the store is not a full-service grocery and is located just outside of the neighborhoods boundaries on the south side of the very busy multi-lane Prince Av., Mattison said the new Green Thrift store “will do more to really help make Boulevard a truly walkable neighborhood.”

According to Mattison, the location of the store, on the southeastern corner of the intersection of Dubose Av. and Chase St., has some residents concerned about increased traffic on the already busy Chase St. Green Thrift officials downplayed the concerns and pointed out that their stores boost foot-traffic much more than car-traffic. At present, the site is used as a parking lot for medical offices located across the street. A parking garage will be built nearby to accommodate for the lost parking spaces.
_____

* This post is a work of fiction. PDN is the acronym for Pipe Dream News, a fake news service that syndicates (actually, pretends to syndicate) fictional news accounts of people, places, things and happenings that do not exist but would be cool if they did.

The Food Trust’s Super Market campaign inspired parts of this post.

How to Create a Small Park: Some Resources

If you’re interested in learning more about small neighborhood parks, here are some potentially useful resources for your consideration:

The Project for Public Spaces “parks” page, and branching-off from that page the “furnishing your public space” page and the “design and planning” page—both of which you can find links to on the right sidebar of the main “parks” page.

This 2005 book—Designing Small Parks: A Manual for Addressing Social and Ecological Concerns—looks interesting.

What’s the relevance of posting information about small parks? Well, I happen to know that some folks in Boulevard, where I live, want a neighborhood park. (I know because I'm involved with the effort.) They’ve (we've) just started canvassing residents via a survey (the image above is from the survey) distributed through the neighborhood listserve to find out what kind of a park they might want. Their (our) ultimate aim is to build support for including the park proposal in the 2010 SPLOST (Special Purpose Local Option Sale Tax) referendum.

According to a news account of a survey conducted for Athens-Clarke Co. Leisure Services department, the demand among city residents for small neighborhood parks is high—so maybe they (we) have a chance.  (It would be interesting to review the data from the Pros Consulting survey, but—apparently—it won’t be available for public inspection until Athens-Clarke Co. officially releases it or something.)

Walk Scores for Athens Neighborhoods

Boulevard is the most walkable neighborhood in Athens and Cherokee Forest is the least, according to a very quick and dirty study I conducted using Walk Score, an online walkability calculator.

If the "study" is accurate, then Boulevard, a near downtown neighborhood, is a very walkable place where it's possible to get by without a car, and Cherokee Forest, located off of Nowhere Rd. in northern Clarke county, is a neighborhood where practically the only walkable location from your house is your car. 

Of the 31 neighborhoods registered as part of Athens-Clarke Co.'s Neighborhood Notification Initiative (NNI), only ten, including Boulevard, are considered "very walkable" or "somewhat walkable." The other 21 neighborhoods are "car-dependent" or "drive-only." None of the registered neighborhoods met Walk Score's threshold for being a "walker's paradise"--which is a neighborhood where you can take care of most day-to-day errands on foot and where many residents get by without a car.

The rankings

For your convenience, here’s a list of Athens neighborhoods ranked from most-to-least walkable (to view larger version, click on chart):
 

Data and methods

I generated the walk scores by going to Walk Score, a web site, where you type in an address and get a map of your neighborhood and a "walkability score." The score is generated by an algorithm that calculates the distance to locations such as stores, schools, parks and restaurants from the address you give, assigns those locations a score based on their distance and then combines all those scores into one summary number—your Walk Score. The higher the score, the more walkable a location is.

The first map below--created by the Athens-Clarke Co. Planning Commission--shows the boundaries of the 31 neighborhoods registered in the ACC Neighborhood Notification Initiative as of May 30, 2009.

In the second map below, each marker points to an address in the heart of one of the 31 neighborhoods. If you click on a marker, you’ll see the address, the name of the neighborhood it’s located in, and a link to the Walk Score for that address. (I had hoped to create a single map showing both boundaries and representative addresses, but I haven't been able to figure out how to do that--yet.)

The Walk Score for each address/neighborhood was generated on May 30, 2009, and might be slightly different today if new data has been added to the site.

Map 1: ACC NNI Registered Neighborhoods
View ACC NNI Registered Neighborhoods in a larger map

Map 2: Representative addresses with Walk Scores
View Walk Scores for Athens NNI Neighborhoods in a larger map

Limitations

I don’t take this “study” very seriously, and neither should you. For one thing, I’m assigning a whole neighborhood a Walk Score based on a single house within the boundaries of that neighborhood. I’ve tried to eyeball “central” locations, but these are just very rough approximations. A better study would sample a spatially diverse variety of locations weighted by some measure of the concentration of residences. 

Of course, these rankings also are heavily dependent on the Walk Score web site’s own algorithms and data—both of which have limitations.  For example, the site doesn’t factor in street design or topography, and it measures distance “as the crow flies” rather than actual walking paths. Read about other limitations here. And on top of all this are all the problems inherent in talking about the walkability of an arbitrarily defined neighborhood.

Still, if we could test every residential address in Athens, plot them on a map, you’d see natural clusters of more and less walkable areas—and these clusters would, I’d bet, roughly match many of the neighborhoods we already identify formally and informally.

So, even though I say I don’t take the precise rankings very seriously—it’s just not very carefully structured—I’d nevertheless bet that a properly done study would not return significantly different rankings. The Walk Scores might be slightly different, and the exact ranks might differ, but I would not be surprised to see every neighborhood remain in the same broad Walk Score categories—that is, Boulevard would stay in the “very walkable” category; Five Points in “somewhat walkable;” Green-Acres Crestwood in “car dependent,” etc. 

Walk Score’s categories

Quoted from Walk Score’s Web site:

90–100 = Walkers' Paradise. Most errands can be accomplished on foot and many people get by without owning a car.

70–89 = Very Walkable. It's possible to get by without owning a car.

50–69 = Somewhat Walkable. Some stores and amenities are within walking distance, but many everyday trips still require a bike, public transportation, or car.

25–49 = Car-Dependent. Only a few destinations are within easy walking range. For most errands, driving or public transportation is a must.

0–24 = Car-Dependent (Driving Only). Virtually no neighborhood destinations within walking range. You can walk from your house to your car!