It was a year ago when the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported on the revival of the large, mixed use Avondale MARTA Station parking lot project that the City of Decatur has been pursuing from over a decade.

Now Decaturish reports that the MARTA Board of Directors recently voted to begin negotiations with the Decatur Downtown Development Authority of redevelop the site.  The two orgs have selected Columbia Ventures as the developer, which will include 604 apartments, 74 condos and 25,000 of retail space, according to Decaturish.

More HERE.

Map courtesy of Decaturish

I’ve been meaning to post this ever since the Decatur City Commission meeting in late May when Commissioner Fred Boykin asked Planning Director Amanda Thompson about the status of the project.  Looks like Ralph beat me to it!

Tonight, the Decatur Planning Commission will consider rezoning the south parking lot at Avondale MARTA station as Mixed Use, under the 2009 changes to the zoning ordinance.  (Meeting materials HERE!)  We mentioned this revised plan back in March, in case you missed it.

MARTA and Decatur have done this dance before, resulting in the confusingly named Avondale LCI Master Plan.  According to sources a few years back, the plan was never executed because MARTA backed out, but now there’s a new MARTA-stration (MARTA + adminstration – get it?) and they have already publicly stated that they’re more aggressively pursuing transit-friendly development around existing stations.

The Patch article linked to above quotes Asst. City Manager Lyn Menne saying that there’s no current developer for the site, and that this rezoning just defines what the city “wants to see happen at the site.”

Rendering from the 2005 Avondale LCI Master Plan courtesy of the City’s Website

In years past, Decatur had previously had two LCI districts. Now we only have one great big one. In fact, we are one great big one.

What’s an LCI district, you ask?

The Livable Centers Initiative is a program of the Atlanta Regional Commission that encourages local jurisdictions to link transportation improvements with community development in order to create more sustainable communities (yes, in fact, that sentence is straight from the ARC website). The LCI program, which has been around for about twelve years, disburses funds to cities, counties and communities around the region to plan for activity centers, town centers and transportation corridors to bring, according to the ARC, “a new level of livability to the region.” To date, ARC has allocated more than $141 million in planning and transportation funds to 96 distinct areas in the Atlanta region.

My favorite Decatur LCI was a planned mixed-use development for that little area around the Avondale MARTA station, in 2002. I went to all the charettes and meetings (they had cookies). The resulting plan was pretty, and it had a pocket park, which was my favorite part. You can read all about it here, on the City’s website. I think my park was supposed to go about where a big kudzu patch still is, nine years later. Planning is such fun. It’s the implementation that will bite you in the . . . pocket park.

Now, rather than pursuing additional optional districts, the City of Decatur received the Atlanta Regional Commission’s approval to make the entire city a single LCI district, making a larger area of the city eligible for LCI grants for transportation related projects such as intersection improvements, bicycle lanes, streetscape improvements, etc. The approved LCI ten-year update will soon be available on the City’s website. Maybe this will make implementation as much fun as planning!