Gerald Pouncey’s first interaction with the Beltline was soaked in diesel and doubt.
The environmental and industrial attorney remembers inspecting land along northeast Atlanta’s abandoned railway in the early 2000s. A developer client of his believed the real estate would soon be valuable.
But Pouncey said the land’s potential was hard to envision through the lingering fumes of fuel that had been sprayed as a crude herbicide on the tracks for decades.
“It was tough to imagine that it would be anything like what it is,” he said. “At the time, that corridor was an area you did not want to be at night — sometimes didn’t want to be there in the daytime.”
A decade later, Pouncey’s daughter would live in an apartment along that same corridor, which became some of the hottest real estate in the Southeast. The Beltline’s Eastside Trail had radically altered the area, connecting neighborhoods and creating Atlanta’s most prominent pedestrian live-work-play district.
This December marked 20 years since the ambitious rails-to-trails loop first got public financing through a tax allocation district. Project backers credit the TAD — an area where property tax revenue growth is allocated to pay for infrastructure within its boundaries — with helping the project avoid financing snags, clean up the polluted railways and consistently deliver new trails.
Mayor Andre Dickens is on a campaign to extend the city’s TADs, potentially a $5 billion effort. Some academics and residents say areas like the Beltline TAD have accomplished their mission and don’t require renewal, while supporters say the Beltline’s mission has evolved and is just beginning.
“This is not just a wilderness walk for people. This is about community and economic impact,” said Clyde Higgs, president and CEO of Atlanta Beltline Inc., the public-private entity in charge of the project. “We just use the trail as a means to an end.”
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com
The entire 22-mile loop is on track to be complete by 2030, and Higgs said the Beltline’s private investment, jobs creation and affordable housing goals are ahead of their respective targets. Plans for an adjoining light rail system to the trail — the central notion of the Beltline’s original vision — have yet to materialize and remain steeped in controversy and revisions.
Whether the trail’s concrete has set or is yet to be poured, development has flocked to areas close to the Beltline. The Eastside and Westside trails have developed their own skylines, and nodes of development have emerged Southside as well. Real estate prices have skyrocketed anywhere in the trail’s vicinity.
Shirley Franklin, Atlanta’s mayor during the early days of Beltline planning, said the project’s impacts on Atlanta are obvious and far-reaching, touching many neighborhoods overlooked for decades. The development of Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport is the only one she says compares to the Beltline in terms of complexity and effect on the city’s trajectory.
The Beltline’s success, however, came at the cost of speculative real estate grabs, displacement of longtime residents and accusations of gentrification. Franklin said the Beltline’s positive impacts — and efforts to mitigate its shortcomings — aren’t over yet.
“Rome wasn’t built in a day, and city disinvestment that took place over 100 years doesn’t get solved in 20 years,” Franklin said.
Old land, new vistas
The graffiti-plastered Krog Street Tunnel and lush Piedmont Park may as well have been in different cities before the Beltline.
The grit of the former is a relic of south Atlanta’s industrial roots, while the latter is a longtime gathering spot for the city’s upper crust. Getting from one to the other was a time-consuming task of navigating car-clogged surface streets.
But now, it’s a popular 2-mile walk that winds through a half-dozen neighborhoods and past thousands of homes, offices, shops and restaurants. Longtime Atlanta resident Darin Givens said seeing the Beltline’s Eastside Trail come to life reshaped how many saw the city’s geography and connectivity.
“You’ve got these vistas of the city that you’ve never seen before,” said Givens, co-founder of ThreadATL, a nonprofit advocacy group that promotes good urbanism in Atlanta. “It really changed our entire perspective on the city fairly immediately.”
Ryan Gravel was among the first to see that vision as something possible. Often known as “The Beltline Guy,” Gravel’s 1999 master’s thesis at Georgia Tech was the blueprint for the trail loop, laying out a plan to convert defunct rail lines into a light rail system surrounded by paths.
Gravel, an architect and urban planner, helped cultivate a groundswell of grassroots support for his idea in the early 2000s. During a public meeting where supporters were trying to get the Beltline placed on the region’s transportation project list, Gravel remembers overhearing conversations that he describes as crucial to the trail’s success.
“They were talking about ‘Our project. Our project.’ And I had no idea who they were,” Gravel said. “But it dawned on me that the power of the project was that the people claimed it as their own.”
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
In December 2005, the city created the Beltline TAD as the project’s primary source of funding. Many companies and nonprofits have also financially supported the Beltline, including the PATH Foundation and James M. Cox Foundation, a nonprofit arm of Cox Enterprises, which owns The Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Over 20 years, the TAD has raised about $750 million and helped spur 12.8 miles of main-loop concrete trail paving alongside 10.3 miles of connector trails. The TAD is among eight in Atlanta set to expire in 2030 unless renewed by the City Council.
The real estate community often compares the Beltline to beachfront or waterfront property because it’s so desirable. Egbert Perry, the CEO of longtime Atlanta developer Integral Group, said that would not have been possible without public investment up front.
“You put millions (of dollars) worth of public investment to create Atlanta’s waterfront,” he said. “It’s the foresight to do the Beltline that laid the foundation that made private investment possible.”
‘Surprise and delight’
There are billions of dollars in development along the Beltline, but few are better known than Ponce City Market.
