This thesis examines issues of affordability and gentrification in neighborhoods around the Atlanta BeltLine. The BeltLine is a Transit Oriented Development project that is an adaptive reuse of an old freight rail corridor circling the city of Atlanta. The rapid new development occurring along the BeltLine is gentrifying neighborhoods and displacing communities. This thesis examines past urban redevelopment projects in Atlanta to see what the affects were on marginalized communities, and how the BeltLine is either similar or different to past development initiatives.

The transportation crisis in Atlanta has attained epic proportions. Inconveniences and hardships created by too many automobiles and not enough alternatives for movement, have reached untenable levels. Getting at what lies beneath the asphalt, interrogating what drives the paving of America, along with the seemingly unstoppable space, energy, and money consumption that the current mode of mobility entails will perhaps allow for future decision-making that includes a more nuanced reading of the landscape. In an effort to understand these forces, I interrogate the creation, trajectories, and current positioning of three major Atlanta transportation projects: the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), the bus and rail system that has been the backbone of metropolitan Atlanta’s public transportation system for the past 30 years; the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority (GRTA), which is the super-agency created in 1999 in an effort to address the air quality issues in the region; and the Beltline, an enormously popular current proposal to build a 22-mile loop of greenspace, transit, and other amenities around an inner loop of the city built on existing rail beds. This investigation engages a wide literature on race, space, and place; attendance at various meetings and relevant symposia; archival data; and in-depth interviews with 20 area transportation experts and interested parties. As race and regionalism are so central to understanding power and procedure in metro Atlanta, particular attention is given to racial and spatial practices. This research reveals the contest over issue framing between car-centered growth promoters, environmental (or green) actors, and social justice, or equity proponents and how the outcomes of this triumvirate’s competition results in regional transportation policies and procedures. The examination of the three instances; MARTA, GRTA, and the Beltline, give us an excellent window into the making of mobility in the region. INDEX WORDS: Transportation, Atlanta, Race and Regionalism, Mobility, GRTA, Beltline, MARTA.

Wayfinding Design for Randomly Developed Areas: The Beltline Case Study proposes a wayfinding signage program for the new public transit project in Atlanta known as the Beltline. This program unites the Beltline with other transit options within Atlanta, such as MARTA, to form a comprehensive transit system. This program will be known as The Atlanta Unified Transit Program. My proposed signage program includes map kiosks, information posts and signs promoting the various levels of transit offered in Atlanta as well as information about the areas surrounded by public transit. The signage examples created for my thesis are prototypes that could later be applied to any location within the area serviced by public transit.

This is a map from a dissertation that was completed in 1975, which has been scanned to ensure greater access. Please search the GIL Online Catalog for more information about this thesis, or to locate the hard copy within the Georgia State University Library. A Note on Maps (from the Appendix): Two main sources were used in the mapping of streetcar routes: franchises and deeds of conveyance. Neither of these alone or combined were completely satisfactory in fixing the exact route, at any given time, of the lines which were built. While the franchise theoretically laid out the route to be followed, the wording of such legislation was often vague or incomplete, and the franchise was no guarantee that the line would eventually be constructed with no modifications. The deeds, on the other hand, represented the routes existing at the time of the conveyance of the property, often many years after initial construction. This leaves open the possibility that routes may have been slightly changed from time to time as traction companies constructed turn-outs, spur lines, parallel tracks, etc. These maps were drawn up under official auspices and therefore represent an additional primary source of information on this question. This does not, however, render them totally free from error or omission. In the case of the West End and Atlanta and the Atlanta Street Railroad companies, for example, the evidence overwhelmingly indicates that they occupied Broad Street between Marietta and Alabama Streets, which is not indicated on the 1886 official map. When one turns to the general problem of tracing downtown tracks, which were altered quite frequently, the problem of accuracy becomes almost insurmountable. Except in these notable instances, in drawing these lines the author has tried to closely follow the routes as already plotted by the map-makers for the year concerned, even though this has entailed minor deviations from the routes as indicated by primary sources. Such discrepancies pertain primarily to the short-lived Taylor Hill Line of the Atlanta Street Railroad Company and the Park Avenue line of the Metropolitan Street Railroad Company. The lines of the companies are drawn in the following color keys: the Atlanta Street Railroad Company, red (with the Taylor Hill Line in orange); the West End and Atlanta Street Railroad Company, brown; the Metropolitan Street Railroad Company, dark blue; the Gate City Street Railroad Company, light blue; the Edgewood and Atlanta Street Railroad Company, black; and the Fulton County Street Railroad Company, green; the Atlanta, West End and McPherson Barracks and Grant Park Electric Railway companies, pink. Prospective routes of other companies are not indicated. Also not included on the 1894 map are the lines which were built by the Chattahoochee River Railway Company (later the Collins Park and Belt Railroad Company), the Atlanta City Street Railway Company, and the Atlanta Consolidated Street Railway Company. These lines can be seen plotted on the map but are not included in the color key.

