Radical Georgia Moderate

September 6, 2005

Must-read article

I was predisposed and away from my computer all of yesterday and didn’t have time to finish results, rankings, and odds for NCAA picks, but rest assured I’ll get to all that tonight. I put a spreadsheet mostly together Sunday afternoon, but didn’t get to finish it since there were games yet to be played. While you wait with baited breath, here is some mandatory reading material about various downtown Atlanta revival efforts underway, and how they compare to efforts in other cities. My boss was quoted. Kudos to Creative Loafing’s Scott Henry for putting together a fine piece of work.

Filed at 1:03 pm

3 Responses to “Must-read article”

Amber wrote:

Reading the descriptions of Atlanta in the 1960s made me feel a bit forlorn. I’ve read similar descriptions elsewhere and they always leave me with the same question… “What. The fuck. Happened??”

Or, not so much what (that much is obvious) as why.

I fear that if I start writing about the power of the automobile lobby and how they effectively destroyed decades of established public transit in major cities all over the country, I’ll be dubbed a conspiracy theorist and dismissed. So instead, I’ll let that mention of what I’m not going to say serve as me actually saying it. (Is your head exploding yet?)

Downtown Atlanta has so much potential. But more than that… looking at what it was 40 years ago, we shouldn’t be talking about its “potential,” because it never should have lost what it had! Of course, I know looking at the past and thinking “if only…” is useless, because you can’t change the past; but I hope this can serve as a lesson for the future. I hope downtown will continue on a positive swing and become, once again, the vibrant, thriving area that it should be. The “new urbanism” developments give me hope… so let’s hope we keep seeing more of those.

Also, as an aside… I know I have mentioned Dallas in relation to Atlanta before, but it bears repeating… if you really want to see a city that is “an uninviting concrete canyon for office workers who high-tail it to the ‘burbs at the stroke of 5,” look at Dallas. It was creepy the degree to which that was true in Dallas.

Tuesday, 09.06.2005 at 2:05 pm
Joe wrote:

Wow. It’s not often you see the Loaf be all positive and stuff like that. I’m sure it won’t last for long. Mara Shaloup will come to the rescue with a stinging rebuke of how downtown’s revival is on the backs of the poor, or some crap like that

Tuesday, 09.06.2005 at 2:39 pm
Trackback from Bloglanta:

Revitalizing Downtown Housing

Catch up on the ensuing discussion. Rusty pointed out an unusually cheerful article published in this week’s Creative Loafing. Amber began a discussion on some of the complexities associated with the housing issues associated with downtown’s revitali…

Tuesday, 09.06.2005 at 10:03 pm