Meet Atlanta's New Planning Director Tim Keane

[fourthwarden]

Originally Posted by bu2

That office of design sounds like a ridiculous waste of resources. He wants to tell developers how to build their buildings? The city will be taste police?

Suggestions. He's talked about offering guiding hands to the developers in the past. To me, it sounds as if he's wanting to make a set of design examples and style guides that work well with neighborhoods and the city. I would imagine that they would not be mandatory, in fact Keane has straight-up said they won't be, but that they may be things that would make the developments more easy to digest; more likely to get the thumbs up from the NPUs and civic associations.

In addition, it sounds as if they will be public relations offices, where citizens can come in to look at plans, designs, and even make suggestions.

[cqholt]

Originally Posted by bu2

That office of design sounds like a ridiculous waste of resources. He wants to tell developers how to build their buildings? The city will be taste police?

This is not new, in fact NPU-O and Kirkwood Neighbo's Organization has a design guide for developers wanting to build mtulifamily development. That allows the residents to influence the structures that they will have to live around for decades after the developer has made their money and off building again.
Also, there were so many comments in the 'How to make Atlanta unique' thread throwing shade because we have boxy, modern buildings, well this office will assist developers with more unique designs.

[jero23]

Originally Posted by cqholt

Keane is getting push back from council members.
Planning chief's overhaul of stretched-thin department meets pushback from some councilmembers | Atlanta News & Opinion Blog | Fresh Loaf | Creative Loafing Atlanta

Martin is basically the only one that is doing so, the rest are for the changes. Also Martin is not running again anyways so I don't know why he is wasting our time with his nonsense.

[bu2]

Originally Posted by cqholt

This is not new, in fact NPU-O and Kirkwood Neighbo's Organization has a design guide for developers wanting to build mtulifamily development. That allows the residents to influence the structures that they will have to live around for decades after the developer has made their money and off building again.
Also, there were so many comments in the 'How to make Atlanta unique' thread throwing shade because we have boxy, modern buildings, well this office will assist developers with more unique designs.

Taste police are bad.

Druid Hills has a historic district. Had someone tell me they were trying to get approval on their windows and the review committee couldn't agree on what was "historic." Obviously, if you don't know, you shouldn't try to stop it, but they were. Plano, TX had real strict restrictions on what you could build and they ended up having miles and miles of 2 story dark red brick doctor's boxes.

It ends up being the taste of whoever happens to be on the committee that year. Even if voluntary, detailed designs can be used in Atlanta's system to bottle up approval for extended periods. For example, you don't want a modern design house in Kirkwood but you need to use discussion and arguments about what the market expects in that neighborhood. When you start getting specific, then you get too much homogeneity in a style that is simply the reflection of a small group of people's taste.

Developers understand design far better than any committee. They also understand their customers and what they want.

[cqholt]

Originally Posted by bu2

Taste police are bad.

Druid Hills has a historic district. Had someone tell me they were trying to get approval on their windows and the review committee couldn't agree on what was "historic." Obviously, if you don't know, you shouldn't try to stop it, but they were. Plano, TX had real strict restrictions on what you could build and they ended up having miles and miles of 2 story dark red brick doctor's boxes.

It ends up being the taste of whoever happens to be on the committee that year. Even if voluntary, detailed designs can be used in Atlanta's system to bottle up approval for extended periods. For example, you don't want a modern design house in Kirkwood but you need to use discussion and arguments about what the market expects in that neighborhood. When you start getting specific, then you get too much homogeneity in a style that is simply the reflection of a small group of people's taste.

Developers understand design far better than any committee. They also understand their customers and what they want.

In reference to Kirkwood, we worked with Euramax on the exterior materials to ensure it was not 100% stucco and that it had brick and other materials that blended with existing buildings.

Developers only care about 1 thing, making money and they will do it a project as cheap as possible to maximize their profit. This is where the Office of Planning needs to come in and protect the citizens QoL and the city's built landscape to ensure the developers are producing a quality product.