There Will Be...

...apartments!

If you rat-hole on social media you may have noticed folks complaining on local fora either about their current apartment or the difficulty of finding one that doesn't suck. Rents are going up, far beyond any other component of the cost of living, and quality of life is going down. Things remain unrepaired for months, even years. Management is unresponsive if not downright rude, and that assumes they can even be found. 

And the answer to this dilemma is? Well if you ask any developer, and the city bureaucrats only too happy to lend them an ear, that would be build more apartments. Not build better apartments, build more. Building better apartments might cut the cycle of planned dilapidation turning off the revenue stream of building more, new apartments while the older ones fester and decay. Where's the profit in that? 

There is one thing worthy of note in the online descriptions of the downward spiral and that is the use of the word ghetto, as in ghetto people. This was in very negative reference to a complex to avoid. It wasn't surprising that the word was used, it probably is very accurate, but that there where no ad hominem  attacks. In this world were so many are just waiting to express outrage and condemnation this passed without notice. Maybe everyone knows these were ghettos-in-the-making from the day they broke ground.

Damn Those Drive-thrus

Or so say city bureaucrats though they seem to have difficulty with definitions. This is a side effect of agenda driven actions. There goal is to ban all new drive-thrus and the agenda is some intellectual squishy "pedestrian friendly" nirvana. This is really their first step towards filling the village with five-over-two firetraps to inject very high density housing. And crime. 

One bureaucrat remarks that these evil drive-thrus "lead to a lot of conflicts between pedestrians and cyclists (scope creep) at points of ingress and egress." Most shops in the village would call this business. And how do these bureaucrats propose to allow for successful businesses? They will put a couple thousand apartments in the village. That's how you get the pedestrian density they covet.

Cheerleaders Don't Win Games

Sometimes they don't even know what game is being played.

Since first meeting resistance to the Pave Paradise scheme of the [Shining] PATH Foundation, the mayor has been trying to get the cool kids, and only the cool kids, to show up for a pep rally. No Boo-Birds need attend. To the mayor's dismay, the Boo-Birds will not stay away. And it is as if the Shining PATH is feeding the seagulls at the beach with expected results. Not only have the Boo-Birds flocked to the events, and not only have they displayed their dismay, the breadth of their issues and the intensity with which they are presented is growing. Not what the mayor and the other elected cheerleaders had in mind. 

In addition to previous pushback around poor location and planning seemingly catering to non-residents more than anyone else there was significant pushback against destruction of quality of life. As it turns out there remain Dunwoody residents who purchased a home for peace and quiet, to live in privacy, perhaps even cloistered. And yes, that means these communities, often with HOAs are likely to have barriers in place including walls, fences and private ownership of neighborhood roads. The Shining PATH and their mayor (ostensibly our mayor) doesn't really give two shits about that. They intend to open up these neighborhoods, tear down the barriers and destroy the privacy these neighbors hold dear. 

The usual suspects have also shown up in support, notably the Bike Brigade. First they got their bike lanes whenever, wherever pavement was re-striped and now they are all in on the plan to add just under 4.4 Million square feet of impervious surface to "Tree City," some of which will likely intrude on stream buffers. But when you are monomaniacal like the Brigade and the mayor, well, nothing else really matters, does it? 

Makes you wonder what happened to the not-so-distant era of Going Green, since concrete is one of the most environmentally unfriendly synthetic materials in the world, whose manufacture alone is responsible for 5% of global CO2 emissions. This doesn't account for the trees and other vegetation destroyed for the installation of a series of interstate-highway-scale lanes. It will destroy not only trees in the way, but those beside with suffer and many die due to inevitable root damage. Apparently there is even less concern about runoff and the harm that will cause to the local ecology. 

And when did Shining PATH take ownership of Dunwoody? Really. Who died and made them Local Control? What little pushback there was came from King John and was dismissed by the Shining PATH Planning Priest as inappropriate and requiring too much specificity. Apparently in their view a "Master Plan" is little more that a commitment, a contract if you will, with little specificity beyond "costs will be exceeded." Yet there was enough specificity to tell some residents their privacy was about to be obliterated. Seems like someone was blowing smoke, perhaps in the wrong person's face. Exactly what is it that King John does for a living? Who does he work for? Is it possible he is a bit of a domain expert when it comes to paving our way out of paradise? Hmmmm...do you really think it is a good idea to mansplain to to him?

