Thompson: Strict commitment to mixed-use is misguided

| | Story updated at 12:51 AM on Sunday, April 8, 2007

Jim
Thompson
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An interview with Athens-Clarke County Commissioner David Lynn last week by local radio station WGAU-AM (1340) News Director Tim Bryant was a bit troubling.

Lynn, commenting on the commission's much-discussed 8-2 Tuesday decision to deny a special-use permit to ACTION, Inc., and its 6-5 decision (with Mayor Heidi Davison casting the deciding vote) to table a similar request from the Boys & Girls Club, left little doubt he and a majority of the other commissioners remain committed to a vision of Athens-Clarke County as a collection of mixed-use developments - self-contained, walkable "live, work, play" communities mixing retail, commercial and residential uses in tight proximity.

That commitment is troubling because during the interview, Lynn freely admitted that major examples of that type of development - specifically, The Bottleworks on Prince Avenue and Ansonborough on Gaines School Road at Cedar Shoals Drive - have not developed as fully as he and others had hoped.

Yet at last week's meeting, a majority of commissioners - Harry Sims and George Maxwell most definitively excluded - opted to stick stubbornly to that mixed-use vision for Athens-Clarke County.

Some brief background: The social service agency ACTION and the Boys & Girls Club occupy two tracts on Oconee Street in the eastern edge of downtown Athens that a developer is eyeing for a residential development. The developer came to last Tuesday night's commission meeting seeking a special-use permit that would waive a zoning requirement that commercial space be included in the project's ground-floor spaces. The commission opted not to grant the permits, but there's a chance that some compromise could be reached with the developer at a future commission meeting.

Such a compromise would likely find the commission willing to settle for less commercial space than they'd like to see in the development. It might be in the developer's best interest to acquiesce, to get the residential development he wants while making a token nod to the commission's desire for mixed-use development.

Regardless of whether some compromise eventually is reached, the commission's consideration of such an approach would be a tacit admission that mixed-use development - at least to the degree that most commissioners would like to see it - might not be a completely realistic vision for the community's future.

Such an approach obviously can work in some parts of the community. The Five Points area is a wonderful example of mixed-use development, with retail and commercial businesses along Milledge Avenue and Lumpkin Street situated within easy and comfortable walking distance of dozens and dozens of homes lining streets paralleling and crossing those two major thoroughfares. Downtown Athens and parts of the Prince Avenue corridor offer other proof that mixed-use development can work.

But in much of the rest of the community, there are impediments to mixed-use development. The eastern and western reaches of the county already have been developed on an old model, with homes on acre-sized or larger lots in a mix of long-developed and newer subdivisions that are, by virtue of the land they occupy, far away from commercial and retail centers. In those areas, there's little hope for development of mixed-use communities, because the existing infrastructure is, unfortunately, geared for automobile rather than pedestrian traffic.

That's not to say commissioners simply should accept the word of developers who say they can't make a mixed-use development work. But it is important for them to recognize - as Lynn's candid assessment of a couple of existing mixed-use developments demonstrated - that there's no real way to determine where in this community such developments might be viable.

• Jim Thompson is editorial page editor of the Athens Banner-Herald. He can be contacted at (706) 208-2222 or by e-mail at .


Published in the Athens Banner-Herald on 040807


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