Back to School -Tom Barry, Georgia Trend magazine, October 1999
"The Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA) was a great step forward, but we were 20 years behind in trying to come up with a regional approach to transportation." - Governor Roy Barnes "Cars are the single greatest excrescence now in our visual culture. I often imagine that 500 years from now, people will say we have photographs of this people who apparently had an obsessive relationship with large metallic objects." - Dr. William Chace, President of Emory University
Emory President Dr. William Chace is no slouch at symbolism. After all, he's a James Joyce scholar, and Joyce is to symbolism what Atlanta is to traffic. In both regards, very thick stuff indeed, with a lot going on. You could spend years getting from one point to the next. A Joyce sentence can be that leisurely rush-hour drive through Perimeter Center, that scenic tour at dusk along Georgia 400 North. Last year, when Chace wanted to make a strong statement about his hate affair with the car and how Emory was changing its land-use policies, he took bold action. Rather than dash off an Ode to a shrub or Remembrance of Petunias Past - as most any ex-English prof would - he eliminated 40-odd faculty parking spaces and replaced them with greenery and landscaping. Pretty apt, as symbols go. Few things, apart from Coca-Cola icons, are as sacred at Emory as a dedicated parking space near the office, but the profs took their licks with little renting of tweedish garments. No sheepish lot, they sensed something had to be done. Emory was rapidly turning into a parking lot, much like the rest of Metro Atlanta today. It may seem strange that a university is a poster boy for smart growth, but Emory has become one. Growing rapidly and bursting at the seams, 600-acre Emory is a microcosm of sorts for metro growth in general. Modern Emory is Atlanta's third-largest employer, with 22,000 employees. Lately, it's been Dekalb County's No. 1 developer, erecting $244 million worth of buildings this decade, its endowment swollen by vast blocks of Coca-Cola stock. Over the next several years, Emory plans $200 million plus worth of new projects, including eight major buildings. In addition, along with Georgia Tech, it is building an ambitious biotechnology development center on the old Georgia Mental Health Institute site on Briarcliff Road. The Clifton Road Corridor, home to Emory's burgeoning medical science complex, has seen especially frenetic building activity. They should give some crane operator an honorary degree. But the Emory of the future, Chace says, must grow a lot smarter than it has over the past 30 years. Many of the newer structures don't fit in with the landscape or with the Italian Renaissance architecture. Some would make an art historian weep for our civilization (admittedly, a reflex action). But that's in the past. Emory's newly adopted 50-year master plan, crafted with input from neighborhood groups, proposes restricting development to rigidly defined areas, increasing green space and reducing car traffic considerably. (Sadly, Susy Sophomore may be sans Daddy's Saab, but hey, everyone must sacrifice.) Chace wants a walking campus, and so Emory has an aggressive MARTA subsidy program and stresses car- and van- pooling. The university is seeking federal funding for a fleet of electric shuttles, and it recently received, along with Georgia Power and Clean Cities Atlanta, a $225,000 federal grant to fund charging stations for electric vehicles. Mmmm. Maybe we can all go to school on this. Which brings us to the U.S. Senate Smart Growth Task Force, which held a recent "field tour" at Emory, attended by Gov. Barnes, Sen. Max Cleland, GRTA Chairman Joel Cowan, developers, local officials and a host of others intent on changing transportation/development/ real estate patterns across the region. (Happily, the "field" turned out to be the plush and well-provisioned Emory Conference Center. Nestled in the woods off Clifton Road, it provided some eco-symbolism of its own.) Theirs is a daunting task, considering that what must be done is encourage mixed-use developments in areas with infrastructure already in place. The notion bumps up against the whole 20th century zoning philosophy in Metro Atlanta, which has spread low-density development across the horizon while rigidly segregating residential, office and commercial areas, mandating ever-greater dependence on the car. Smart Growth proponents are urging live-work-walk communities and much greater densities so that mass transit can at long last, become viable reality in a region where motorists average