Underground Atlanta will be in new hands — eventually, I suppose — as the Downtown Development Authority voted last week to clear the way to sell the civic white elephant to some real estate guys from South Carolina.
The developers, WRS Real Estate Investments, who will pay $35 million, excel at one thing: Building Walmart-anchored, suburban-styled projects. This time, they're tasked with something very much the opposite. One would hope.
Nonetheless, Mayor Kasim Reed wants something, in there. Anything. And with WRS, that's what the city is getting. Something.
What exactly will that something will be? We don’t know. There haven’t been real public hearings with the developers standing in front of residents saying what they’d build or who they are bringing in to help them to build it.
They say they want apartments, restaurants, artists, entertainment, funky retail and maybe a hotel.
But they build Walmart-based developments, not apatments, restaurants, funky retail, etc. Almost every single project on their website lists a Walmart as an anchor. Actually, one didn't. It listed a Publix.
Underground Atlanta is different. Sure, there’s the cheesy 1980s facade that never worked, but they’d get some of the oldest buildings in Atlanta. And they’d also own some very old downtown streets. Last month, the City Council, under the Mayor’s steely gaze, threw the public streets into the deal, too, for WRS to do with them what they will.
Mayor Reed wants to close this deal by month's end. Just like it was to close by New Year. And mid-last year. And first quarter of 2016. And mid-2015.
Granted, this is a complicated deal encompassing 12 acres of property spread over four square blocks with old easements for MARTA and railroads. It’s not like getting ReMax sell your bungalow.
Last week, the mayor gave one of his me-against-the-world soliloquies: “I feel a bit like I felt about (the sale of) Turner Field. There was an awful lot of flak from the neighborhood.”
“I challenge anyone to stand up and say leaving Turner Field as 70 acres of vacant lots is better than Georgia State and Carter as a development.”
Yup, he’s right. Something is better than nothing — if something and nothing are your only choices. That seems to be his reckoning for Underground.
“Let’s rewind the tape, on Ponce City Market,” he continued, referring to the massive old Sears building turned popular destination. “When I made the decision to sell, the same kind of abuse that I’m getting now came from folks in the community. Now it’s part of people’s lives.”
The mayor is a tenacious fellow and single-minded. Underground is gonna get sold, dammit. To these guys or someone else.
The mayor has been moving Atlanta properties faster than a used car salesman on Buford Highway: Turner Field, Underground, Fort McPherson (to his filmmaker bud, Tyler Perry), the land under old churches to build the new Falcons stadium and, he vows, he’ll unload the moribund Civic Center as soon as he runs off the homeless shelter from Peachtree and Pine.
Remember, you don’t make souffles without breaking eggs. And Hizzoner loves cracking eggs.
Oddly, for a deal as big a deal as Underground, as central as it is to downtown, the original bid to get it redeveloped was announced in the summer of 2014 with no fanfare, press release or anything to drum up notice. The AJC at the time noted the city “quietly advertised a request for redevelopment” with a short time period to take bids.
Two weeks later, The Mayor told the AJC the city had received multiple bids for the job.
In December 2014, WRS was announced the winning bidder. A month later, it was learned that WRS was the only bidder.
Turns out WRS had been working on plans to get a Walmart grocery store in there at least a year before the bids were put out, so they had a jump on the game.
Naturally, there’s a push-back on Underground because, as Reed notes, he must always endure push-back. But here, the skeptics might be onto something. Nothing so far says this will be different or special or even doable. A 25-month lag (and counting) in getting the deal even closed leaves one wondering.
A week ago, the WRS guys finally met at The Underground with perhaps 150 residents interested in what they had in mind.
WRS development officer Kevin Rogers paged through a foot-thick pile of old planning studies and surveys about demographics and what the public wants downtown.
He talked vaguely about a large book store, about “unconventional clothing” stores, a grocery store and entertainment (Masquerade currently squats in Underground after getting gentrified out of its old spot near the Beltline). And WRS wants apartments, some 3,000 folks living atop the new Underground. But, again, no particulars about the plan or who would help them do it.
“We want to give people a reason to drive down from the suburbs once a month,” Rogers said.
One by one, those in the crowd in the Underground meeting made their points. Many were the artsy types who have set up shop in historic, yet decrepit buildings just to the south, buildings that are being bought up by a German firm originally working with WRS. But now, who knows? Everything is still real secret like.
Chad Carlson, a member of the Atlanta Preservation Alliance, a new organization that has pushed to save historic buildings, told the developers, “To the question of why Underground failed, look around you. This place is fake. It has plastic flowers. People don’t want fake stuff. People want authenticity.”
Critics of the deal say the city hasn’t made sure what WRS will preserve historic buildings or even cares what it will build.
City Planning Commissioner Tim Keane, in jeans an old T-shirt instead of his normal crisp suit, stood off the the side of the crowd and told me the city would not let the developers go Bigbox Underground.
“The design of this and redevelopment of this is what we should be judges on,” said Keane. “It can’t be monolithic or massive.”
The judges will have their score cards ready.
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