Lindbergh City Center

Periodically someone will ask me about the Lindbergh City Center development around the Lindbergh MARTA station, and I usually have to plead ignorance.  It was among the earliest "Smart Growth" projects in Atlanta, so early in the development I followed events closely, particularly the negotiations with the various neighborhood groups.  The project began with a great deal of fanfare as Bellsouth announced that it was going to begin moving its offices to more central locations around the MARTA stations, and that facilitating mixed use around the Lindbergh MARTA station was one of its objectives.

Since then we've had the more fast tracked Smart Growth of Atlantic Station, the more consistent New Urbanism of Glenwood Park, and the interesting high profile hybrid the Edgewood Retail District.  Consequently I lost track of the progress around Lindbergh City Center.

On one of the email forums associated with New Urbanism Lee Sobel of the EPA posted a link to an article in the online commercial real estate newsletter The Slatin Report entitled Smart Growth, Slowly (click here to go to the article) which provides a good succinct summary of the progress since I last paid any attention to the Lindbergh City Center.

Here are a few other links to information about Lindbergh City Center:

CarterNet's executive summary on the project.

CarterNet's master plan  (with a link to a PDF document with further details)

American Public Transit Association's announcement of the ribbon cutting ceremony for phase I

A few photos of the MARTA station itself, from  world.nycsubway.org a site I've just discovered
which seems to be devoted to subway systems, and which has a lot of good photos.

Comments

[BRENT]

Beautiful work..........

[Dave]

It is good to see this project moving forward again, and I'm very curious to see how the residential element turns out.

That said, I just posted a comment at SSP where I laid out the main criticism of the project... basically, the developers bent over backwards in order to make sure that the project was easy to drive to, which really defeats the point of TOD. This is even true of MARTA's own offices (which are at Lindbergh), where most of the high-level staff drives.

With future TOD projects we really need to keep a close eye on this kind of thing. It is just really hard to do a good TOD when half the land right by the station is devoted to parking.

[Tommy O]

I own property on Lindbers and Ptre hills ave. any advice on the realestate

[Ryan]

As of the last two weeks, retail inside the BellSouth towers appears to finally be under construction. MARTA's apartments are coming along nicely as well.

[Buy Online Rx]

So is rural or urban life more sustainable? The question itself is probably misleading. Just as it is apparent that cities will have major difficulties in the coming years, it is also obvious that striking out for the wilderness on one’s own alone is naïve; very few people are actually able to be completely self-sufficient, even if they are able to tolerate living that way.