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DEL.ICIO.USWant 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.
Comments
Commenting is now closed for this entry.
By Tommy Woodsmall
March 16, 2006 07:11 AM | Link to this
Rick, you’re observation is correct. This ideology of a live work and play community is just that, “an ideology”.
I grew up in a live work and play community. It was called, “a farming community”.
Many of my neighbors never left their property to go to work during the day and when someone was going the 10 miles to town it was not unusual to pick groceries for Aunt Daisy down the road or a case of oil for Cousin Elmer on the Hill.
I can’t imagine the new “live work and play” idea ever really working.
Sure, there are going to be a few of these places like in Suwannee and Duluth where a loft apartment will cost you $400,000 and there might be an ice-cream shop below you where someone works making $8.00 an hour. But, you can bet that person working in that ice-cream shop making $8.00 an hour doesn’t live in that loft.
Also, go knock on that loft apartment door and see if the next time they go to the big city they would mind picking you up a new ice-cream scoop.
Yea, right …
By DB
March 16, 2006 11:30 AM | Link to this
You are absolutely correct, Rick. I have watched other, similar, developments rise, and it is the same everywhere. From the townhouses in Decatur to the lofts in downtown Atlanta to the mixed use lands in Gwinnett, it is the same old story. People who can afford to live there are not going to be serving in the expensive coffee shops or restaurants. I’m an educated person with enough training and talent to work in a professional office, and I couldn’t possibly afford to live in the places where I might find work next door!
By BobG
March 16, 2006 12:05 PM | Link to this
What you observed, Rick, does not prove that mixed-use can’t be done right. What you observed is evidence that, in Gwinnett, development has always been driven not by a desire to do it right but by a desire to maximize profit. Our elected officials do not understand their role in encouraging affordable housing while minimizing the impact on public facilities; and the developers really don’t care what they build, as long as they can get “the most buck for their bang,” to twist a phrase.
By scott carter
March 16, 2006 12:39 PM | Link to this
I have a better idea-let’s boot the developers out of GA and into Iraq where they can destroy trees and build more houses which will eventually clog the new 23 lane highway-enough is enough-it is time to put the developers OUT OF BUSINESS! How many malls and shopping centers do we need when there are empty ones lined all over Cobb and Dekalb county? And we definitely do not need any more apartments.
By BobG
March 16, 2006 02:56 PM | Link to this
Development, including mixed-use, is not bad. Too much of it, and in the wrong place, is.
By Sabrina
March 17, 2006 11:08 AM | Link to this
Rick, this was a great article.
This community is clearly for people with money and/or their own small business. If they can’t put a large employer in the middle of it, people like myself, will never live there. I can’t picture any 17 story corporate office in the middle of all this, at least not the one I work in. The traffic alone, with our employees, would make the home owners move out. I guess they will have extra parking for those who can’t afford to live there or those of us who just want to shop there.
I wonder how many of the new residents buying into this property, actually lived in Suwanee before their purchase.
By Keith Shewbert
March 18, 2006 10:35 AM | Link to this
Rick,
Thanks for your reporting on Gwinnett. The example you give of Lum Howell Park in Norcross leaves the impression that only wealthy folks can live in the downtown area. In fact within easy walking distance of downtown Norcross are residences ranging from 120,000 to 700,000. Part of most LCI studies that embrace live/work/play communities stress the need for a wide range of housing price points. Anyone wanting to enjoy and contribute to the Norcross community is welcome and will find a residence that is affordable and safe.
Thanks,
Keith Shewbert
By Michael H. Smith
March 18, 2006 10:49 AM | Link to this
Something that hasn’t been brought to fore thus far, though commentaries from Mr. Woodsmall and Sabrina are right on the money “literally”, is this small fact prevalently exercised throughout our capitalist market. Anything of “proven success”, and by terminology “proven success” as in this case, equates into a high monetary return on investment reflected in the yield based upon consumer acceptance and appetite to buy — or simply put, a very highly profitable venture where high population density per-acre means “BIG BUCKS”. Problem is the construction sector is no different from any other greedy business sector when it comes to capitalizing on a “proven success”, which Bob G calls “done right”. So development will simply follow this high yield trend for years in reproducing one high density project after another high density project sprawling ever onward like up$cale kudzu on designer-steroids consuming everything in its path. However it is at this point, as the Dirt-e old man has rightly stated in his reckoning of low density verse high density development, “All in all you can just call it sprawl, Y’all!”
Live, work and play is a concept — one that has very real drawbacks — which should follow its biggest advocate former King Roy E. Barnes into an early retirement and like that movie Rick doesn’t like, it too should be “ ‘GONE’ with the wind ” of change carried-off a drift into the abyss as just another failed way of life created for and by an aristocracy of elitists, not so unlike the other one which once built upon the backs of slaves and manipulated commoners.
The Beav would have it no other way, so what ever is the poor Beav to do Mr. Badie?