The CQRGC Healthy Places January monthly meeting’s topic was the Connect Atlanta plan, the city’s new comprehensive transportation plan. The presentation was enlightening in multiple ways, but one notable piece of information eschewed my perception of a piece of Atlanta’s transportation development history. When the Connect Atlanta plan came out, many people I knew lauded it as Atlanta’s first transportation plan, and while this is true in many ways, Atlanta has had several transportation planning initiatives already. What really got me, was that planners recognized the inefficiencies of the freeway system early on and called out the necessity of a balanced transportation plan. And this was before construction even started on the 1950s freeway system!
Jammed.
The speaker, Paul Moore from Gladding Jackson pulled a 1958 graph of Atlanta city transit ridership statistics. The early planner’s mindsets were eye opening. I have continually heard in my education that this city was ‘designed’ to grow entirely around the highways with no alternative methods of transportation.
As it turns out, during the initial studies, planners recognized that the coming freeways could only support Atlanta’s growth if, if and only if, transit ridership remained at the same rates. In 1958, this was at 50%!! Yes you read that right, 50%. Incredible. Still, the pre 1950’s graph pointed out quite clearly that the city had three options:
- It could, in a best case scenario, increase transit ridership from current levels.
- It could, in what they projected to be the most likely scenario, keep transit ridership levels at the same rate.
- Or, in a worse case scenario, transit ridership could decrease 20%.
Unfortunately, we all know how that one turned out. Atlanta city transit ridership decreased an astounding 43%, down to 7% of total trips taken by the year 2007. Wow.
Now, if the 1950s planners had only had the foresight to create policies that would keep transit ridership at similar or increasing levels, rather than relying on chance to keep them there, we’d be in a different place than we are today. But what would those have been? I don’t think anyone could have foreseen the rise of the 2nd and 3rd ring suburbs and subsequential growth of perimeter job centers at that early stage of planning, but the simple act of keeping the downtown street car networks would have been a good start.
I wonder, what are we doing today that will seem so short sighted in the future?
His work was initially influenced by John Biggers, an artist who studied the social impacts fo the shot gun house. Lowe’s social variation on this, he calls 
In all, his initial building project, sponsored with a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, encompassed twenty two homes over the first few years. Ten housing arts programs, five with educational programming, and seven for single mothers getting back on their feet. All of the houses are for rent, none for sale. Lowe and his team believed that market-rate, for sale housing would eventually come to the area, but renters stood a higher chance of being gentrified out. The project is still growing, in the next year 56 homes will be built by what is now called the Project Row House Community Development Corporation, creating pockets of close-knit neighborhoods with traditional front porches.
An unfortunately fuzzy photo, this is gallery director Cathy Byrd, Rick Lowe, and I at the exhibit after the lecture. We chatted for a bit, mostly about NPU-V, and its possibilities. The next week’s lecture was about the long term disinvestment, speculative development and displacement experienced by residents of neighborhood planning unit V, the Summerhill/Mechanicsville stadium-area neighborhoods. Some residents of the area joined in our conversation as well. And I’d have to say, Rick knows his stuff.
