3 Cities Take Buford Highway Into Future

By Shane Blatt
Gwinnett News
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
February 19, 2010


Two years ago, three newly elected mayors met for lunch at a Ruby Tuesday in Duluth.

On the table: soda, salads, burgers — and Buford Highway.

Duluth’s Nancy Harris, Norcross’ Bucky Johnson and Suwanee’s Dave Williams have a vested interest in the highway. After all, this artery shoots straight through the heart of their respective cities, with up to 33,610 vehicles on average zipping through parts of the corridor each day.

But for these enclaves, Buford is a road riddled with transportation, safety and zoning issues. It’s where exhaust-belching cars crawl from block to block, where pedestrians stroll along broken sidewalks, where traffic lights dance on looping wires strung from tired utility poles, where a hodgepodge of shops and aging strip malls mingle with industrial warehouses and town homes.

So over a meal in January 2008, Williams and his mayoral counterparts pledged to transform more than eight incorporated miles of a 16-mile stretch of Buford Highway from the DeKalb County line to the city of Suwanee.

In March, Duluth is expected to put the finishing touches on its Buford Highway master plan, a vision that could include mixed-use developments, pedestrian overpasses and decorative gateways. In January, Norcross applied for $2 million in mostly state transportation and Atlanta Regional Commission funds that hold the promise of landscaped medians and, later on, sidewalks and underground utilities. And last week, Suwanee leaders met with state transportation officials to discuss streetscaping and keeping the road’s growth in check.

“We’re trying to unring a bell,” Johnson said. “What we’re looking for is a flow to [Buford Highway], rather than something that looks like a patchwork quilt. But it didn’t get this way overnight, and it’s going to take a long time to improve it.”

And those improvements won’t come easy. Because Buford Highway is a state road, the cities must get transportation officials’ blessing to construct medians, plant trees and build gateways.

With preliminary plans to narrow the lanes to slow traffic, Duluth would face the biggest roadblock.

“No, sir,” Georgia Department of Transportation spokeswoman Teri Pope said of Duluth’s “traffic-calming” idea. “There are a lot of restrictions put on state routes that most municipalities don’t know about, don’t want to know about.”

In addition, the cities’ boundaries don’t touch, so there will be gaps of unincorporated highway that Gwinnett County planning officials have said they have no immediate plans to address. Still, city leaders hope their efforts will produce a “halo effect.”

“I think if Norcross has a plan in place and Duluth has a plan in place, the property in between will look like one or both of us,” Harris said. “It would set a precedent for how the area should look.”

Duluth turns to TAD
The city of 26,000 in December green-lighted the creation of its first tax allocation district to spur redevelopment along a three-mile stretch of Buford Highway.

Last month, the city invited residents to weigh in on its redevelopment plan, which locals helped shape after months of input. The plan, 20 to 30 years out, called for landscaped medians and pedestrian overpasses, gateways at North Berkeley Lake and Old Peachtree roads and mixed-use developments.

“We’re looking at the big picture to make [Duluth] a more attractive place for businesses,” Harris said.

The city would almost double the size of its 60-acre downtown district, making Buford Highway the epicenter of a new live, work and shop environment, said economic development manager Chris McGahee.

There are just 400 undeveloped acres remaining in the city of 10 square miles. Most are family-owned or pose topography problems, so mixed-use, in-town living makes sense, McGahee said.

“We’ve all gotten a little bit tired of our moats, our castles, our subdivisions with the yards we have to maintain,” McGahee said. “We’re looking to be more communal.”

Judy Wilson, a 27-year Duluth resident, said she welcomes improvements. “Our city has nothing attractive on Buford Highway,” said Wilson, referring to industrial buildings and vacant lots. “It looks deserted, unkempt, abandoned. We need to fix the sidewalks, put in sewer.”

Woody Bell, also of Duluth, recalls riding his bicycle up and down the city’s stretch of Buford in the 1950s, when it was a rural two-lane road. In the early ’90s, it was widened and Duluth lost its tree canopy. Now empty land and vacant buildings mingle with Dairy Queens, ballet schools and the city’s Public Safety Center.