In reality this "path" thing is just a stepping stone to a greater destruction of Dunwoody, at least the Dunwoody that attracted most residents in the first place. The ultimate goal is to add as much ultra-high-density housing to Dunwoody as possible. High Street is just the beginning with plans already forming to bring Stick Frame Over Podium housing to the Village and any other cluster of shops developers set their sights on. After all, who wouldn't want to live five or six floors above E. 48th Street Market? You'd have great views of the golf course sunbathers around that backyard pool. These "paths" along with parks are a way of deflecting obvious negatives about this ultra-high-density. The developers' bureaucrats at city hall will point to these and suggest access to "paths" and parks makes up for living like a sardine. If they dare suggest this will add to the tax base you know it's too late to save the shoes as the Developers' Authority will keep these [re]developments off the tax rolls. And that Stick Frame? Well, that is planned obsolescence at its best. These will not outlast the tax handout before needing to be re-developed, with, wait for it, another tax handout. And they are hell-bent on doing this. After all, they had no problem whatsoever stealing property from a church.

A few folks, most probably more Dunwoody than you, remember going to GaTech football games in the early '80s. If so, you may remember the cheerleaders, who seemed too clueless to attend Tech, had this bizarre cheer that somehow involved bananas. They trotted this out for a couple of games in a row, much to the crowd's displeasure. Booing and razzing did not seem to get the point across so at the next home game students smuggled in bananas and when the cheer started those cheerleaders were pelted with enough fruit to feed a troop of chimpanzees for a month. And the student section was never subjected to that odious, totally forgettable cheer ever again. Maybe it is time, metaphorically speaking, for residents to  ask our elected officials "how much they like them bananas?"

Grubb-ing For Bidness

An apartment developer (yep, that's his speciality) who had his bit to convert an office building to apartments is on the rampage. He now contends that unless he is allowed to build apartments in Dunwoody, Dunwoody is doomed. Outside of dubious cancer meds, do terroristic fear tactics really work to sell your product or service? Or is this just a last ditch effort to cash in on Dunwoody?

The argument is odd. Not that long ago an office building was so unused that he wanted to turn it into apartments but now, with all the office space around perimeter he contends there must be massive rental properties built for all the up and coming young professionals. And he is just the man to do it. But this doesn't seem to align with our new, post-pandemic reality. We learned that we can work very effectively when away from the office with some corporations (e.g., a major insurance company) finding that productivity (and hence profits) went up. Mentally ossified Boomers are already out the door and the millennials filling their places are managerial style that is less place-and-face centric. Getting work done away from the office is not going away. And this means two things: no commute; and no need for right-by-the-office living. Of course the latter never made sense for two-income households, something your average developer never addresses and it is why you haven't heard so much about live-work-play lately. 

What is also missing from this is a sense of history. Dunwoody (as in the City of) was sold to voters on a platform whose major plank was stopping the rampant development of apartments. Now one might look at High Street and conclude "promise made, made to be broken" but at least one of the current pols holding office was active in the sales pitch. Voters gave the thumbs-up because they had been convinced that as a city there would be significantly greater restriction on the imminent destruction of Dunwoody's character as a suburban edge-city. 

Let's see if our pols intend to keep the commitment. 

Blink And You've Missed It

But...they're back at it again. It seems a never-ending pas de deux between Grubb[ers] and the city with Grubb always in the lead. First it was a 1200 unit MDU then after DHA pushback all the apartments went poof. Suddenly nothing but condos. But all those parking spaces, lots and decks stayed, because, well, the brief era of Transit Oriented Development is dead. Must not have been enough Federal subsidies pouring down that rat hole.

Now Grubb[er] is back and so are those apartments. Somehow this is not seen by the city as a clear indication of untrustworthiness-perhaps the eye does not see itself. Perhaps it does. In any event, about all the city has issue with is sidewalk and buffer reductions. And what gives the developer hope? Well if past behavior is any indicator the city will rubber stamp the request just as they did for the condo development on Dunwoody Village Parkway. 

Looks like we're going to be getting some new, but soon to be trashy, apartments. Dunwoody Yes!

Earnest Leaves Dunwoody

"I came! I saw! I got blowed up!"
-- Earnest P. Worrell

Arrive Perimeter has, with gas and a spark, been transformed to Depart Perimeter. Who could have smelled that coming?

Arrive intends to demolish the site ASAP and if yelpers are to be trusted it should not have taken an explosion to get that [wrecking] ball rolling. But this is the kind of "quality" development the city encourages in Dunwoody, so rest assured, apartments will be rebuilt on that site. It is an odds-on favorite that these will be bigger and the beneficiary of tax handouts from the city.

You gotta wonder how Dunwoody's "urban renewal" team is engaged.

Choices, Choices

So we have two dogs in the show for District 1: a former councilman and a wannabe. The former is a known quantity and was never defeated for re-election but abandoned the office to take a run at mayor. The latter is perhaps best known for openly, on the record, declaring a greater affinity for Sandy Springs than Dunwoody almost as if it is a personal loss to be in this city. Would that we could keep it an individual shortcoming. This candidate comes with the ringing endorsement of the dwarf most prior whose inability to read and understand ordinances spoke to limited academic achievement and whose grasp of representative governance flip-flopped when "personal impact" was involved. What a vote of confidence. Wannabe intends to "bring Dunwoody Village into the 21st century" a rather shameless acknowledgement of "I will work hard for the developers" and a clear intention to ignore the residents' wishes and help over-build thousands of apartments to overcrowd our schools. And no one will be surprised when wannabe endorses enormous tax handouts to these developers further undermining those same schools. But wannabe also has plans for the old Austin site looking for something "other than a grassy area." Perhaps some 8-10 story apartments? Your developers would really like that. 

