City on the Verge

INTRODUCTION
ATLANTA'S LIVABLE FUTURE

Atlanta is on the brink of either tremendous rebirth or inexorable decline. At the center of a perfect storm of failed American urban policies, Atlanta has the highest income inequality, and its metro area features the longest commutes, in the country; attempts at twentieth-century urban renewal blasted highways through the city center and destroyed neighborhoods; suburban sprawl impaired the environment even as it eroded the urban tax base and exacerbated a long history of racial injustice. Although many cities across America suffer these problems, the issues have collided nowhere so conspicuously as in Atlanta.

Consequently, Atlanta's quest for reinvention maps onto America's broader struggle to renew its cities: to transcend racism, segregation, and gaping economic divides, to transition from cars to public transit and walkable environments, to find new prosperity in the ruins of vanished industries. Having undergone an extraordinary transformation in recent decades, the city is now on the verge of emerging from its adolescence to become a grown-up city, with enough density to support a web of public transit, plenty of parks connected by multiuse trails, bike-friendly streets, and opportunities for people in the most troubled neighborhoods to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty. Yet Atlanta has been on the verge of something for most of its relatively brief history, and there is a real danger that the city's leaders will opt, once again, for image over fundamental change. Atlanta cannot afford to wait any longer; nor can the country.

The most promising symbol of the city's potential for rebirth is the Atlanta BeltLine. A twenty-two-mile ring of mostly defunct rail lines, running through forty-five neighborhoods girdling Atlanta's downtown, the BeltLine is currently being transformed into a stunning pedestrian walkway and potential streetcar line. The project's backers hope that it will spur redevelopment, urban activism, community organizing, and environmental awareness. Many see it is a model for the next American city: walkable and accessible, diverse both economically and racially. Its success will reflect a remarkable turn of events, since the BeltLine's rail beds once served to segregate the city by race. Yet, as with all massive social endeavors, the BeltLine has faced countless obstacles and fierce critiques, including from those who fear that the project will displace the city's poorer black residents with wealthier white ones.

City on the Verge dives deep into Atlanta's history but focuses on the BeltLine's evolving struggles as emblematic of the greater forces sweeping through the city and country at large. This potential "emerald necklace," as architect and city planner Alexander Garvin (who helped plan its new parks) has called it, could rejuvenate the heart and soul of the city. The Atlanta BeltLine also provides a wonderful lens for viewing the disparate areas of the city, north, east, south, and west, rich and poor, white and black. In literally encircling the city it provides a metaphorical narrative hoop on which to organize the book, with forays into the inner city as well as the outlying suburbs.

The success of the Atlanta BeltLine is key to the city's rejuvenation, helping to reverse the late-twentieth-century "white flight" into the suburbs, which produced some of the worst sprawl in the country. You might say that the battle over the BeltLine is a matter of life or death: Atlanta could emerge as a truly great city—or it could fall back into congested mediocrity.

Because Atlanta combines so many of the nation's urban ills, City on the Verge provides a key to understanding the crises—and potential renaissance—of American cities generally. "Americans sense that something is wrong with the places where we live and work and go about our daily business," wrote social critic James Howard Kunstler in 1996. "We drive up and down the gruesome, tragic suburban boulevards of commerce, and we're overwhelmed at the fantastic, awesome, stupefying ugliness of absolutely everything in sight… as though the whole thing had been designed by some diabolical force bent on making human beings miserable." Atlanta is an extreme case in point. Just a few years after Kunstler wrote, Time magazine featured it as the classic exemplar of American urban sprawl: "Once wilderness, [metro Atlanta is] now a 13-county eruption, one that has been called the fastest-spreading human settlement in history. What it leaves behind is tract houses, access roads, strip malls, off ramps, industrial parks and billboards advertising more tract houses where the peach trees used to be."

As a relatively low-density city surrounded by mall-studded suburbs, Atlanta most closely resembles other Sunbelt cities, such as Phoenix, Houston, Dallas, Miami, San Jose, and Los Angeles. The pressure on these urban centers to reinvent themselves through "smart growth" that fosters safe, affordable, dense, mixed-use, transit-friendly neighborhoods will only increase, as nearly 90 percent of US population growth over the next two decades is projected to occur there.

"Atlanta is traffic-obsessed to a degree that, among major American cities, perhaps only Los Angeles can match. And it is the place where traffic and demographic inversion [young adults and affluent retirees moving in to the city, while immigrants and the poor shift to the suburbs] seem… to be most closely tied together," wrote Alan Ehrenhalt in The Great Inversion and the Future of the American City (2012). Traffic obsessed, yes, because Atlanta is also traffic strangled. This city "has probably been the source of more bad transportation policy than any other in America," wrote David Owen in Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are the Keys to Sustainability (2009).

