Exurban development Vs. Urbanization

[JMatl]

Originally Posted by NC2ATL60

Spot on!

Agreed!

[Smocaine]

Originally Posted by JMatl

But Atlanta's beyond hope in your opinion, right?

Charlotte is growing exactly like Atlanta did 30 years ago. The only thing they're doing differently is investing in Light Rail instead of Heavy Rail - which is smart. LRT is much less expensive, and the Feds highly prefer investing in that mode now. Other than that, there is absolutely no difference in the growth patterns. And cwkimbro was right, we had the foresight to connect Buckhead and Perimeter by rail to Midtown, Downtown and the Airport. I don’t ever see SouthPark having any rail , it would be prohibitively expensive.

As far as Downtown, yes it needs help - and it's coming. There are literally billions being invested.

Atlanta is, yes, mostly beyond hope. You will always be getting a bad deal for your dollar, no matter where you are.


The Junior Varsity cities still have a chance. I lived in Charlotte and it was so much less...suffocating. In every way. There's something there. If I were a Fortune 500 exec and I had to choose between opening an office in Atlanta vs. Nashville/Charlotte/etc, I would legitimately ask them to put into words why they thought Atlanta was a reasonable choice against the competition. The place is a mess.

[JMatl]

Originally Posted by Smocaine

Atlanta is, yes, mostly beyond hope. You will always be getting a bad deal for your dollar, no matter where you are.


The Junior Varsity cities still have a chance. I lived in Charlotte and it was so much less...suffocating. In every way. There's something there. If I were a Fortune 500 exec and I had to choose between opening an office in Atlanta vs. Nashville/Charlotte/etc, I would legitimately ask them to put into words why they thought Atlanta was a reasonable choice against the competition. The place is a mess.

Well, it sounds like you may need to come to the realization that Atlanta is a bad fit for you. Meanwhile, the companies continue rolling in to this 'failed' place.

[Phil P]

I might have been hard on supercommuters. Thinking about it more, it's just a function of who the people are that migrate to Atlanta. Generally it's younger workers (often immigrants) with families, who are chasing higher incomes but don't have a lot of wealth. This leads much more to scenarios of supercommuting happens, they need the space for the kids, wife works there I work here, can't afford the location premium, and will grind out dealing with the 5-10 hrs extra commuting a week till they've climbed the ladder some more.

Charlotte will be better built than Atlanta. They may be at similar comparable stages, but 2030 development is most likely going to be smarter than 1990 development. Point in case is my prior examples of smart development here. Across the country, things are better masterplanned, denser, and more integrated than they had been. You can almost tell the age of a subdivision from Google Earth by the way it's laid out. In fact, a large part of the current housing supply shortage is due to a backlash from a lot of different groups against SFH sprawl development, and the backlash hasn't let down despite the crunch in housing.

In general, I'm bearish on big cities in general. None of them have been "cities on a hill" of successful steady QOL increases outside of tech worker pay. Rail sounds good but for some reason the US sucks at it, and a lot of transit agencies deliver below their initial claims. Density sounds good, but it brings problems of its own that need to be mitigated. Denver's a pretty dense city core but has terribly crowded parks and low tree cover coupled with a 5F heat island effect and really bad air pollution for its size. Part of Atlanta's appeal, the greenspace, is a core factor is the sprawl. Small cities have gained a lot on large cities on what they offer in the 20th century due to e-commerce, tech, yelps effect on restaurants etc... Working from home is the icing on the cake pushing small cities ahead, at the expense of large city CBDs, which still continue to lag pretty bad from 2020-21. Large cities across the globe are weighed down by a LOT of problems. China for one is aggressively pushing development away from large cities to smaller ones.

My problems with Atlanta and Denver both were largely problems with the metros size and the downsides of that. I'm here cause I don't have the remote job yet and I'm hoping to find a lady (mountain towns are terrible dating markets!), but I really don't think I want to be in a large city when I'm less tied to a location with work. Bottom line, exurb lifestyle doesn't appeal, it's not a great compromise of rural and urban for a person that likes to be outside a lot.

[Smocaine]

Originally Posted by Phil P

I might have been hard on supercommuters. Thinking about it more, it's just a function of who the people are that migrate to Atlanta. Generally it's younger workers (often immigrants) with families, who are chasing higher incomes but don't have a lot of wealth. This leads much more to scenarios of supercommuting happens, they need the space for the kids, wife works there I work here, can't afford the location premium, and will grind out dealing with the 5-10 hrs extra commuting a week till they've climbed the ladder some more.

