Intown lifestyle more popular

Just four years ago, the stretch of North Highland Avenue below Elizabeth Street, on the outskirts of Atlanta’s Inman Park neighborhood, resembled a ghost town.

On one side of the road stood a closed paper plant; on the other, a shuttered metal yard.

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Pouya Dianat/Staff Photographer

These condos near the intersection of North Highland Avenue and Samson Street offer a view of the downtown skyline. Baby boomers who raised their kids in the suburbs are looking to downsize, and Atlanta’s traffic has persuaded many to look intown.

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Pouya Dianat/pdianat@ajc.com

A patron enjoys her cigar outside the Cigar Store, a bar and restaurant below loft-style apartments in the Inman Park area. Demand for housing has grown as more people seek an urban lifestyle that allows them to walk to shops and restaurants.

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But now the area hums with activity.

Once-quiet sidewalks are shared by dog walkers and latte sippers. Rusting industrial spaces have been taken over by trendy restaurants. New condo units sit atop clothing boutiques, a wine store and a cigar shop.

About 1,000 condos, apartments and townhomes have sprouted along the corridor, creating a dense, urban pocket seemingly overnight.

“It’s a little like add water, instant neighborhood,” said Genevieve Johnson, 35, a high school English teacher who has lived in one of the new condo developments, IPV Lofts, for two years.

After decades of population decline, the city of Atlanta is growing again. As it does, infill developments like the one along the lower reaches of North Highland are proliferating.

Demand for intown housing is growing as more people seek an urban lifestyle where they can walk to shops and restaurants and avoid long commutes. With little vacant land available inside the Perimeter, developers are snapping up warehouses, factories and other industrial properties and converting them to housing and retail.

The godfather of infill projects, of course, is Atlantic Station, a mini-city built on the ashes of a massive steel plant near Midtown.

But smaller nodes are taking shape across the area. Hot spots include industrial stretches along DeKalb Avenue and Memorial Drive east of downtown and the Huff Road corridor in northwest Atlanta. Atlanta’s Beltline project, which aims to redevelop aging rail corridors into a loop of transit, trails and parks, is expected to spark similar development.

The trend is spreading to suburban locales as well. Auto plants in Hapeville and Doraville are slated to be redeveloped; so too an aging office park on North Druid Hills Road in north-central DeKalb County.

“This is the tip of the iceberg,” said David Goldberg, a Decatur resident and a spokesman for Smart Growth America, a Washington-based group that advocates for better urban planning.

Baby boomers who raised their kids in the suburbs are looking to downsize, and Atlanta’s infamous traffic — along with high gas prices — are persuading many to look intown. Their children, raised on TV shows like “Friends” that made city living cool, are graduating from college and searching for places to live.

Goldberg said more people are realizing that they can choose an urban lifestyle, “that you’re not automatically expected to live in a suburban place where you drive everywhere.”

But don’t look for the city’s industrial core to vanish. Atlanta officials said they are evaluating each industrial property to determine which parcels are redevelopment candidates and which should be preserved.

“The city needs a strong industrial base,” said Steve Cover, the city’s planning commissioner. Industrial properties “are good tax revenue generators; they provide a lot of jobs.”

Developers attempting to retrofit industrial areas face numerous obstacles that could temper the intown building boom.

Bruising battles are possible with nearby residents who worry that too much traffic and density will change their neighborhood. Developers must also find funding in today’s economy, which has been ravaged by a prolonged real estate slowdown and tight credit markets.

The North Highland area offers a road map for developing a successful urban infill project.

In 2001, Atlanta-based Perennial Properties began looking for industrial property to redevelop and found a scrap metal yard and an auto body shop on Highland near Freedom Parkway. The firm began plans to build Highland Walk, a 350-unit apartment complex that opened about three years later.

Tim Schrager, Perennial’s CEO, said the area was appealing because it contained relatively affordable industrial property that was close to job centers in downtown and Midtown as well as hip intown neighborhoods such as Inman Park and Virginia-Highland.

“The intown market as a whole was doing very well, and there definitely was pent-up demand,” Schrager said.

About the same time, plans were being made to transform the closed Mead paper plant down the road into Inman Park Village, a mixed-use development with housing, shops and offices. The project brought together a number of developers, including Wood Partners, Brunning & Stang and Ultima Holdings.

The developers worked with the neighborhood to make sure that the project didn’t overwhelm the community. As a result, the southern end of the 21-acre site that sits closest to the neighborhood is lined with single-family homes, pushing the apartments and condos toward North Highland.

“It’s just turned into a great vision,” said Jimmy Baugnon, development director at Wood Partners. “The negotiations with the neighborhood, although complicated, were productive.”

Perennial also set its sights on a steel factory a few blocks away, where it has built 239 apartment units and 24 loft condominiums alongside restaurants, cafés and shops.

Inman Park residents seem happy with the new development, particularly the retail stores that have sprouted.

“I think everyone is really enjoying the benefits of being able to walk and bike to places, not to have to get in your car to do the things we do day-to-day,” said Lisa Burnette, president of the Inman Park Neighborhood Association.

The development has proved popular and is maturing quickly.

Longtime Inman Park resident Anda Olsen and her husband have traded their four-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot house for a 1,700-square-foot condo at the Grinnell Lofts on North Highland. The neighborhood has embraced the new direction, she said.

“We’re delighted,” she said. “Anything that doesn’t change, and grow, dies.”