A former Sears catalog facility, the expansive building was converted by developer Jamestown into a mixed-use market with a food hall, shops and loft offices in 2014. The project’s second phase was recently completed, adding a timber-wood office building and two residential towers.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / AJC
Matt Bronfman, principal and CEO of Jamestown, touts that Ponce City Market is the second most common Uber destination after the Atlanta airport. He said the market aims to attract 10,000 visitors each day, or 3.6 million per year.
He said the project, which includes about 700,000 square feet of offices, has carved a unique niche for companies, especially when it comes to employee parking.
“Everybody wants a ton of parking … but something has happened at Ponce (City Market) that I’m not aware of happening anywhere else in Atlanta, if not the Sun Belt,” Bronfman said. “About a year later, (tenants) call us up and say, ‘We didn’t need that many parking spaces. We’d like to give 10 or 20% back because our employees are living close to Ponce and they’re walking, they’re biking or they’re scootering.’”
The Beltline’s developed corridors have become pedestrian havens in a city known for suburban sprawl and traffic.
Passersby can play pianos under bridges, peruse shipping containers converted into storefronts and try to spot miniature tiny doors placed in nooks and crannies throughout the trail. The trail has also become a playground for every type of wheeled vehicle imaginable, from bikes and e-scooters to unicycles and pet-carrying prams.
“Walking the Beltline is full of surprise and delight,” Bronfman said. “There’s just always interesting things taking place on the Beltline.”
Growing pains
But whimsy has its consequences, particularly for longtime residents.
Dan Immergluck, a professor emeritus of urban studies at Georgia State University, has spent much of his career studying green gentrification and affordable housing. The Beltline has become one of his prime examples of the potential downsides of making overlooked neighborhoods desirable for high-income residents at the expense of those who already lived there.
“If you did searches for either apartments or homes on websites like Zillow, in Atlanta they had a checkbox for ‘Near the Beltline’ early on,” Immergluck said.
Home price appreciation along the Beltline fast outpaced the rest of the city. Luxury apartments and townhome projects started popping up like mushrooms after a spring rain. The upward financial pressure ended up displacing many longtime residents who couldn’t afford the increased property tax or rent payments.
“It was sold as something that was supposed to be something that’s great for the residents of Atlanta, but it’s only been great for a certain class of residents,” said Kamau Franklin, founder of Community Movement Builders, an activist group focused on Black communities. “And for the rest of folks, it’s been something that’s pushed them outside of the city.”
Higgs pushes back on the criticism, highlighting how the Beltline has adopted programs focused at helping offset property tax increases for legacy residents. He does, however, concede that the Beltline in its early years did not do enough to battle displacement and price appreciation.
Credit: Natrice Miller
Credit: Natrice Miller
“It kind of stuns people at the end of the day, like ‘Ah, I don’t want to gentrify that community,’” Higgs said. “But the option is not to leave it as-is. … (Gentrification) is an amorphous blob of a word that you don’t manage. You manage displacement.”
Gravel resigned from a Beltline board and effectively cut ties with the trail loop’s development in 2016 over concerns that affordability was being overlooked. The trail had become a victim of its own success, he said.
“The Beltline has a ton of lessons of what to do,” Gravel said. “Unfortunately, there’s also some lessons of what not to do, and that’s just as important.”
‘How cities evolve’
The Beltline became one of the country’s earliest and most extensive test cases for converting former rail lines into trails.
Because it encircles much of Atlanta and runs through 45 neighborhoods, its impact is also unparalleled compared with similar projects in other cities, such as the High Line in New York City or the 606 in Chicago. Immergluck said, “The Beltline is a bit of a unique animal.”
That has made early missteps obvious in hindsight, such as the foregone opportunity for the Beltline to buy land alongside the trail corridor before prices increased. Immergluck said banking land after the Great Recession could have given the city more leverage in developing affordable housing — a strategy the Beltline has adopted in recent years.
Since 2020, the Beltline has purchased 87 acres of land for various housing, commercial and mixed-use projects, many of which have a focus on below-market-rate rents.
“Buy as much land as you can and get it into the public umbrella,” Higgs said as advice for other rails-to-trails projects.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
The balance between trail paving and more robust transit infrastructure also remains a hot topic. Givens, the ThreadATL co-founder, said the Beltline won’t be truly accessible for everyone unless it provides options more in line with its original light rail vision.
“I’m very aware of how essential mass transit, buses and trains can be for providing equitable access to the city for everyone,” said Givens, who has a neurological condition that prevents him from driving or biking. “I live it every day.”
Higgs said the Beltline remains committed to new transit modes, adding that a one-method solution is likely no longer feasible. He said the trail’s future likely includes a mix of transit types, such as infill MARTA stations, segments of light rail and autonomous transit vehicles like those soon to be tested by startup Beep.
“We are still 100% committed to transit,” he said. “We want to make sure that it is a system that stands the test of time, not just what feels good today.”
Credit: Ben Gray
Credit: Ben Gray
Gravel, frustrated by the lack of light rail progress, said the Beltline is still a step in the right direction for Atlanta’s urban development. The fabric of all great cities is woven from ambitious plans, including those that came to fruition, fell to the wayside or morphed along the way.
“This is how cities evolve,” Gravel said. “This messiness that we’re experiencing is exactly how cities have always evolved.”
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