The choice is yours, District 1.

It Is Called Discrimination

Discrimination is using the brain god gave you to discern the best option or action to take. In and of itself discrimination is not inherently bad. But when used, particularly by governments, to control or even just influence what folks can do or where they can live based on colour, culture, ethnicity or even socio-economic status there is an evil taint.

But that is exactly the kind of discrimination underpinning the "these apartments are good, but those, back then were bad."

To really grok this you must remember Dunwoody's first assault on undesirables hoped to use a Parks Bond Referendum to capitalize our own little Pogrom. This forced expulsion was rationalized as a way to improve our schools and therein lies the big clue. So what about these most-favoured apartments? How can they possibly be better than the ones the City so wanted to bulldoze? How are they even different?

Turns out the problem is not with apartments per se, but with the specific kind of folks that live therein. In both cases they're immigrants. But over by PIB they're hispanic, poor, with more than few suspected to be undocumented. Down Ashford Dunwoody, they're asian, mostly Indian (dot not feather), sporting H1B visas and IT jobs with more than decent salaries. And they speak english--kinda.

More importantly the PCID apartment dwellers are educated and fully intend that their children will not just succeed in school--they will excel. These apartment dwellers are all right by us not least because their children, who primarily attend Austin and Dunwoody Elementary are part of the reason that each of these schools ranked above the much ballyhooed Vanderlyn on the most recent CCPRI rankings. Austin even ranked well against special charter and magnet schools.

In short, it is simple discrimination and socio-economic segregation that determines whether an apartment is good or bad. 

Seventy Five Percent Solution

Developers want to do what developers do--develop property. And they do it for one reason only--to make money. And we have some developers who are going to develop apartments in Dunwoody's Perimeter Center.

Now they can't say that straight up. They have to spin (AKA deceive and mislead) the issue. First they'll say they're not building apartments, they're building condo's. But they have a problem which they will make your problem. And that problem is these units get built all at once but the retail real estate market won't absorb them all at once. Sales will take time. Rentals are quicker so they are going rent these condos making them indistinguishable from apartments. Plus this is a recurring revenue stream whilst sales are one-time transactional. This will not be rental by individual (like you renting your Four-Four-and-a-Door) but by a developer. A developer who will most likely hire a rental management firm to handle the day to days. Quacks and waddles like a duck.

The City negotiated a long term goal of seventy five percent owner occupied, except that is a "goal" five years out and the developer intends to put up for sale only fifty percent on day one. And the developer has already voiced his displeasure and intent to get a more favorable hearing from Council: "We hope by the time it gets to the council it will be more of what we are looking for."  The developer's mouthpiece acknowledged that seventy five percent was better than the ninety percent owner occupied the Planning Commission advocated saying: "We've had 16 banks talk to us ... and they can't finance at 90 percent owner-occupancy."

The fact is it will never be seventy five percent owner occupied. It will probably never make it to fifty percent. And it gets worse. The FHA will not give loans on these units because the developer will start, maybe, at fifty percent rental and the FHA only allows that if the remaining units are owner-occupied as a principle residence. Out of the gate FHA approval is highly unlikely. So who cares? Well one might expect Millennials to be a demographic most likely to apply for and get FHA loans. Who wants them around anyway? Oh, wait ... WE DO! Or so we say when catering to apartment-building developers.

And cater we do. There is a brash prevarication claiming this development will not spill over to our neighborhoods and won't affect homeowners' quality of life. Really? REALLY? Have these folks never heard of a silly little thing called SCHOOLS? Do schools not affect our quality of life? Have we included a no-children, adult only restriction? Can we? And just who might be interested in these schools anyway? You guessed it! Those pesky Millennials again. This "line of reasoning" sounds like a thinly veiled shill for the developers.

If these are condos, and that is what the developer calls them, then the appropriate level of owner-occupancy is one hundred percent. Zero rentals. Now if the developer needs a government handout, good luck finding one who doesn't, it is real simple. Write into the Declaration of Condominium that each and every unit can be rented for five years total over the entire life of the unit. To make sure they don't just amend the document, ensure that it can only be amended by a super-majorly of individual principal-residence owner-occupants and only after these residence own over fifty percent of all units. After the five years are used up the unit sits empty or you price it to sell. Hard. Stop. Oh, and whilst it sits empty you still get to pay the Condo Association fees.