Charlotte will be better built than Atlanta. They may be at similar comparable stages, but 2030 development is most likely going to be smarter than 1990 development. Point in case is my prior examples of smart development here. Across the country, things are better masterplanned, denser, and more integrated than they had been. You can almost tell the age of a subdivision from Google Earth by the way it's laid out. In fact, a large part of the current housing supply shortage is due to a backlash from a lot of different groups against SFH sprawl development, and the backlash hasn't let down despite the crunch in housing.

In general, I'm bearish on big cities in general. None of them have been "cities on a hill" of successful steady QOL increases outside of tech worker pay. Rail sounds good but for some reason the US sucks at it, and a lot of transit agencies deliver below their initial claims. Density sounds good, but it brings problems of its own that need to be mitigated. Denver's a pretty dense city core but has terribly crowded parks and low tree cover coupled with a 5F heat island effect and really bad air pollution for its size. Part of Atlanta's appeal, the greenspace, is a core factor is the sprawl. Small cities have gained a lot on large cities on what they offer in the 20th century due to e-commerce, tech, yelps effect on restaurants etc... Working from home is the icing on the cake pushing small cities ahead, at the expense of large city CBDs, which still continue to lag pretty bad from 2020-21. Large cities across the globe are weighed down by a LOT of problems. China for one is aggressively pushing development away from large cities to smaller ones.

My problems with Atlanta and Denver both were largely problems with the metros size and the downsides of that. I'm here cause I don't have the remote job yet and I'm hoping to find a lady (mountain towns are terrible dating markets!), but I really don't think I want to be in a large city when I'm less tied to a location with work. Bottom line, exurb lifestyle doesn't appeal, it's not a great compromise of rural and urban for a person that likes to be outside a lot.

I couldn't agree more with all of this, especially being bearish on big US cities. I love the sense of place you get living amongst skyscrapers and in a historic area, but ultimately, American cities don't really deliver on much. I live in a sexy Midtown high-rise with a skyline view, but I'm well-aware that I could recreate my lifestyle just as well, if not better, in a random SFH in Topeka, Kansas. If I'm being honest, American cities are only really playgrounds for the ultra-rich and don't have a lot to offer otherwise.



In my opinion, we're still reckoning with the advent of information technology and haven't really come to terms with all of the fundamental changes the information era demands.

[Born 2 Roll]

Originally Posted by Phil P

I might have been hard on supercommuters. Thinking about it more, it's just a function of who the people are that migrate to Atlanta. Generally it's younger workers (often immigrants) with families, who are chasing higher incomes but don't have a lot of wealth. This leads much more to scenarios of supercommuting happens, they need the space for the kids, wife works there I work here, can't afford the location premium, and will grind out dealing with the 5-10 hrs extra commuting a week till they've climbed the ladder some more.

Though I had co-workers that were born and raised in out-of-state locations as diverse as Michigan, Tennessee, South Florida, New York, California, Texas, Indiana, Jamaica, Virginia, North Carolina, etc., many, maybe about half, of my co-workers that I described as making seemingly longer commutes between their homes in outlying areas and their jobs near and at the Atlanta Airport, were native-born Georgians.

And those who were not native-born Georgians often had lived in metro Atlanta for significant amounts of time (that ranged anywhere from between 5 to 40+ years) that were long enough for them to be completely aware of the living choices they were making, which almost always was indicative of a desire for suburban and exurban living.

On the other hand, there were about a relatively small handful of co-workers that I remember that commuted to work from relatively very close-by areas (within about 15 miles) in Clayton and South Fulton counties.

I, myself also commuted to that job from various distances. For a short time I lived almost literally right across the street (only about 0.3 miles) from the office on the Clayton County side of College Park but did not like living in the dwelling I was in so I moved to a place in South DeKalb County that was about 11-12 miles from the office (still considered to be extremely close by Atlanta standards).

I also at different times commuted to that job from homes in Lithia Springs (22 miles one-way), the Fulton County side of College Park (3 miles one-way) and Doraville (29 miles one-way) in addition to the commute to that job that I made from the place I lived in Norcross (about 33-34 miles one-way).

I also at one time back in the early-2000’s commuted about 40 miles one-way from my home in Atlanta to my job in Covington (in Newton County on the far-outer edge of East metro Atlanta) where I drove an Atlanta Journal-Constitution paper route that stretched as long as 120+ miles in length on Sundays.

Some of the irony was that many of my co-workers who lived within about 30-35 miles each way of the office at my job at/near the Atlanta Airport considered themselves to be living fairly geographically close to the job by metro Atlanta standards.

Before moving back to the Winston area of West Douglas County where he grew up because of the better quality of the schools in Douglas County, one of my bosses at the Airport job used to commute to work more than 40 miles one-way from the east side of Carrollton and considered himself to have a fairly short commute to and from work because of the relative lack of traffic along that route between the Atlanta Airport area and Carrollton (GA-166 and South Fulton Parkway).