Do these homes frighten you? Does their lack of pretension offend your sensibilities? Do their modest proportions fill you with an unsettling sense of dread and leave you counting down the days until an old couch or broken refrigerator winds up on the porch?

Do you fear the criminal element surely lurking inside?

My gut says no. In fact, if anything, I’d guess that most folks would consider these homes a fairly representative sample of the charm we Decaturites like to boast about. And that’s ironic, given that every one of them–along with hundreds of others not shown–would be illegal to build under our current zoning code.

Say whah? Read the rest of this entry »

Al points to this AJC article about a recent northside transit study, which suggests a Kennesaw-to-Dunwoody rail line and a northern extension of the MARTA red line, and states “Powerful forces are aligned to pull MARTA’s center of gravity to the north.”

Which raises an interesting question: While the current center of MARTA is obviously in downtown Atlanta, where is the true “center” of Atlanta in 2011?  As any good student of urbanism knows, the centers of cities often drift over time.  New York City’s core was once downtown around Wall Street.  Now it’s up in the Midtown.

Atlanta may rank poorly in travel magazines of late, but it is perhaps one of the best U.S. examples of a mobile city core.  Think about it . Originally, Atlanta’s center was “downtown”.  Then it began a slow trip up Peachtree, eventually stopping in Midtown to enjoy lush greenery of Piedmont Park.  Today, some might even argue it’s traveled further north to Buckhead evidenced by its glassy towers and high-end shops.

More interconnected rail on the northside of the city could potentially solidify the northside as Atlanta’s new core.  That may not be so great for Decaturites faced with an ever extended commute to the city’s job center, but is it in the best interest of the metro?

Kennesaw-based real estate information firm Smart Numbers has a catchy name for a struggling swath of Atlanta’s suburbs:

The Ring of Death is a J-shaped ring of land surrounding the west, south and east sides of Atlanta’s urban core. According to Smart Numbers, the real estate market in the Ring of Death will never recover.

Never.

It’s overbuilt and overloaded with foreclosures and distressed properties. The Ring includes Hall, Jackson, Barrow, Walton, Newton, Henry, Clayton, Fayette, Coweta, Carroll, Douglas, Paulding counties, and the parts of East Gwinnett and South Fulton.

Looking at the Ring prompts three Decaturcentric thoughts and questions:

1. Decatur isn’t in the ring. We’re smack dab in the middle of the non-dead area. Let’s call it the Donut Hole of Life.
2. Why isn’t Decatur in it? Is it density? Maybe. But Cherokee County is neither dense nor walkable and it’s not in the Ring. Is it mass transit? Perhaps, but Cobb voters hate transit almost as much as they hate science books that leave out the Old Testament. Cobb ain’t in the Ring. Is it schools? City of Atlanta’s school system is in shambles, but Atlanta’s not in the Ring.

It’s probably a combination of all those factors, plus proximity to Atlanta’s main office districts (Midtown, Buckhead, Central Perimeter, and Cumberland).
3. The last thing it reminds me of: Remember the May 31st Decatur Metro post highlighting anti-TSPLOST comments made by Fayette County Tea Partier Debbie Dooley? Yeah, well, maybe we should think twice before we take the advice of people with Ring of Death addresses.

Decatur’s Linda Harris alerts us to the city’s latest walkable honor; receiving a Silver Level designation in the inaugural round of Walk Friendly Communities’ uh…Walk Friendly Communities.

The national organization gave out 11 awards this year, with Seattle the only city to achieve Platnuim status.  (No one walks as hard as they do in Seattle!)  Ann Arbour, Arlington, Hoboken, and Santa Barbara all achieved Gold status, while Decatur shared the Silver level with Charlottesville, Va (Home of the great Parking Lot Movie!)

What aspects of Decatur helped it score a Silver?  Luckily, WFC has a quite detailed website.

Decatur is designated as a Silver-level community due to outstanding management of development and parking, top-notch educational and outreach efforts, and progressive evaluation methods. Highlights of Decatur’s application include:

Read the rest of this entry »

I must say, I quite enjoyed reading Jonathan Lerner’s review of Piedmont Park’s recent expansion on ArtsCriticATL.com, partly because he explained that “the expansion also adds a kind of environment — and a sense of escape into nature — that’s been missing until now.”   However, I also enjoyed it also he used his review to readdress the whole Piedmont Park parking deck debate.  Here’s a quote…

…the parking deck is a fait accompli. If you are still steamed about it, a visit to the new extension — which makes the park big enough, meandering enough and woodsy enough to let you imagine getting safely and therapeutically lost — should go a long way toward calming you down. The expansion is a work in progress and will remain one for some time to come. But it’s already obvious that it’s a wonderful thing. This intown citizen’s opinion? Yes in Our Back Yard.

