Next Stop: Atlantic Station

A new infill development in Atlanta proves that many people want to live in real neighborhoods.

In a city renowned for sprawling highways and long commutes from the vast low density housing of what Joel Garreau has called “edge city” due to its overwhelming suburban makeup, Atlanta seems like an unlikely home for a successful, inner city brownfield development.

Atlantic Station, developed by Development Design Group of Baltimore, is on the former site of Atlantic Steel Company. The development is built on 130 acres and will provide homes for 10,000 residents and employment for 30,000 more and six million square feet of office space. That’s just over half a square kilometer! That is density, and it’s proof that density is not a bad thing, because Atlantic Station is fast becoming the hottest real estate in Atlanta.

Like many sun-belt cities, Atlanta has experienced amazing growth in the last 25 years. It was the second most popular destination for rented U-Hauls. Unfortunately, much of the growth happened at the edges of the ever-expanding city edges with new highways to get to new city edges. In his book The City in Mind, James Howard Kunstler called the result a “hairball”.

Many of the new residents fueling the growth were coming from “rust belt” cities of the northeast. The northeasterners were coming from denser cities built with real neighbourhoods and transit alternatives. The new Atlantians perceived the far-flung edges of “edge city” and its two-hour daily commute as not an option.

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