more miles per day (35) than in any city in the nation. Whispering "greater density" in Atlanta may seem like shouting "Steve Spurrier" at a crowded Georgia football rally. But if the metro area is to grow and prosper in the early 21st century, as it has in the late 20th, it needs compact communities far less tied to the car. Today's 3.2 million population in the 10-county metro area alone is projected to swell to 4.1 million by 2020. "If there are roads that are under capacity, we must stimulate economic development in those areas," Atlanta Chamber of Commerce President Sam Williams told the group. "Mass transit only works when you go from density to density." Atlanta's "density centers," he noted, include Hartsfield Airport, Downtown, Midtown, Buckhead, Perimeter Center and the Galleria area in Cobb. Williams urged officials and developers to re-create "the good communities" around Atlanta, such as Downtown Decatur, around the Square in Marietta, and the Virginia-Highland area of Atlanta, mixed-use communities with active street life. Adam Gross - Emory's Architect - offered Charleston and Portland as examples of " compact" cities with diverse development and common open space linked by transit. How difficult will it be to make a U-turn in development/transit patterns? Plenty. Easier to find a Pepsi kiosk on the Emory campus. Consider the recent proposal to link Emory with South Dekalb via light rail, a plan torpedoed by strong resistance in the neighborhoods along the route. On the rebound, Emory is now looking at a connection to the Lindbergh MARTA station and possibly Georgia Tech and the new Phillips Arena downtown. For many reasons, racial tensions high among them, MARTA today remains a relatively small, misbalanced entity, a two-county (Fulton and Dekalb) vehicle with no northwest corridor or anything south of Hartsfield Airport. For a university of the size and scope of Emory not to be connected to mass transit is preposterous. But retrofitting a connection at this late stage - and at a huge expense - won't be easy. The conclave gave brief glimpses into GRTA's direction. In light of Atlanta's proliferation of local governments (a mere 74 county and city governments in the 10 counties), Cowan sees GRTA's main task as weighing in on "multi-jurisdictional problems. We'll have neighborhood sensitivity, and we'll try to balance that off with the idea of regional transportation." Alternative transportation can be accomplishes most readily with more buses, said Barnes. A Clayton County bus system already is in the formative stages. "People aren't quite as afraid of buses as they are of some other things," said Barnes, avoiding the dreaded R word himself. "Buses will require some more road construction, so we can have HOV lanes. Every road project is not going to be brought to a screeching halt." Barnes has a knack for the iron hand/velvet glove approach, a talent he'll have ample opportunity to perfect in coming years. Already the keening has started over his proposal to get local governments to set aside 20% of land for open space. "Fact is, we've been subsidizing land-use decisions that have created this problem, so the question is: How are we going to change the subsidies to solve it?" he said. "We're not going tell (local officials) how to zone this or that piece of property." But state monies, he added, will flow to cooperative areas and not to others. "I'm not here to stop growth but to make sure that growth continues," said Barnes. "If we destroy our quality of life, though, we'll kill the goose that lays the golden egg." Shortly after his election last November, Barnes spoke to a gathering of Atlanta-area county commission chairmen. Privately, most told him "something had to be done and probably done from the outside." "I told them I knew that increasing density where infrastructure already exists is contrary to the pressures that exist in neighborhoods. To which one commissioner - I won't tell you who - told me, "Listen, you give me (political) cover and I'll do it." Maybe, maybe not, even with the darkest of night for cover. But if Atlanta is to grow, it must grow a lot smarter, just like Emory. The goose is sickly. The implications, Cleland noted, are statewide. Atlanta drives the state economy and generates some 60% of state income and sales tax. As Atlanta goes, so goes Georgia. We're not in two boats," said Cleland. "We're in the same boat." This article, written by Tom Barry, first appeared in Georgia Trend magazine and is reprinted with permission. Return to Smart Growth Return to Campus Growth and Development |
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