W
hen I moved
into the City of
Atlanta from an
inner suburb 14
years ago, my
Southwest Atlanta
neighborhood
turned out to be less than half a mile from
what would become the Atlanta BeltLine
(
)
.
At the time, many of the
city’s disused rail lines were completely
obscured by kudzu and refuse. In other
places, homeless people lived on the tracks
in encampments. Atlanta had grown away
from the early days when it was
known as Terminus due to its con-
fluence of rail lines and their impor-
tance for daily life and commerce.
Today, a decade and a half after
Georgia Tech graduate student
Ryan Gravel laid out a simple,
elegant vision for those tracks in his
master’s thesis, it’s safe to say that
Atlanta is once again being shaped
by the convergence of railroad
tracks and development.
The term
transformative
is used
regularly to describe the Atlanta
BeltLine, an ambitious work-in-progress
that eventually will become a 22-mile
loop of public transit, trails and parks
on a former rail and industrial corridor
through the inner core of the city. Progress
on the 30-year project includes the popu-
lar 2.5-mile Eastside Trail, as well as three
spur trails, a bridge replacement, five new
parks, and the environmental and physical
groundwork for future transit.
Atlanta is a city of neighborhoods with
a small urban core, and the BeltLine cor-
ridor connects some 45 neighborhoods of
wildly varying economics, development
and characters. City residents have a ten-
dency to think of themselves as living in
one of four quadrants: the prosperous and
bustling Northeast, the quirky and hip
Southeast, the overlooked but culturally
vibrant Southwest and the bleak but rap-
idly redeveloping Northwest. For decades,
these areas have led separate lives, cut off by
urban renewal projects and interstate high-
ways. It’s hard to overstate the potential
impact of being able to travel conveniently
crosstown between neighborhoods and
quadrants on public transit or trails. It has
certainly captured the public imagination.
Public enthusiasm for the idea was a
key factor in establishing the basic funding
mechanism for the BeltLine project—a
form of tax increment financing called a
Tax Allocation District, or TAD. In 2005,
the City of Atlanta, Fulton County and
Atlanta Public Schools approved the TAD,
agreeing to freeze their tax base at the 2005
level of property tax revenue for the next
25
years. The increment, or growth, in
property tax revenues will be used to cre-
ate $1.7 billion in bonding capacity over
25
years, with the rest of the project to be
funded through local investments, includ-
ing private contributions and federal funds.
But just how much is the project
impacting the city? Go to the Eastside
Trail, a BeltLine segment, and close
your eyes. Even without looking at the
apartments, restaurants and small busi-
nesses popping up, your ears will give
you a sense of the change. That’s because
every few minutes, you’re likely to hear
the “squeak, squeak, squeak” of a bicycle
someone has pulled out of the basement
after years of disuse. Atlanta hasn’t always
been the most walkable, bikeable city, but
it’s getting there in large part due to the
growing influence of the BeltLine.
Fast Forward
BeltLine advocates have always had lofty
goals, aiming not just for rail-trails and
public transit on the route but also for
economic development, parks and afford-
able housing. Since 1999, the project has
been responsible for the addition of five
and a half miles of paved trail, seven miles
of hiking trail and seven new parks. And
although the loop is nowhere near com-
plete, the BeltLine’s imprint on civic life,
Jim Brown
Ryan Gravel
Christopher T. Martin
On the Eastside Trail: The residents of
Atlanta are embracing the BeltLine for active
transportation, recreation and social synergy.
Christopher T. Martin
rails
to
trails
u
fall.14
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