Results for “crestwood hills”

it’s expensive but plenty of other cities do it, including smaller ones with less money. i would pay the increased taxes to see burying of utilities along our most visible corridors, like roswell rd, piedmont rd, 14th street. atlanta has far too much visual blight in my opinion, after having lived in other places. it should be prettier than it is with the tree cover and hills, but it’s marred by terrible roads and wires everywhere – traffic lights on wires, distribution lines, transmission lines, all of the telephone wires…

That train track is not only a major freight thoroughfare and home to the Amtrak Crescent, but provided a blueprint for MARTA expansion into unincorporated NE Dekalb that would have followed a Emory/CDC, North Druid Hills, Northlake/Tucker route and was killed by the original NIMBYs in the mid-90s.

I always think of some Benny Hill situation when envisioning 72 homes-worth of folks, all going to work at the same time from a gated ‘community’. And into North Druid Hills…

"what’s bad about upzoning by a successful mode of transit (true full fat BRT)."

Because it will kill the property value of homes in the low-slung, well-preserved areas and bankrupt people. And what for? In LA we have plenty of space on the corridors to add all the housing we will ever need. No need to go into the R1 zones (especially not the historic ones, HPOZ or otherwise). They didn’t do that in Seattle, did they?

Also we need SFRs in the city for all the rich, in-migrating tech middle-managers and above to buy. They aren’t going to bust their asses and deal with all the taxes and traffic in LA to live in a "unit". If they don’t have a home to buy in the city they will move farther out and just add to the traffic jams. Eventually they will say screw it, tech pulls out of LA and then what? Where will the tax base come from to pay for all the free stuff the state and local governments want to give out?

The situation in SF is different. They don’t have miles and miles of run-down commercial corridors to re-develop like we do. One-size-fits-all rules for upzoning are not fair to LA when we are adding plenty of density the right way. That’s why the State Senator representing Pasadena killed the bill. Have you seen all the construction going on in Pasadena?

Moving forward I could see 4-plexes allowed as in-fill in CA if they stick to current height requirements and if the infrastructure in the area can handle the additional traffic. But part of the deal would need to be that all HPOZs, and cities like LA and Pasadena, are exempt. I’m not here to make fans and will say places like Torrance and Beverly Hills haven’t done enough.

PS — I believe upzoning within a 1/4 mile of a regular bus stop is still allowed under SB 50. In SB 50 2.0 they relaxed the frequency rule, that’s it. Could be wrong on that.

"The mall’s "central location combined with easy highway and MARTA bus access," coupled with plentiful parking"

Everything is "central" to something depending on how you draw the circle, but this is literally on the "Perimeter." If this location is so central, why isn’t the mall thriving? Also, highway and bus access and a big surface parking lot do not describe positive aims of 21st century urban development. Where is the MARTA train and pedestrian/cycling access? I guess Emory Healthcare is in all sorts of subpar strip mall locations around the metro area, but I’m more interested in the university’s plans to develop a transit-oriented Midtown campus in order to break out of the Druid Hills bubble and better integrate itself into the life of the city.

At what point does a building surviving ~100 years of Atlanta’s "tear it down already" mentality make a building significant in its own right, though? The Kimball House is gone, Loews Grand Theatre is gone, Terminal Station is gone, The Carnegie Library is gone, Union Station is gone, and practically every antebellum house ITP is gone. The grand "hills to die on" are practically extinct, so the smaller, perfectly good historic buildings in this city are largely what we have left to protect. It’s always a "next time" until next time actually comes around.

For what it’s worth, the more notable ones still in peril are Gaines Hall (as good as gone now), the Butler Street YMCA, and the Rufus M. Rose house, as well as quite a few older industrial buildings in the Adair Park / Mechanicsville area.

Just the best architecture in this country, the 1920s, but hey, all these jerks love big, gaudy and awful. The city should put a stop to this right now. They’ve ruined Bev Hills already.

i agree with you 100%. The ONLY thing that makes no fault eviction bans and anti-gouging rent control tolerable, for most of us, is that there is no vacancy control. Remember, Costa-Hawkins forbids cities from adding vacancy control if it wasn’t there before 1995. Even if Costa-Hawkins were repealed it wouldn’t automatically mean vacancy control. The cities would have to approve that and few ever have, except I believe Beverly Hills?

While I’m not a fan of rent control in general, I don’t think the way it’s been allowed to exist in CA has been that bad for owners. If you compared two buildings, one under LA’s RSO and the other not and both at market rents, there would be almost no difference in the value/price. Sure there are a lot of cases where the RSO building has way lower rents than an identical non-RSO, but that’s because the owner didn’t raise the rents much, for many years, by his own decision.

When he goes to sell the new buyer is going to pay less than he would have if the rents had been increased more frequently and kept closer to market (which AB 1482 allows you to do). The new owner is happy because he didn’t pay very much for the building. Even an RSO landlord can go to market rent when someone moves out. The guy who really cleans up is the one who buys an RSO at a low price, because of several low rent tenants, and ends up turning over those units quickly to market rent, through normal human aging, job transfers or buyouts.

This happens all the time and is another reason RSO buildings, even with several low rent tenants, aren’t cheap in a high demand area like LA. Of course sometimes you lose that bet and end up with tenants who stay forever at those low rents. More risk means a slightly better return on the RSO building, a 4% cap rate instead of a 3%. AB 1482 isn’t going to change that dynamic much.

I could see the Supreme Court deciding that vacancy control, in a situation where the Ellis Act is also repealed, would be a "taking" because that truly would destroy property value and absolutely stop any new construction. You might as well go full commie at that point because no one is going to want to work. (If there was vacancy control with Ellis intact you would see thousands and thousands of units go TIC and wide-spread homelessness.)

So far the rent control we’ve seen wouldn’t come close to meeting that definition. But upzoning residential neighborhoods would because property values would plummet. See the point Justin_Junior makes below. This is why I like our checks & balances system — if the states, cities, developers and tenant groups on the West Coast get too greedy against homeowners/landlords, we would hope a more conservative court would protect our rights and reign them in. This is one reason I support Trump until a better alternative comes along.

Garden Hills, Loring Heights, Piedmont Heights, Chastain, and about 40 something other neighborhoods…

What is your source that any municipality in California allows relaxed parking minimums for buildings near mass transit?

Despite this being a Curbed national article, I place things in the framework of Los Angeles since that’s where I live. Not providing parking does impose an adverse externality on others, but: No pain, no gain. I am a firm believer that we need to transition our car-centric urban centers to become pedestrian and transit-encouraging. Part of that problem is not having enough physical housing, and part of not having enough physical housing are antiquated zoning laws requiring arbitrarily high parking requirements for all buildings, even those built in the densest areas. Koreatown in LA has 42,000 people per square mile. It has a subway. It’s as dense as parts of Manhattan. Yet they have the same parking minimums as West Hills whose density is 4,550 people per square mile.

I apologize if you thought I meant we need to remove parking minimums everywhere. Even at that though there is a case to be made for letting the market decide. Parking minimums are only part of the problem.

Do you think we need to both reduce car usage and build more physical housing? How do you propose we do that?