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Sunday, August 26, 2007
Development has no rhyme or reason
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
If you need a prescription filled, pharmacies along a short stretch of Lawrenceville Highway aim to please.
A Walgreens is under construction at the corner of Beaver Ruin Road and Lawrenceville Highway. Just three miles west sits another Walgreens at the juncture of Rockbridge Road and Lawrenceville Highway. And a little farther down the road a CVS Pharmacy operates.
If there’s a rhyme or reason to all this, I’m at wits’ end. Then again, this is Gwinnett, where, when it comes to land use and development, we pull up short on common sense and balance.
When it comes to building, practically anything goes.
Drive around.
It’s not unusual to see an existing strip mall with plenty of space to lease. Yet across the street, or right next door, another complex is going up. When it’s complete, it will offer more of the same: nail salons, wing joints and dry cleaners. On Duluth Highway at Boggs Road, a cleaners is opening up even though two more are within a block of it in either direction. Typical. Unimaginative. Maddening, yet oh-so-common.
Now we have a situation in Duluth where residents oppose a proposed Wal-Mart Supercenter. The big-box store would be located on Peachtree Industrial Boulevard, near the intersections of Sugarloaf Parkway and Chattahoochee Drive. Opponents say two Wal-Marts already exist within eight miles of the site in question. The company, though, says there’s a demand for a third store. That’s a lot of Wal-Marts.
Residents, understandably, are spitting mad.
They attended a meeting of Duluth’s Zoning Board of Appeals on Wednesday night to voice their dismay. Wal-Mart — which had withdrawn a request for variances from city designs — wasn’t even on the agenda.
But here’s the rub, and it partially explains why we now have these residents waging war against a retail giant.
The site that Wal-Mart wants to build its superstore on has been zoned commercial for several years. Somewhere down the line, though, city leaders saw fit to “down zone” that designation so that houses could be built in the area. In essence, their decision allowed residential construction to encroach upon an area that had originally been zoned for light industrial use, until its most recent designation as a commercial corridor.
And that’s classic Gwinnett, the spot zoning/rezoning capitol. Sense of balance is a misnomer. Development just happens with scant rhyme or reason. It’s why we are inundated with cookie-cutter strip malls and stand-alone stores that appear inconsistent with their surroundings.
And why we have so many pharmacies within a short stretch of Lawrenceville Highway.
— Rick Badie’s column appears on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Contact him at 770-263-3875 or e-mail rbadie@ajc.com.
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