The City of Sandy Springs, and the rest of metro Atlanta, has drawn in a lot of people. Some say we are full and need to slow down growth. One explicit sign that we are not full is the ongoing school closures due in part to enrollment below capacity.
This is happening across the metro area, so it is not the fault of any one school system. Spalding Drive Elementary in Sandy Springs closed last year. As the saying goes, demographics are destiny.
School closures are an inevitable downstream response to declining enrollment, including predicted enrollment. Child Lens, a report from the Playing Out organization, offers a way out.
By focusing planning on children we can find innovative strategies to keep schools open, help everyone else, and sustain growth across the metro area.
There are too many cars, not too many people
Credit: Vladimir Shklovsky
Credit: Vladimir Shklovsky
Per the housing presentation at the Feb. 5 City Council retreat, Sandy Springs’ housing market has pushed thousands of residents to leave the city.
Households have tended to get older as they stay in their homes over time, i.e., fewer school-age children remain. City zoning blocks construction of additional housing.
Also, existing homeowners are losing property value because that zoning blocks developers who would pay more for land if they could build commercial, multiunit residential or even houses with smaller lots.
This systematic housing scarcity disproportionately blocks families with young children from moving in because they need extra bedrooms and statistically they have the least money available to outbid others for housing.
One of the common objections to denser residential construction is that it will cause worse traffic. More broadly, a lot of the feeling of being full is tied to too many cars, not too many people.
The ongoing process to form a new Transportation Master Plan (TMP) for Sandy Springs is a good place to start disentangling these concerns.
The same old emphasis on enabling more driving will be increasingly costly over time and continue to exclude children. Instead of spending $60 million mostly to widen a short stretch of Hammond Drive to support more vehicle traffic, the city should work with MARTA to reestablish discontinued bus routes, build new bike lanes and launch initiatives across city government to make the city less reliant on cars.
Focus on transit to stem car crashes and pollution
Credit: City of Sandy Springs
Credit: City of Sandy Springs
The TMP should be designed in conjunction with new dense housing plans so that new residents can use alternate modes of transportation.
That will both help to reduce traffic and also decrease the cost of living. For example, Brian Goldstone’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “There is No Place for Us” (a nonfiction book about five working families in metro Atlanta who struggled to afford rent) documents one family who moved to Sandy Springs.
One unexpected cost was the need to buy a car to get to work. Blocking construction cannot stop congestion. Most daytime traffic in Sandy Springs is non-resident drivers coming in for work, etc.
The Georgia Department of Transportation (GDOT) prioritizes using state roads going through Sandy Springs to move drivers between neighboring municipalities. If those drivers stay on Interstate 285, I-400 and Roswell Road, they cause a lot of crashes that Sandy Springs first responders must attend to, and they emit pollution harming residents, especially children, at all of the schools beside highways.
When they use local roads to cut through to their destinations they cause traffic there too.
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
Also, driving offenses are the most frequent form of crime in the city. Speeding is so common that the sheer number of complaints from speeders about a couple school zone speed cameras led to multiple City Council discussions last year. The topic of these meetings, rather than the obvious need to install more speed cameras around all of our schools, was to analyze the Sandy Springs Police Department’s procedures to make sure they were being fair to speeders. Crashes in Sandy Springs cost $650 million per year.
Shifting transportation spending away from cars and toward enabling children to safely and independently play and visit friends in our city, and allowing housing construction so that more children can live in our city, will improve lives for children and help keep our schools open. But it is also a path toward residents of all ages having better and less car-dependent lives.
A city where current residents can age in place and live independently if they cannot drive, and their children can find homes of their own one day. A city with thriving schools. A city that will be desirable to new businesses, in part because their employees will move here as well. Which future will we choose?
Vladimir Shklovsky is a father of three in Sandy Springs who would rather be riding bikes with his family.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
