- Zoning History of the Site

Hi, I'm Cooper Pierce, I'm principal at Jones Pierce Architects, here in Atlanta, Georgia. Today we are going to be talking about a project that we worked on called Villa De Gripe. When we were looking at the history of the site, we came across the current zoning ordinance in the city of Atlanta 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 quarter was right threw here so you had these different levels of manufacturing. And really at one point there was a rail road spur that came through here that's how 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 see your neighborhood platting there.

This was becoming, the swath, now, what had happened in the late '60s, was the Georgia DOT had condemned all this land to do an expressway out to the east side of Atlanta to Stone Mountain. The neighborhood fought it but not until after they had already come in and condemned it and literally bulldozed all the houses.

There are hundreds of houses here and so they've come back because this was so contested. The city 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 they new new zoning code came 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 platting pattern that of the house that'd been demoed as 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 it did cause some concern with the neighborhood and with something that was very contentious because they said well that was this buffer, but what you have now is really a park in place instead of a freeway.

So that buffer's really not needed and when you go to the you know, go back to the comprehensive development plan you see that you've got the green buffer but they've designated all of this that was the manufacturing now industrial is to go to this purple which is (inaudible).

So that's how we got to try to re-zone to commercial.

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