Fulton County has an image problem with its huge warehouse district: Its legitimate economic opportunities sometimes have been overshadowed by its undesirable qualities.
This has caused companies to bypass it and take their business across the Chattahoochee River to Cobb and Douglas counties, or get out of Fulton and relocate.
"We have had tenants who have been there for years and years and who decided to move across the river," said Tom Flanigan, ING Clarion asset manager. "I don't think it was taxes."
To attract new business and keep what it has, Fulton County is pushing a campaign designed to clean up what it says is the 10 percent of the boulevard that gives the rest of it a bad name.
For starters, code enforcers and police have targeted motels that allegedly were centers for sex and drug trades; three were closed for health and safety violations, and a fourth was sold to a new owner, who refurbished the property and secured a Days Inn franchise.
The new motel has posted rules in the lobby banning unregistered guests from rooms and requiring identification to reserve a room as a customer.
"We got rid of a hub of criminal activity," said Tom Phillips, county code enforcement administrator. "You can walk in there now and say, ‘I can stay here.' Two years ago you wouldn't have said that. You might not even have walked in there."
At its last meeting, the county commission banned truck drivers from parking their big rigs in vacant lots off the boulevard and using them as unofficial truck stops. "Truck stops, as you know, have a link to prostitution," Phillips said.
Even strip clubs such as Fannies' Cabaret are seeking a more orderly boulevard. Fannies' is trying to distance itself from prostitution, specifically the hookers who regularly have solicited the strip club's clientele when arriving and leaving. The club hired security to run the them off.
"It didn't used to be this way 15 years ago," said Thomas Madden, Fannies' Cabaret general manager.
Police have cracked down, making 107 prostitution arrests in the past two years compared to 41 in the three previous years, according to county statistics. The county is committed to restoring a clean-cut image to the boulevard's seven-mile roadway that runs from Fulton County Airport at Charlie Brown Field to Campbellton Road in south Fulton, according to Deputy County Manager Rob Hernandez.
The area has 89 million square feet of warehouse and commercial space but a county study released in March showed that several buildings and warehouses, developed in the 1960s and 1970s, are practically unusable. Seven properties are listed on the Georgia Hazardous Site Inventory, including five for the presence of cancer-causing vinyl chloride.
Noting its potential, the study described the boulevard as potentially one of the largest and most prestigious warehousing and transportation hubs east of the Mississippi River. "Today it may still be the largest, but it has lost much of its prestige," the report concluded.
Last month, the county used the area blight and vacant warehouses to have the district reclassified as an opportunity zone urban redevelopment area. That allows it to borrow $26 million from a federal bond program and give employers a $3,500 tax credit for each new job for 10 years. Hernandez said the county wants to use the bond money to install crime surveillance cameras in the area. A $100,000 federal grant already was secured to increase police patrols and hire seven officers specific for south Fulton.
"We're serious about this," Hernandez said. "We have put together everything we have available in our tool box to assist Fulton Industrial."
Satellite offices for county services and commissioners Emma Darnell and Bill Edwards have been set up to show the county is committed to improving the area. People have noticed. Companies recently either bought or leased separate industrial properties that cover a combined 260,000 square feet.
With upgrades, the area should be able to sell itself. It is located in the center of a metro area that promotes itself as a national transportation hub. Fulton Industrial offers a regional airport and is located close to Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport. Interstate 20 is located nearby, as is the Norfolk Southern Intermodal container shipping yard in Austell, an industrial area crisscrossed by railroad tracks.
A next step would be to develop a Community Improvement District, which has happened elsewhere in Fulton and in Cobb, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties. CIDs require commercial property owners to tax themselves to pay for development plans, transportation alternatives and security.
Boulevard activists so far have been unable to obtain 51-percent approval of the property owners to install a CID, which increases tax bills by three or four mills. Yet one man on board with this idea is Madden, the strip club manager, who recognizes that even the adult entertainment business needs better security.
"We have to keep it clean here," he said.
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