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Thursday, March 16, 2006
Want mixed use? You’ll have to pay
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You expect Wally and the Beav to bound out the front door. If nothing else, Aunt Bea, Opie and Barney ought to be sitting on the front porch, listening to Andy strum his guitar.
This isn’t a sitcom, though. I’m in Suwanee Town Center, the mixed-used development that’s probably the envy of cities across Gwinnett. It’s a live, work and play community designed to, well, let residents live, work and play. Luxury single-family homes and townhomes in the complex have sold like hot cakes. And the retail shops are to open sometime this summer.
Suwanee Town Center epitomizes “new urbanism,” the idea that communities should be built around mixed-use neighborhoods, with housing, jobs, stores and services within walking distance. By doing so, cars are taken off congested highways and people relate in ways that were common back in the day, but have usurped us in the 21st century.
The county’s most intriguing experiment in new urbanist planning may be Suwanee Town Center. Right now, it’s more construction site than community. Crews of landscapers, builders and cabinet and flooring installers blanket the development. They’re completing residences and working on retail/office space. Shadowbrook at Town Center — the residential anchor — looks like an ideal place to film a sitcom. It looks fake. Traditional, yes, but an aesthetic fabrication of Main Street USA.
Looks like somebody is trying really hard to sell a concept. Mailboxes are in the backs of houses. Streets have names like Savannah Square Street and Charleston Avenue. Only thing missing is the picket fence.
It’s hard to build character from the ground up. Constructing luxurious dwellings with traditional accoutrements near a retail complex doesn’t cut it. Looking old doesn’t equate to character. You’ve got to have soul, and for that, it takes a diverse socioeconomic group of people.
Speaking of which, I don’t think you’re going to find any waitresses buying in Shadowbrook. They can’t afford it.
According to fliers I picked up Wednesday, Shadowbrook townhomes start in the low $200,000s. Two houses on the market were listed at more than $250,000. A sign in the sales center said that only 15 homes remain.
“And then we will be ‘Gone With The Wind,’ ” the chalk board states. I never liked that movie. Although I respect the concept of a live-work-play community, the way it’s unfolding in Gwinnett bugs me. Too elitist. The very people who could benefit the most from living in a complex with access to shops and, possibly, employment, can’t bear the sticker shock.
Houses in Lum Howell Park, a project in downtown Norcross, will sell for $380,000 to $450,000.
In Duluth, lofts near the Town Green sell for several hundred thousand dollars. Developers, investors and civic leaders claim mixed-use projects will benefit everybody. They say they’ll help change the face of this suburb for the better. Maybe they’ll change life for those who develop the projects, and if market value climbs, the people who live in them.
The rest of us will just have to make do with what little we got — or what we can afford.