Unless Atlanta can reposition itself—no longer perceived as a congested, sprawling, auto-dependent area—it risks slowly dissolving into an amorphous urban shell, leaving isolated communities powerless to attract business, fix infrastructure, solve huge health problems, or resolve racial prejudice and income inequity.

Atlanta is not alone in its attempts to adjust to new urban realities. In the era of the automobile, American cities evolved into places that inadvertently made lives more harried and less healthy. Inner cities decayed. People sat in cars rather than biking or walking. Junk food was cheaper and easier to find than fresh fruit and vegetables. The "edge cities" surrounding the urban core, accessible only by automobile, leeched life and business from traditional downtowns. (In metro Atlanta, the oxymoronically named Perimeter Center exemplifies the phenomenon.) Over the past two decades, some US cities have clawed their way back to civility. Eschewing suburban commuter hell, empty nesters and young professionals have relocated to innovative cities such as Portland, Oregon; Seattle, Washington; and Charlotte, North Carolina, which are far ahead of Atlanta in terms of livable initiatives such as bike lanes, trails, parks, and streetcars.

While not the only such urban project, the BeltLine is the most ambitious and transformative. And with its short, turbulent history, hubris, diversity, creative public-private partnerships, fraught politics, climate, and dramatically contrasting affluence and poverty, Atlanta can serve as a kind of petri dish for the remaking of a city. If it succeeds, it will offer hope and an example for other urban areas; if it fails, it will become a cautionary tale of epic proportions: this is how to create an unlivable urban area.

So if Atlanta doesn't fail, what will its future look like? What could the BeltLine do for the urban core, for real estate and jobs as well as individuals and families? Here is a hopeful vision:

Despite many unanticipated setbacks, Atlanta is already realizing this vision straight out of the "new urbanism" playbook.^* The NuGrape building, headquarters for the soda pop company from 1937 through 1971, has indeed been converted into high-ceilinged lofts, and residents really do sit out on the former loading dock on summer nights. The Historic Fourth Ward Park, with its nearby skateboard area, was finished in 2011, and the massive old Sears warehouse on Ponce de Leon Avenue is now the Ponce City Market, a combined retail, residential, and commercial space. The 2.25-mile Eastside Trail section that goes by the NuGrape Lofts was paved, landscaped, and completed in late 2012. In December 2014, the city inaugurated an east-west streetcar loop—the first in the city since 1949—through the downtown area, which may eventually link into the BeltLine system.^**

The restoration of the long-empty Sears behemoth and the replacement of a flood-prone area of abandoned warehouses and decaying businesses with a large park are near-miracles in a city that has specialized in tearing down historic buildings and underfunding even its existing parks. And the BeltLine itself, its Eastside Trail jammed with pedestrians, bikers, and dog walkers, is perhaps the greatest miracle, repurposing a derelict corridor of mostly abandoned rail lines as a combination of trails, parks, mixed-income housing, retail and office space, and possible public transit that may revitalize the city.

Twenty-two percent of Atlanta's population lives along the BeltLine, which is, according to land use strategist Christopher Leinberger, "the most important rail-transit project that's been proposed in the country, possibly in the world." New York Times reporter Richard Fausset called the BeltLine "a staggeringly ambitious engine of urban revitalization." Kaid Benfield of the Natural Resources Defense Council deemed it "the country's best smart growth project… so enormous, so multifaceted, so ambitious and potentially transformative, and so complicated that it is difficult to know where to start."

The story of how the BeltLine began in 1999, as a master's thesis by an unknown architectural grad student named Ryan Gravel, developed a grassroots following, and ultimately gained acceptance from Atlanta's mayors, corporations, and nonprofits, all the while pushing through various obstacles that threatened to derail the project, is complicated and fascinating. And although particular to this city's struggle to create the BeltLine, the convoluted politics, legal issues, and improvisational strategies should inform other urban efforts, which inevitably face their own challenges. The often overlooked but crucial metropolis of Atlanta can inform the future of our cities nationwide, with their own all-too-familiar woes.

But this book goes well beyond the BeltLine project, transformative as it may be. It also analyzes the city and region, looking at such issues as transportation, race, housing, education, religion, the environment, energy, public health, business, politics, and the economy. Mirroring the spur trails off the BeltLine, spur sections discuss related places and subjects.

Still, the BeltLine remains the project that will link disparate areas of the city. Though this massive undertaking will take at least another decade or two to complete, undoubtedly encountering many more bumps along the way, it is well under way, supported with funds stemming from Home Depot, Coca-Cola, Cox Enterprises, and UPS, among others. The city government is squarely behind the effort.