But I was left wanting more hi-res photos.  Fortunately, great Atlanta photographer Josh D. Weiss took a stroll through the expansion over the weekend and came back with a photo series that made all my fleeting online wishes come true!

Photo above used with permission

The AJC hasn’t put their Sunday lead story online yet, but that won’t stop me from summarizing it now.  Paper, internet? It’s all just information to me!

First off, regardless of all the tough talk we’re hearing from local political leaders, it sounds like we shouldn’t be expecting the U.S. Census Bureau to make any dramatic adjustments to their Atlanta, Fulton, DeKalb 2010 Census numbers any time soon.  As the AJC notes in the second to last paragraph of its extensive investigation

…the census only accepts challenges to the count based on narrow, highly technical issues.  Re-counting, or mailing forms to alledgedly missed areas, isn’t an option, said census spokeswoman Stacy Vidal.

So if you’re willing to accept that all this blustering may be as worthless as a strong wind blowing across a windfarm-less vista, you may still be wondering “Why were Atlanta’s Census numbers 121,000 higher than they should have been?”

Well in short, according to the AJC, Fulton County used issued building permits to convince the Census bureau to raise estimates in both 2004 and 2006.  Additionally, the Census Bureau used a static household size of 2.3 people to calculate its Atlanta estimates over the last 10 years.  However the influx of young folks – hipsters and otherwise – actually pushed the household size down to 2.1 in 2010.  It’s a small change, but applied across the city’s population, that’s 45,000 fewer people, according to the AJC’s math.

The other static number that inflated the population figure?  Vacancy rates.  The AJC reports that by holding the vacancy rate at the 2000 level (10%) over the past decade in foreclosure-riddled Atlanta overestimated the population by another 39,000.  (The vacancy rate in 2010 was 17.6% according to the paper.)

There’s a bit more to it, but this gives a gist of what the AJC found.  Basically, there’s “fault” in both camps – and note that it’s with the ESTIMATES and not the official 2010 Census count.

Of course none of this actually matters because the Census Bureau doesn’t recount!

William writes in and introduces himself to his new neighbors.

I’m a data and GIS analyst (and former reporter) who just moved to the Medlock area after working for The Palm Beach Post down in South Florida for the past decade. I specialized in stuff like census and real estate data, so I thought I’d throw together some maps of my new home after seeing your post a couple of weeks ago about the NYT’s census map.

You may be wondering about the map above.  It’s straight off a new post on William’s blog showing the black Atlanta population from the 2010 census.  The darker the shading, the larger % of the group; the higher the bar, the more people from the group in the block.  Pretty interesting way to look at it.  Check out his post for similar maps showing the Atlanta Hispanic and Asian populations.

And for the more hyper-local among us, William also created an interactive, block-by-block Google Map of 2010 Census data for just DeKalb County.  Here’s a screen-shot of it, centered around Decatur.  If you want to play around with it, you’ll have to jump over to William’s blog and scroll down a bit.

UPDATE: In the comments, Eric suggested this video, which provides another take on the past 200 years. Really great!

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Though I’m not entirely sure I believe things are quite as bad as this video implies, I think that the short history lesson and the proposed response are right on point.  (But maybe I’m trying to have my cake and eat it too, thinking that any large number of people will make any sort of radical change without hypothetical perils laid before them.)

As soon as the Emory Village roundabout is completed, the Alliance to Improve Emory Village hopes to build the above “pocket park” at the corner of North Oxford Road and North Decatur Road, which currently plays the part of an unfortunate and needless extension of the defunct Chevron gas station’s concrete pad.

As you can tell from a quick glance at the image above is so much more than a concrete street corner.  It will include a creek-esque “water feature”, trees, shrubs, and stone seat wall, and green space.   According to Emory’s release, “Benches and seating spaces to accommodate 40 people will be installed. Eight of the more than 50 new trees that will be planted in the Village will be in the park.”

The Alliance says it still needs to raise $40,000 by June to build the $300,000 park.

If you’d like to study this park “concept plan” more closely, check out this PDF.

h/t: Fresh Loaf

11Alive’s Doug Richards contacted me yesterday and inquired about Decatur’s recent accolade of being deemed “Georgia’s Most Walkable City” by Walkscore.com.  I rattled off a couple potential contacts and suggested that he also might want to include a “CCP Games Moving to Decatur” angle to make the story a bit more topical.  Above is the result. (Also, if you’ve been wondering about CCP Games current location, watch the video.)