Bell, who owns Woody’s Nursery, said he’s not sold on the idea of flushing buildings up against the highway or creating medians that will hamper tractor-trailers from maneuvering in and out of his business.

“I think it’s got a lot of potential, if things are done right,” he said. “I just don’t want it to harm the people who are there.”

Norcross embraces Buford
Norcross’ downtown was once invisible from Buford Highway, a nearly conscious push a decade ago to distance the highway from the rustic historic district, officials said.

“It was almost a ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ kind of relationship,” longtime Councilman Craig Newton said. “Then we came to the realization that if we ignore it, it’s not going to go away.”

In 2002, the city earmarked more than $400,000 for benches and sidewalks near Jimmy Carter Boulevard and Langford Road. Then last summer, Norcross took a significant step to reconnect its downtown by introducing Lillian Webb Park, a 4-acre, $4.5 million town center that sits 75 yards from Buford Highway. This spring, sidewalk and streetlight additions to Cemetery Street will further link Norcross’ quaint downtown with the highway, officials said.

As in Duluth, building improvements won’t happen overnight for the two miles that wind through Norcross. It’s a stretch of road where rundown auto-body and title shops mix with Asian- and Latino-run businesses.

Norcross leaders, working with the Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District, are using overlay districts to revitalize buildings. The designation should pave the way for single-story shopping centers to be transformed into multiple-story mixed-use developments, officials said.

“We’re really trying to bring up the level of standard of Buford Highway — of development, safety and mobility,” said Chuck Warbington, executive director of the Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District. “There was never any thought process on how Buford Highway developed back in the ’70s and ’80s. But you’re going to start seeing changes.”

In January, the district, in partnership with Norfolk Southern Railroad, completed $250,000 in sidewalk improvements just south of Norcross, from Jimmy Carter Boulevard to the DeKalb County line.

Mayra Esquea-Cruz, who manages Mi Pilon, a Dominican restaurant, with her sister, said sidewalk and median improvements are long overdue because “a lot of people do get killed crossing the street.” The Norcross Police Department reports one pedestrian fatality in the past 12 months.

Esquea-Cruz fears any changes to building or zoning requirements could work against her business. “A lot of these buildings are very old and out of code,” Esquea-Cruz said. “It’ll hit the Spanish businesses hard and require us to spend more money. We’ve already been hit hard by the economy and immigration.”

Suwanee writes history
For Suwanee, Buford Highway is not so bad. After all, just two lanes run through this city of 16,500 from Suwanee Creek to Sugar Hill, with no immediate plans to widen it.

But Williams wants to be proactive. If Buford Highway were to expand, he said, it could threaten Suwanee’s tree canopy, stymie pedestrian access and thwart efforts to link historic Old Town to the new town center.

“We don’t control the destiny of Buford Highway alone,” Williams said. “But if we don’t plan the future of that road, we know what we’re going to get: Doraville or Chamblee.”

So Williams and other city leaders met with state transportation officials last week, asking to collaborate on a future road design that GDOT and the Suwanee community can live with. Next week, Suwanee will engage its residents, with ideas that include bike lanes, on-street parking and even a roundabout.

Unlike Duluth and Norcross, Suwanee isn’t looking to redevelop existing properties. For Suwanee, it’s an issue of first-generation development — and how that comes about.

“If this were a baseball game, we’d be in the first inning,” Williams said. “Most of the history of that corridor has yet to be written.”

Williams’ colleagues in Duluth and Norcross could help him write that history.

Perhaps over lunch.
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Glossary
Tax allocation districts: TADs are designated areas that can use public money to fund improvements. Bonds are issued, and they are paid off with the increased tax revenues as property in the district appreciates.

Community improvement districts: CIDs are self-taxing groups of commercial property owners that fund capital and beautification improvements along designated areas.

Overlay districts: Zoning districts that establish consistent architectural and design standards. In Norcross, for instance, such changes would be mandated if the property changed hands.


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