Ain't gonna happen.

At the end of the day here is what we know: residential units will be built; many, then most, then almost all will be rental; there will be negative impacts on our infrastructure; there will be negative impacts on our schools; and the developer will not pay a dime in impact fees. And there are those amongst us who are happy to help out a poor developer. 

Apartments and McMansions

The world is increasingly binodal whether we're discussing pay disparities, the digital divide, abilities of students in a single class or even Dunwoody real estate--the mean truly is mythical.

Dunwoody was formed to purge the area of existing apartments and where ever possible to forestall or prevent the construction of new apartments--a chore previously handled by the DHA thru their cadre of lawyers. The logic was that apartments suffer from shoddy construction, poor maintenance (and one might observe: poor enforcement of local codes) and high crime thus harming overall property values in the vicinity but the underlying issue was the fact that apartment dwellers ARE the lower lobe of our socio-economic binodal distribution. This was pretty clearly exposed along with the plans for spending the proposed tax bonds on eradicating the PIB apartments. The noise about this being a  "high crime area" has become muted as the real high crime area is the Perimeter Mall where the apartments are tony and newer. It cannot go without saying that they pay more in property tax for which they receive the lion's share of Dunwoody's police protection. We won't detail the "harm to our schools" argument as that was pretty much blown out of the water with Austin's recent CCRPI scores in spite of hosting kids from apartments.

Given our revulsion to apartments it may seem befuddling that there is a growing resistance to McMansions whether on previously undeveloped land or lot-by-lot tear down rebuilds. It seems that in Dunwoody the only good McMansions are those replacing existing apartments or preventing the construction of new apartments. But while McMansions may be bad, they're not that bad.

But are McMansions really bad at all?

A surprising number of single family detached houses in Dunwoody were built in the late sixties to mid eighties after which scarcity drove up prices and drove many buyers further out. As our Mayor has pointed out (in his support of tear-down McMansions) these houses were built with construction techniques and integrity such that they have about a thirty year life (funny how that is a bad thing for an apartment complex but a good thing for a house) and it is really about time they were replaced. Our own little Ulysses, bless his heart.

So why is someone in a mature neighborhood upset that the neighboring 2600 sq. ft. Four Four and a Door has been replaced by a 6500 sq. ft. Tudor style two story with a three car garage and blessed with a daylight basement?

This isn't just envy. You. Lose. Money.

Your property taxes just went up and the Total Addressable Market of buyers and  ironically the price they're willing to pay just went down.

But there is also a strong pride of ownership. Long time homeowners have often put much of themselves into their home--more than sweat equity--homes become a personal statement. It is a family jewel. The homestead. Where the kids were raised. Remember the year the cat chewed thru the Christmas light cord and had to be put down? Ah...yes, dear Beelzebub...she was really just like a dog.

Where real estate agents see a house (and a private school payment for their child) some folks see a home. Their home. Just like the one in Father of the Bride, Part 2--to be preserved and cherished for all eternity and not an eyesore to be demolished so some rich asshole has a better place to park his A7.

OK. Maybe there is some envy.

Then there are those built on previously un- or under-developed land. Bill Grant has been building McMansions right off Ashford Duwnoody (and even scored a new curb cut for a single driveway) for what seems like an eternity.  And now another developer has plans to build a few dozen homes off Vermack. This would be on approximately 35 acres already zoned for exactly this purpose so at this point it is in the hands of the developers and their investors. Resistance will be relegated to "additional traffic" and "impact on schools". Not very compelling.

Prices at the new development start at $700,000 and run right up thru $1 million. The Bill Grant homes are no cheaper. Unless your plan in life is to drain a trust fund these hardly fall in the category of Starter Home. And that affects the traditional Dunwoody Demographic pushing some folks who currently enjoy the view from the top just a wee bit further down.

When you consider a wide range of factors (down payment, interest, other debt, DTI, etc.) you should not be surprised if the folks buying these homes have anything less than $150K in annual household income. Probably more. Perhaps a lot more. This is not only at least two times the 2011 Dunwoody average household income, it is no more a starter salary than these are starter homes. So don't expect a starter family either.

It is hard to get really good drill downs on census data for these demographics but researchers have long reported that these levels of income strongly correlate with high levels of education, particularly amongst women as they tend to seek out equally well educated mates resulting in high earning households. These folks also tend towards the middle to latter part of the high-wage portion of the lifecycle (generally 35-55 years of age) and combined with a high probability of well educated women will likely result in fewer and older children. Their kids are as likely to be in (or out of) college as they are to be taking seats in K-12. Given these income levels, strong emphasis on education and the sorry state of our DeKalb County schools any of their children eligible for DCSD will probably be in private schools.

These McMansions will attract smart, well educated families with high household incomes and below average burden on school and city services. With all this how could anyone oppose the gentrification of Dunwoody?