VaHi: Loved to Death
by Jack White
Virginia-Highland’s Master Plan became part of the city’s Comprehensive Development Plan in July of 2014. The plan was the result of a great deal of work in the community. Click here to see the Plan.
The initiatives in the Master Plan cover a wide range of topics and challenges. A few – like installing storm drain signage (“Only rain in this drain”) – need only coordination with the appropriate municipal agency. Some are longer-range planning issues awaiting full funding – the bike lanes along Kanuga Street and Virginia Avenue and supporting the Monroe Drive Complete Streets program. (Fixing Fire Station 19 was such a given that it didn’t make the plan.)
The Master Plan referred some topics for further study. Those include the concerns that citizens voiced during that process about the impacts of neighborhood redevelopment, often expressed as the fear of losing the very characteristics that made this community so attractive in the first place. (“VaHi is being loved to death” was a popular line.)
In the past, the only City of Atlanta mechanism for addressing such challenges was historic designation (“HD”), which was what the Atkins Park section of VaHi adopted after a nice discussion several years ago. Atkins Park was built as one subdivision over a few years, and HD appears to have worked well for them, as it has in several other neighborhoods.
Last fall some VaHi citizens organized their own look at HD for other portions of the neighborhood. That idea predictably produced both support and opposition; even more interestingly, it focused attention on another, more flexible approach (sometimes called – among other terms- an Urban Design District) that some planners and city officials suggested might be useful for neighborhoods like Virginia-Highland.
Such a concept isn’t new to the metro area; Hapeville and Roswell have versions. Such plans can be as simple as identifying five to ten special elements that typify a community: garage placements, front porches, height and lot coverage requirement, et al. Or they can address scale instead of specific design; it depends on what any given neighborhood’s defining features are and what the residents think is important.
Nomenclature aside, the question is whether any approach can be found that identifies and describes common construction elements – both ones that are widely desired and widely disliked – in a manner that both allows homeowners the flexibility to effectively and innovatively renovate and still preserve the essential characteristics of VaHi. Are there guidelines that work and still allow for the inevitably needed exceptions?
It’s a question worth asking and answering for several reasons. The first has already been mentioned; it was a very common comment in the Master Plan process.The second is that the current code is a mess. A large percentage of houses in our neighborhood do not conform to their own current zoning, a result that shreds the underlying logic of the approach and creates so many time-consuming variances that even the city has acknowledged that the entire zoning code needs to be re-written.
We welcome the idea (it’s way overdue), but that very lengthy process will not address the concerns our own residents have identified. If this neighborhood has certain features that deserve to be protected, there is no group more likely to know them than our own citizens.
We are living – and have lived – with design overlays for years, mostly without knowing it. VaHi’s commercial areas along North Highland have a zoning overlay: the Neighborhood Commercial (“NC”) districts. They allow flexibility in rebuilding and expansion (including building a full-story higher than current conditions) while maintaining many of the characteristics we associate with the area today: street-facing entrances, shop windows, walkable sidewalks, active street life, etc. The BeltLine overlay addresses similar features.
The VHCA board has asked Canvas Planning Group to lead an examination of potential responses to the redevelopment challenges that citizens have raised. Canvas’ founder, Aaron Fortner, has consulted with Virginia-Highland on several initiatives, including NC (Neighborhood Commercial), development at 10th and Monroe, the Master Plan, and many other related topics. All of his outreach work has been characterized by a measured pace and the inclusion of citizens in the process; it’s one of many such things he does very effectively.
As ever, deliberative and reflective will be the order of the day. Nothing else would match the democratic tradition in this neighborhood, or be effective in the end – nor has any board ever approached such challenges in any other way. The last two processes in VaHi – the Master Plan and the Neighborhood Commercial (NC) process – illustrate the process. There were a ton of chances and ways to be involved; that will be the case here too. The content of both ideas evolved and changed along the way; that’s what happens when there is good engagement on things that folks care about.
Beginning with analysis and discussion means something else, too: there are no pre-determined proposals or outcomes. Whatever the end product, the process itself is certain to produce a vastly better understanding and appreciation of what makes this community unique and special. We look forward to that part with confidence and optimism.
Jack White is a VHCA Board Member and Planning Committee Member.