Selling Out the Neighborhood
The future of the Chapel Hill Road Corridor is complicated at best. This winter will begin the temporary transformation of Douglas Boulevard with a new concrete median, while on a half-mile stretch of Chapel Hill Road four intersections are slated to have traffic light improvements. More about the temporary work can be found in a previous post.
Traffic has always been the issue for the corridor since 1999 when Arbor Place Mall was open to the public. Increases in traffic occur daily as more retail stores come available in the area. As a result, neighboring residential areas are coming under extreme pressures to either stay as a neighborhood or sell out the property completely.
For the Heritage Valley subdivision near the Stewarts Mill Road / Chapel Hill Road intersection, residents chose to sell out at the expense of overdevelopment and increasing traffic woes.
Heritage Valley subdivision [Google Maps] is squeezed between Arbor Place Mall and Arbor Station subdivision. The only access point to Heritage Valley is on a crest where Stewarts Mill Road widens to four lanes. Residents have been frustrated over the years about the increase in traffic and the lack to exit the subdivision without avoiding an accident.
What may come as a shock for some residents and a promise for developers, the fifty acre subdivision is up for sale on the Development Authority's website. Eric McDonald of the Authority talked to Losing Georgia last week, mentioning this property was up for grabs and may be developed within the next ten years.
Because of the increase in traffic and the overdevelopment around the Chapel Hill Corridor, all the home owners in the Heritage Valley subdivision opted to sell out in hopes of better things to come, despite the rise in fair market value. What further pushed the issue was the construction of Chapel Hill Centre and Chapel Hill Village shopping centers.
The current ideal proposal is to completely redevelop the subdivision into an office / commercial development that would go in conjunction with Arbor Place Mall on some level. What is a concern is how it will affect Arbor Station - one estimation puts it that well-known subdivision may not exist in the next 10-15 years according to current development statistics.
A series of buffers would be put in place that would move in the general direction of Arbor Station. The immediate buffer could be a tree line, some type of fencing or a line of apartments/condos. Then a swift into an office style complex that would provide jobs closer to home and away from Atlanta . Lastly would be the commercial element catering to more retail stores and specialty shops.
But what of the corridor? Can it handle another heavy increase in traffic within the next five years? Probably not considering that in the five years Arbor Place Mall has been open, the corridor has sustained traffic at its maximum level. The long term plan for the Chapel Hill Corridor is to widen the half-mile stretch to six lanes whiles the rest to be widened to four lanes all the way to Highway 166.
In this case, overdevelopment coinciding with traffic has forced residents to make a difficult decision, to lose their homes in the wake of retail tax dollars. Although there is no final say on the development prospects for the current location, this just goes to show how the pressure to develop in the shadow of Atlanta can affect everyone in a community, including the neighborhood.
