Tag Archives: allen plaza

What happened at Allen Plaza, plus an ARC transportation “wish list” database

18 Apr
W and 12 hotel and residence buildings

An undeveloped parcel of land on Ivan Allen Boulevard sits in the shadow of Allen Plazas W hotel and condominium tower and Novares Twelve Centennial Park

Rachel Tobin wrote a brief but through history of downtown’s troubled Allen Plaza development for Friday’s AJC.

Developer Hal Barry summarized the events leading up to the recent foreclosure of one of the project’s buildings. It’s a story that’s become all too familiar in the last few years:

“We did well and made a lot of money…[a]nd we turned around, as risk-taker developers do, and reinvested a lot of it in operating expenses and project investments. And then the market hits you broadside.”

Also on Friday, the AJC published an overview of the Atlanta Regional Commission’s transportation “wish list,” with a database of all the prospective projects on the region’s list .

Among the items MARTA requested are a variable regional fare system (sometimes referred to as “zone fares”) , on-board security cameras for all buses, trains and paratransit vehicles, an advertising system for the agency’s 10 miles of tunnels and the establishment of a cloud computing system to assist in post-disaster recovery and service continuity.

The 436-item list, with projects totaling about $29 billion, will be pared down first by the GDOT’s planning director, then by the 21 members of the Atlanta Regional Roundtable. Voters in each of the state’s 12 regions will decide during primary elections in 2012 whether to approve a new one percent sales tax to fund their regions’ projects.

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Weekly Reader

5 Apr

Suntrust towers on Peachtree and Peachtree Center Ave.

Ever read so much you nearly forget to write about it?

  • From What Now, Atlanta? : The acres of chainlink and gravel on Clifton Road north of the CDC are scheduled to re-start becoming a mixed-use project in June. “Urbanist,” a frequent WNA commenter suggested that ready-made communities like this one diminish the prospects for development in existing neighborhoods in the city. He’s suggested in the past, for example, that if the concentrated development in Atlantic Station had been spread throughout Midtown, we wouldn’t still be wondering when the vision of the “Midtown Mile” is going to come to fruition.

But putting vacant spaces in already high-density areas into service can be risky because those neighborhoods don’t offer much parking. Or, maybe not. This 2008 post from the Urbanophile suggests that parking is oversold as an obstacle to successful retail development.

  • From the AJC: The Atlanta University Center neighborhood was awarded a $250,000 grant last week by HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods Initiative program. The program’s Web site says the grants’ objective is to “transform distressed neighborhoods and public and assisted projects into viable and sustainable mixed-income neighborhoods by linking housing improvements with appropriate services, schools, public assets, transportation, and access to jobs.”

 

  • From The Architect’s Newspaper: Qatar plans to deploy robo-clouds to provide shade from the desert country’s brutal summer sun during the 2022 World Cup.

 

  • Also from the AJC: A couple on Edgewood Avenue are suing graffiti artists who they say have been doing uncommissioned work on their property for years.

 

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