No matter who is due the credit, Buckhead has evolved as the address of choice, where millennials are staking out their occupancy, and where new shopping options are geared to attract their credit cards. Pedestrian activity is commonplace, and start-up businesses will challenge the mindsets of yesterday’s leaders.
In the 1940s and 50s, our daily newspapers described this northern collection of neighborhoods as Atlanta’s “Bedroom Community.” It was in this unincorporated portion of Fulton County that a large number of leaders in Georgia’s capital city spent family nights before heading south to the central downtown, where the skyline of office buildings housed their businesses.
There are no witnesses remaining, but the history books report that back in the 1830s, crossroads like Peachtree Road at Roswell Road, and the ferry roads like Paces Ferry Road at the Chattahoochee, were occupied by Cherokee and Creek Indian trading posts.
In 1952, most of these rolling woodlands — north to what is now Sandy Springs — were annexed into the city of Atlanta by then-Mayor Bill Hartsfield.
In 1988, the formidable Buckhead Coalition was created, a nonprofit civic group consisting of CEOs of major area firms, now limited to 100, with almost a third that many on a wait list. The coalition arranged, with the Atlanta Regional Commission, for official boundaries encircling 45 neighborhoods.
Buckhead today is hardly just a place where people sleep. It boasts of 29 million square feet of office space, 5,300 hotel rooms, 1,400 retail units, and other commercial development. It’s apparent that jobs are here, and many residents can — and do — walk to work. Buckhead’s 80,000 residents included an 11,904-person increase in the 2010 census over the 2000 count; the city of Atlanta as a whole increased by only 2,393 in that time.
Jay Bookman wrote in a recent Atlanta Journal-Constitution column that “according to economist Joe Cortright, almost all of metro Atlanta’s increase in young, college-educated professionals has been concentrated within the region’s inner urban core.” That’s Buckhead. And they are a welcome addition. Even if corporate Atlanta isn’t growing, the area between the Amtrak station and the northern city line is doing so at a healthy pace and with an admirable profile.
There has been talk from time to time of Buckhead becoming a separate city, but such a short-sighted move would be very costly to the entire area. Buckhead occupies about 20 percent of Atlanta’s land area. It has close to 20 percent of Atlanta’s population, but pays over 45 percent of Atlanta’s ad valorem taxes. Take that away from the city, and cause Atlanta to bankrupt, and you would bring all growth to a standstill.
It’s obvious Buckhead is much more than a bedroom community. The fact is, we can all brag that Atlanta is one of the few cities that has two downtowns, because Buckhead is one by any definition. Although we compete when opportunities appear appropriate, there is no question but that the original central downtown around Five Points is, and must continue to be, a very important part of Atlanta. And it behooves us in this northern quadrant to be there for it when needed, as it needs to be in relation to Buckhead.
The old downtown houses federal, state, county and city offices, not to mention tourist and sport facilities, plus Georgia State University’s ever-blossoming campus. Atlanta’s new downtown of Buckhead is the indisputable shopping mecca of the Southeast and the very best in Georgia’s dining, as well as much of Atlanta’s nightlife. Midtown, as its very nomenclature defines, connects us beautifully as Atlanta’s stage for the performing arts.
The mission of the Buckhead Coalition is to “nurture the quality of life of those who live, visit, work and play in the Buckhead part of Atlanta,” and its members are to be congratulated for their altruistic civic service on its behalf, for everyone’s benefit. If the reader was here in 1988, the skyline had not even started to sprout. Now we have 9,438 rental apartments under development, representing a 75-percent increase over the last three years since the economy turned around.
This is a success story, a community of both bedrooms and board rooms.
Former Atlanta Mayor Sam Massell is president of the Buckhead Coalition.
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