In Makeshift Metropolis: Ideas About Cities (2010), Witold Rybcynski noted, "Large cities currently have a number of significant disincentives: faltering school systems, high tax burdens, unwieldy municipal bureaucracies, poor services, and unresponsive governments." Again, God knows, Atlanta has provided ample evidence. But with the BeltLine maintaining the momentum generated by its grassroots origins, the city government has become more responsive; services are improving, and schools are likely to follow in time. Still, this story is far from over and involves failures and looming questions as well as successes.

Although set in the present with a view to the future, City on the Verge draws on a rich historical context. A century ago, cities may have been dirty and polluted, but they were dense, vital hubs of industry and commerce. Workers lived in neighborhoods near factories (like Atlanta's Cabbagetown, near the Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill) serviced by railroads. Wealthier people lived further out along the streetcar lines in the first suburbs (like Inman Park). During the 1920s, the automobile began to change that way of life and culture. In the postwar era, desegregation and white flight to the suburbs hollowed out downtowns, a trend ultimately tied to important public health issues such as air pollution, global warming, water availability, affordable housing, and increased obesity.

Still a young city, Atlanta has yet to clearly define itself or its future. After General William Tecumseh Sherman reduced it to ashes in 1864 during the Civil War, it re-created itself as the "Phoenix City," and it has been reinventing itself ever since, boasting about the "Atlanta Spirit," labeling itself "the World's Next Great City," all the while unsure of its real character. "If Atlanta could suck as well as it blows, it would be a sea port," one cynic observed in the 1890s, implying that Atlantans were blowhards. Although never a typical Southern city, it has that patina of gracious living cheek by jowl with hardscrabble poverty. It has precious few historic buildings, having routinely torn down the old and thrown up new skyscrapers (or parking lots, stadiums, and convention centers). Unplanned development has rendered metro Atlanta a mishmash of malls and crowded expressways, with mostly segregated neighborhoods surrounding a hollowed-out downtown core. Its public schools are deeply troubled.

Yet Atlanta remains a tremendously appealing place to live. People who move to the city for their own or a spouse's job usually come to love its diversity, energy, distinctive neighborhoods, restaurants, theater, museums, music, sports, and recreational opportunities. More young people are choosing to live "in-town," helping to rejuvenate troubled neighborhoods. For a major metropolitan area, Atlanta still retains a small-town, intimate feel. Everybody seems to know everyone else, along with the latest gossip. And yes, it does indeed foster a type of Southern hospitality you won't find in New York. Amid accents of all kinds, you'll still hear "How y'all doin' today?" Although the summers can be brutally hot and humid, nothing makes you appreciate a swimming pool or ice-cold Coca-Cola more, and then there are the warm, magical summer nights. Atlanta winters are mild; springtime explodes with daffodils, azaleas, and dogwoods; and the autumn is long and mellow.

Atlanta offers diversity in all senses of the word. It is a troubled, dynamic, appealing, contradictory city, and the BeltLine project has the potential to envelope it with a livable new urbanism where people can walk and bike, enjoy parks, and get around on streetcars (or bus rapid transit) and rapid transit. The BeltLine will link to new urban farms whose fresh food can contribute to better health, along with an active lifestyle.

As an Atlanta native with a profound personal involvement with the city, I now live far away in northern Vermont. Yet I have continued to monitor the problems and progress of my birthplace through the years as I have returned to visit family and friends, as well as to research two other Atlanta-related books (For God, Country, and Coca-Cola and Inside the Outbreaks).

I wrote most of City on the Verge in standard journalistic third person, but readers will find me popping up in the first person throughout the book. I grew up in the city, and my family's roots in the region extend back generations. I was born on October 1, 1948, the year before the decommissioning of Atlanta's last streetcars in favor of trackless trolleys (buses with overhead electric lines), themselves soon replaced by diesel-fuming buses. I recall my father giving the finger to Ku Klux Klansmen as we drove past the field where they were burning a cross in Marietta. During my childhood African Americans had separate schools, bathrooms, and drinking fountains. Like most upscale families, we had a black maid, whom I loved deeply, though I knew virtually nothing about the part of town in which she lived.

As a teenager, I worked for a summer as a welder's assistant at Southern Cross Industries (formerly the Southern Spring Bed Company), where my father was an executive. My great grandfather had founded the business in 1884, two years before Coca-Cola was invented in Atlanta, in the same era that produced the BeltLine railroads, which skirted the overburdened central rail junctions and helped to open the outlying area to industry. Today that bedding factory on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive (formerly Hunter Street) has been converted into the Mattress Factory Lofts. Ironically, MLK Jr. also worked there for a summer as an adolescent.