Thesis (Master of Architecture and Master of City Planning)--College of Architecture, Georgia Institute of Technology, 1999

The Atlanta Beltline is an urban redevelopment project that was designed to increase access to trails, parks, and greenspace in Atlanta, Georgia. Thirty-three miles of new trail will be developed, providing a place for the community to engage in purposeful physical activity and active transport around the city of Atlanta. Because physical activity is associated with improvements in birth outcomes and under the assumption that close proximity to the Atlanta Beltline encourages physical activity, I hypothesize that women residing within 0.5 mile of the Atlanta Beltline will show improvements in birth outcomes, as compared to women residing 1-1.5 miles away from the Beltline. Birth outcomes were measured as rates for low birth weight, premature live birth, and fetal mortality rates. Census tract data for birth outcomes for the time period “pre-Beltline,” 2002 - 2007, and “post-Beltline,” 2008 - 2012, was obtained from Georgia Department of Public Health. 18 census tracks in three areas along the Beltline (Northside, Eastside, West End) were identified as exposed and 17 in the same areas were unexposed. We found the following mean rates (SDs) of the outcomes in the exposed census tracks during the pre-Beltline period: 119.22 (48.39) low birth weight, 154.94 (55.80) premature birth, and 16.17(15.81) fetal death, all per 1,000 live birth. During the post-Beltline period in the exposed area, these measurements were: 107.55 (39.66) low births weight, 131.06 (48.92) premature birth, and 12.28 (13.51) fetal death, all per 1000 live birth. In the unexposed census tracks during the pre-Beltline period, mean rates (SDs) of the outcomes were 110.82 (42.81) low births weight, 144.88 (46.49) premature birth, and 19.94 (35.45) fetal death, all per 1000 live birth. During the post-Beltline period, these measurements in the unexposed area were: 100.88 (40.76) low births, 134.17 (47.85) premature birth, and 8.06 (6.89) fetal death, all per 1000 live birth. Overall in both the exposed and unexposed areas, the time trends for the examined measurements of birth outcomes were towards improvement; however, only a decrease in premature live birth in the exposed area (p=0.2) and fetal mortality in the unexposed area (p=0.1) were of statistically marginal significance. We conclude that currently no significant improvements in birth outcomes, associated with close proximity to the Atlanta Beltline have been detected.

This study focuses on how spatial circumstances affect property owners’ preference toward sustainable urban development, in the form of three-essays. In the first essay, property owners’ preference toward the concept of compact development is identified. Compact development is an increasingly popular concept that includes multiple aspects, such as mixed land use, high density, and pedestrian/transit-friendly options. Previous hedonic literature on the comprehensive effect of compact development is limited. Also, spatial dependence in the data, something likely endemic to compact development, has not yet been thoroughly addressed. This study uses a spatial fixed-effect model, a spatial-autoregressive model with auto-regressive disturbances (SARAR), and a spatial fixed-effect SARAR model to determine the price effect of “compactness” in a major U.S. metropolitan area. By analyzing of 47,000 sales records in Fulton County over a decade, this study indicates that home buyers prefer to have smaller, more diffuse greenspace nearby, rather than a large, concentrated greenspace at a longer walking distance. High parcel density and diverse land use is consistently disvalued, and the premium on accessing public transportation is not identified among all models. No specific trend over time has been observed, despite the recession starting in 2008. Finally, a comprehensive index of compactness shows relatively high willingness-to-pay for compact development. The second essay tests the spatial spillover of signaling within the pursuit of LEED certification. The benefit of pursuing green building certification mainly comes from two aspects: the cost-effectiveness from energy efficiency and the signaling consideration, including the premium on property values, benefits from a better reputation, morality values, or purely pride. By analyzing all new constructions that received LEED certification from 2000 to 2012 (LEED-NC v2.0 to v2.2) in the U.S., this study tries to identify the size of the signaling effects, and spillover of signaling, as building owners pursue LEED certification. The results show that the signaling effect affects decision making in pursuing LEED certification, especially at scores around thresholds. The size of signaling effects differs among different owner types and different certificate levels. For the Gold level or below, government and non-profit-organization owners value signaling more than do profit-seeking firms. At the Platinum level, there is no significant difference among owner types. This study also finds that the signaling effect clusters spatially for government and profit-seeking firms. Finally, the results show that the cluster of signaling is independent from the cluster of LEED buildings, indicating that mechanisms behind the cluster of signaling are different from those of LEED constructions. The third essay tests the distance effect on the support for Atlanta BeltLine. Atlanta BeltLine, a large urban redevelopment project currently underway in the center of Atlanta, transforms 22 miles of historical railroad corridors into parks, trails, pedestrian-friendly transit areas, and affordable housing. This study aims to determine the distance effect on the support of Atlanta BeltLine and whether the implement of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) affects the support. The contributions of this exercise are twofold. First, it demonstrates the risks and remedies to missing spatial data by solving the technical problem of missing precise spatial location values. Second, it tests underlying reasons why distance can help explain the level of support that Atlanta BeltLine has received, with striking implications for theories like the Homevoter hypothesis. Survey data used in this study was conducted in summer 2009, about three years after the declaration of the project. The support by both homeowners and renters significantly declines as distance from the BeltLine increases. However, when residents’ tendency to use BeltLine parks and transits is entered as a variable, the distance effect disappears. By indicating that the distance effect comes from homeowners’ and renters’ the accessibility to BeltLine amenities, the result rejects the homevoter hypothesis, which holds that property value increment is the main mechanism behind support. The results also show that whether or not a homeowner or renter is a parent in City of Atlanta affects a person’s support of the BeltLine. These results lead to the conclusion that the concern of TIF affecting future school quality hampers the support of the project.