The City of Atlanta is going where it has never gone before. It is developing a “design” for the city.
In January, the City hired Ryan Gravel, best known as the visionary behind the Atlanta BeltLine redevelopment, to be the manager of the Atlanta City Design Project.
Shifting Atlanta from a city centered around cars to one focused on people on foot or bicycles faced a reality-check on Friday.
Alexis Hyneman, a 14-year-old student at Grady High School, lost her young life when a car hit her while she was riding her bicycle Thursday at the super-confusing intersection of 10th Street, Monroe Drive and the Atlanta BeltLine.
For decades, Georgia has had several road-building initiatives geared to attracting new companies to the state.
They’ve been called developmental highways or the Governor’s Road Improvement Program (GRIP) – and they’ve all involved spending hundreds of millions of dollars of state money to build four-lane roads to almost every corner of the state.
If we can get the City, the BeltLine and APS all working in concert to promote quality development in marginal Atlanta neighborhoods, an economic renaissance could be in our future.
The bottom line is that multi-use trails have a greater economic return on investments than stand-alone parks. Trails also are a way to provide greater equity by offering greater access to green space that connects diverse neighborhoods.
After nearly a month of radiation treatments five days a week, I’m happy to say that today (Monday) was my last day. It is one more step along the way towards my recovery from breast cancer.
When I wrote my first column about having breast cancer, I promised I would keep folks informed at key steps along the way, The response I received from that column was overwhelming, inspiring and heartfelt.
The fourth annual HOPE Global Forum in Atlanta was a testimonial to the economic revolution that Operation HOPE founder John Hope Bryant has been building since 1992.
No, Operation HOPE’s revolution is not a sit-in or a protest march or an ultimatum to big business or Wall Street.
In journalism school, we were taught that every story must answer the questions: Who? What? When? Where? Why? And how?
Often, the hardest of those questions to answer are the why and the how. So as a journalist, I have always tried to find out the story behind the story.
New Year’s Eve has always been one of my favorite nights of the year.
Growing up, my family would welcome the New Year at the spectacular neon Coca-Cola sign on top of the Russell Stover store on Peachtree Street at Margaret Mitchell Square.
Call it the maturing of our mayor.
Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed, in his last two years in office, seems positioned to make a constructive impact on our city.
During a conversation on Dec. 16, Reed acknowledged that he had developed a much greater appreciation to preservation and sustainability during his years in office.
Dating back to 1998, Georgia environmentalists have longed for a dedicated fund for land conservation.
But getting a dedicated fund approved and implemented has proven elusive.
Alex Cooley, who passed away on Dec. 1, was the heart and soul of Atlanta’s music scene for decades.
My earliest memories of Cooley date back to the late 1960s and early 1970s when he would put on free concerts at Piedmont Park on Sunday afternoons.
When I got the call that I had been diagnosed with breast cancer on the morning of Oct. 13, my first reflex was: “I don’t have time for this. Take it back.”
No one plans to have cancer. No one has time for it. Instead, it hits you upside the head and tells you to wake up and make time for yourself and your health.
Dear SaportaReport readers,
The entire team at SaportaReport would like to wish you a heartwarming Thanksgiving holiday.
We are particularly thankful to have so many wonderful and thoughtful readers who have helped make our website as strong as it is today.
Personally, I have a great deal to be thankful for – especially this year.
The draw that evening was Tim Keane, Atlanta’s relatively new commissioner of planning and community development, a welcomed strong voice for quality urban design in Atlanta.
Even Thomas Wheatley, editor of Creative Loafing and moderator of the panel, was surprised, telling the audience “it felt great there was this type of hunger for design in Atlanta.”
As Fulton County leaders weigh two different approaches to fund transportation, they may end up in a head-on collision where everyone loses.
Or, if the various parties can work out a compromise, everyone can win.
One approach is for Fulton County’s mayors and commissioners to ask voters to support a full-penny five-year transportation sales tax.
The other option is passing a half-penny, 40-year sales tax to expand MARTA.
Over the past decade, the Atlanta region has become more fragmented as new cities have emerged on the scene – adding to the proliferation of local governments.
But now we have a counterbalance. Four regional organizations are working closer than ever to collaborate on the major issues facing metro Atlanta.
For more than five years, a host of nonprofits, governmental agencies, companies, foundations and community activists have been working this day – the opening of Lindsay Street Park.
It is a shrine to what can happen when everyone collaborates behind a community-led vision of what the future should look like.
For decades, Northside Drive has been the great divide separating downtown on the east from the economically-depressed communities on the west side.
Northside has served like a moat – creating a symbolic barrier between the haves and the have nots.
So when a new stadium for the Atlanta Falcons was being planned, neighborhood residents begged for that wall of separation to be recast as a welcoming mat for people on both sides of the street.
It’s gone on long enough.
The political and legal dispute between the City of Atlanta and the Atlanta Public Schools over how much the Atlanta BeltLine owes the school system is going into its third year.
As long as the negotiations are left in the hands of political leaders who dislike each other and shun any perception that the other side has “won,” we all lose.
Finally there’s a branding campaign to give equal billing to two great Atlanta mayors who helped ensure the city’s status as an aviation hub.
Wall-sized posters with large portraits of Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield and Atlanta Mayor Maynard H. Jackson Jr. greet arriving passengers at Atlanta’s airport.
The headline says: “Two Men, One Vision”