I remember when the "Atlanta Population Now" sign on Peachtree Street, which tracks the growth of metropolitan Atlanta, broke 1 million people in 1959 (it now exceeds 6 million in a thirty-nine-county area, projected to swell to 8 million by 2040). I remember when Interstate 75 plowed through the red clay near my home on West Paces Ferry Road in the 1960s.

That road was named for the man who operated a ferry across the nearby Chattahoochee River. I used to canoe on its muddy waters, colored and polluted by the runoff from eroded developments upstream. I knew that Native Americans once lived there too. I found their arrowheads in the woods. On a school trip, I visited the Etowah Indian Mounds, where ancestors of the Creek Indians lived 1,000 years ago. On a family vacation to the mountains of North Carolina, I watched Unto These Hills, a dramatization of the 1838–1839 expulsion of the Cherokees along the "Trail of Tears."

Yet it didn't occur to me that European settlers had killed or driven out the Creek and Cherokee who used to live in what I knew as Atlanta. And despite unearthing musket balls from the Civil War, seeing Gone with the Wind (which premiered in Atlanta in 1939), and visiting the Cyclorama near the Grant Park Zoo, it didn't occur to me that this war was fought because those white men had imported and enslaved the Africans whose ancestors provided domestic servants for the wealthy enclave in which I grew up. Like most children, I simply accepted my world as the given order. Only in retrospect did I recognize what a small and privileged bubble that world represented.

So the research for this book has in many ways given me an opportunity to explore my native city for the first time. I have walked the entire BeltLine and stayed overnight with kind hosts in its wildly disparate surrounding neighborhoods. I have interviewed hundreds of people, ranging from the homeless, to Mayor Kasim Reed and former mayors Shirley Franklin and Sam Massell, to BeltLine and neighborhood leaders and activists present and past. I have also spent time in Gwinnett County to the north; Clayton County to the south; Decatur, Clarkston, and Stone Mountain to the east; and Serenbe to the southwest.

All of this has reminded me once again what a marvelous, crazy blend of a city Atlanta is, where a chic, upscale restaurant like Two Urban Licks, housed in a cavernous former warehouse right next to the BeltLine in the Old Fourth Ward, lies only minutes from Bedford Pine, a subsidized housing complex along Boulevard Avenue that is notorious for drug deals, crime, and prostitution. The ultramodern reflective skyscrapers of Buckhead and Peachtree lift out of concrete pads that ooze red clay. With more trees than any other major American urban area, Atlanta looks like a forest from on high, and the whole city thrums on a summer night with the sound of cicadas and the scent of magnolias. Yet it has a paucity of parks compared to most other American metropolises and is one of the least pedestrian-friendly cities in the world.

Walking the BeltLine, interviewing the homeless, the police, the neighbors, the drug dealers, the activists, the developers, the hustlers, the hip-hop artists, the new immigrants, the entrepreneurs, the academics, the students, the nouveau riche, and the old guard, I have sought to connect the dots of past and present, rich and poor, black and white. The BeltLine, in encircling the city, connects areas whose inhabitants hardly know one another now. It has also served for me as a kind of metaphor in a personal journey of reconnection and discovery.

I am opinionated and passionate about my native city. Nonetheless, I won't express many opinions again until the final chapter. I prefer to let the facts and characters speak for themselves so that readers are free to make their own judgments. By the time I offer my own, perhaps those conclusions will dovetail with yours, based on the stories you've read—or perhaps not.

A road map of the book you're about to read is necessary. The contents reflect original research, extensive historical reading, news synthesis, nearly four hundred interviews, and old-fashioned shoe-leather journalism. In Part One, chapter styles trade off with one another. One set of chapters offers an unbroken linear narrative of the BeltLine's evolution and struggle, while alternating chapters offer expansive perspectives on Atlanta's history, transportation and racial issues, housing, public health, urban planning, education, and more. Part Two offers a panoramic view of the city from the ground level, with chapters exploring the neighborhoods adjacent to the BeltLine, towns "outside the Perimeter"—or OTP—of the city proper, and, finally, the troubled downtown "hole" in the BeltLine donut. By the end we've brought the story up to date and look to Atlanta's future.

That future looks hopeful but is by no means etched in stone. There is no guarantee that the entire BeltLine loop and other sustainable development efforts will be completed. The city doesn't even own the entire BeltLine right-of-way—the railroads still own about 40 percent—and the project has really just begun. Its financing remains unclear, as does whether streetcars will (or should) parallel the trail. Yet it is a good and worthy fight, one that has inspired the city in ways I never could have imagined just a few years ago. I hope you will take inspiration from the effort and join me in rooting for my hometown and the rest of America's cities.