Kempner: Atlanta’s dreams of a floating city

Related coverage:

Find Matt on Facebook (facebook.com/mattkempnercolumnist) and Twitter (@MattKempner) or email him at mkempner@ajc.com.

Downtown Atlanta boosters have trotted out a whopping big plan to make intown better by making more of it.

The idea: Cover up three-quarters of a mile of the Downtown Connector, essentially making it a tunnel. On the newly created land above, install parks, big buildings, shops and restaurants, happy water things, millennials, kids with kites, dogs with Frisbees and grandpas with ice cream cones (or so the renderings show).

The thinking, laid out in a new 113-page analysis, is that this will vaporize the "blight" that boosters say exists between a booming Midtown and a blossoming Downtown. If it all works out, more Midtowners will walk downtown. And more visitors and workers Downtown will skip Uber and stroll northward.

They call the proposal “The Stitch,” which is not supposed to make you think of an annoying muscle cramp but rather the idea of pulling together Downtown and Midtown.

I think of it more like The Big Float, because who hasn’t stewed in Atlanta traffic and fantasized about floating above it all.

It’s wonderful to dream big. That’s what city leaders should do.

Until you see the price tag and have to figure out if it’s all worth it.

The cost for this one is a little fuzzy. It might be about $300 million, according to where I found it on page 113 of the study. But it’s early, and I’m sure that figure will grow a bunch. The government – which ultimately means you and I – will certainly be asked to pitch in some money if the idea survives.

A sweaty walkabout

So I took a sweltering afternoon walk with Jennifer Ball, a vp of planning and economic development for Central Atlanta Progress, the nonprofit of mostly business leaders that commissioned the study.

I questioned the study’s description of the area.

“Blight is a strong word,” she acknowledged.

Then she pointed out what she called “dead spaces”: a few vacant buildings, unused lots, street-level parking. There’s the long-unused brick Medical Arts Building topped with graffiti. The “butt end” of an ugly parking deck gaping at the 350,000 daily drivers on the interstate. Farther back is a closed Methodist center where the railing is wrapped with coils of razor wire.

Ball made sure I also noticed a cell tower, a small strip club (I mean, “adult fantasy bar”), a profusion of chain-link fences and an updraft of noise from the interstate.

“That’s what breaks down the experience that it is fun to walk around downtown,” Ball told me.

(Well, that and the random smell of urine in alleys and, in certain stretches, lots of homeless folks living life on the streets.)

This is in one of the biggest economic corridors in the Southeast, around where no less than Peachtree Street crosses I-75/I-85 into downtown.

“It’s underutilized,” Ball said. “These are not what we think are the highest and best uses in the core of our city.”

Instead boosters want “where every block is activated, every nook and cranny.”

“In Atlanta, our core business is growth.”

According to the recent study, despite its pretty renderings of people frolicking, “The Stitch is not a park project.” It’s a redevelopment effort “to foster investment, encourage development and increase real estate values.”

Paying to build

So nearby property owners should be happy with the idea. And it gives developers a shot at paying the federal government to build on any new ground over the interstate, which I’m told should generate more tax revenue for the city.

Apparently all that private building would be attracted to the area by the new green space and pretty stuff (ironic, right?), plus the extensions of three nearby streets and maybe better access to MARTA’s Civic Center Station, which straddles the highway.

The case for The Stitch would require some reconciling with reality. The study bemoans the current view interstate motorists have of the city. But how much better will it get when they’re in a tunnel?

As for the ugly stuff that already lines the interstate, well, couldn’t that be dealt with in a less expensive way that doesn’t involve burying 15 lanes or so of interstate?

City leaders also will have to wrestle with whether we really need more space in downtown Atlanta. Some office towers still have excessive vacancy. Plenty of lots remain unused. In Midtown, developer John Dewberry has a trove of mostly undeveloped land.

CAP president A.J. Robinson said downtown is “probably in better shape than we have been in 50 years, but so is everybody else,” he told me. “We have to take a step to stay up with everybody else.”

He’s sometimes made the walk from his downtown offices to Midtown.

“It’s not a real pleasant experience,” he said.

So I asked: Is The Stitch worth the price?

“Fair question,” he said.