Zoning History of the Site

When we were looking at the history of the site, we came across the current zoning ordinance in the city of Atlanta. It dates back to 1982. And prior to that, there was another zoning ordinance in place. And so what is now considered industrial was M-1, or M-2. And I presume that was for manufacturing. And so this was right where the rail corridor was, right through here.

So you had these different levels of manufacturing, and really at one point there was, like, a railroad spur that came through here. That's why we have some odd configuration here, But you had your manufacturing, you had sort of your commercial. This is actually commercial. And then you had your existing, you can neighborhood planning there. This was becoming this swath. Now what had happened in the late '60s was the Georgia DOT had condemned all this land to do an express way out to the east side of Atlanta, to Stone Mountain.

The neighborhoods fought it. But not until after they had already come in, condemned it, and literally bulldozed all the houses. There were hundreds of houses here. And so they've come back because this was contested, the city's zoning staff, planning staff, designated this area A-1, more as a place-holder because that was the, what they did is apartment zoning, thinking that would be a good buffer between this manufacturing core and this historical neighborhood.

So that got put in place. And then when the new zoning code came in, in 1982, all that M-1 became I-1, the commercial remained commercial.

That I-1 became RG-2. And you can see what was left of that became RG-1, which is the Carter Library Freedom Park, but this area, this still had, sort of the RG under it, but it became a special interest district because they started bringing back the old planning pattern of the houses that had been demo'ed as sort of the sides to this park link.

So that was for new residential lots was that sub-area 3 that you see here. And the sub-area 1 was mainly the park in the middle. So as far as looking at the history of how we got this weird RG-2 zoning amongst all this I-1 and C-1, that was the reason.

And it did cause some concerns with the neighborhood, and it was something that was very contentious, because they said this was this buffer, but what you have now is really a parking place instead of a freeway. So that buffer's really not as needed, and when you go, you know, go back to the comprehensive development plan, you see they got the green buffer, but they've designated all this that was the manufacturing, now industrial.

This to go to this purple which is mixed-use. So that's how we got trying to re-zone this to commercial.

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