GROWING PAINS
Edgewood Retail District popular, but some residents are still unhappy

By Margie Fishman

 Photo by LeAnn Shaw

Six months after the Edgewood Retail District on Moreland Avenue opened its doors, the mixed-use development hasn’t brought all of the traffic, environmental and other quality of life consequences that neighbors rallied behind during their protracted struggle with the developer.

The 42-acre property, the former home of Atlanta Gas Light, between East Atlanta and Little Five Points, developed by Florida-based Sembler Company, includes 590,000 square feet of retail space and 260 to 280 condos, single-family homes and apartments for senior citizens.

Major tenants are Lowe’s, Target, Kroger, Barnes & Noble, Best Buy, Ross Dress for Less, Bed, Bath & Beyond, Office Depot and PETCO. Smaller retailers include EB Games, Stanton Designs and the Vitamin Shoppe, along with banks, a dry cleaner, a nail salon and six restaurants. The majority of retail is expected to open by late fall, according to Jeff Fuqua, president of development for Sembler in Atlanta.

The residential component, which will be located behind Target and Kroger and in the old shoe factory building, may not be finished until late 2006, he said. Residential was a sticking point during discussions on the development two years ago, along with open space, traffic and neighborhood buffers.

Last summer, Sembler sold the development, valued at $82 million, to a group of investors led by Stephen D. Bell & Co. of Greensboro, N.C. Development plans have not changed, Fuqua said. Sembler will continue to handle property management and leasing and retain a small interest in the commercial side.

Bell partnered with Sembler early in the process because the company recognized that the Edgewood area was “on the verge of exploding,” said Jay Couch, Bell’s senior vice president for commercial properties. The firms have teamed up in the past on Park Place, a Central Perimeter retail center, and the mixed-use Perimeter Place near Perimeter Mall. Sembler has leased more than 80 percent of the commercial properties in the Edgewood center, Couch said.

 “They are all just doing gangbusters,” Couch said of the existing retailers, noting that they are ahead of their sales projections.

Atlanta City Council member Natalyn Archibond, who represents the district where the shopping center is located, said she has heard nothing but positive comments from constituents about the shopping center, aside from the occasional dust complaint. Archibond’s mother, who lives in the neighborhood, delights in spending entire afternoons at Barnes & Noble, the council member said.

About a half-mile down the road in the Little Five Points business district, Sara Look said sales have slowed at her feminist bookstore, Charis Books & More, but she is not sure if she should blame Barnes & Noble or the American culture of instant gratification. A Borders bookstore is located a half-mile in the other direction.“It’s just a general feel in Little Five Points of feeling threatened,” she said.

Ryan Rasheed, a shift manager at the Aurora Coffee, said he wasn’t concerned about the Edgewood Starbucks and Caribou Coffee.
Aurora’s clientele “purposefully don’t want to visit Starbuck’s,” said Rasheed, adding that the shopping center has contributed to traffic congestion on Moreland.

Others praised the shopping center for its one-stop convenience.
Larry Johnson, who lives in East Atlanta and grew up in Grant Park at a time when there was a store on every corner, said the new center saves him a trip to North Druid Hills.

Keisha Smith, a paint clerk at the Edgewood Lowe’s, said she would like to move into the development, with its 24-hour security and emergency phones. That way, she said, she could walk to Kroger to get cereal, dress her two children at Target, and pamper herself with a manicure. “Let your community grow,” she told opponents. “You can’t stay at the bottom forever.”

But Judy Butler, an activist who has refused to step foot in the shopping center since it opened in March one block from her yellow Victorian house, disagrees. Butler, who co-founded the opponents’ group SCALE –”’Cuz it’s just too big!” – said shoppers haven’t discovered the back roads leading to the development, such as her own street, LaFrance, which used to be a dead end.

“The only way to stop that globalized corporate reality is you gotta restrain yourself from using it,” she said.

Sembler provides a shuttle to the center from the Edgewood MARTA station and contributed $600,000 for speed humps, traffic circles and road resurfacing in neighborhoods surrounding the development. City planners will decide how to use that money once the development is finished.

In approving the development, city officials stressed its economic benefit to the community. Sembler and its consultants estimated that the center would bring another $1.5 million in property tax revenue annually to the city, $8.6 million a year in sales tax revenue, and 1,600 jobs.

City officials wanted neighborhood residents to get priority in applying for those jobs. The city has not received a list of local people employed by the center, but Archibond said she was confident that the company had succeeded.

In recent interviews, managers at the Edgewood Lowe’s and Best Buy couldn’t estimate the number of local people they had hired. Of a dozen Lowe’s employees interviewed Sept. 9 by INtown, only three lived in the bordering neighborhoods.

Fuqua said Sembler made extensive efforts to hire local people by holding job fairs on site. Sembler has presented the project as a model around the region, he said. “Every community that we’ve shown this to wants it in their community,” he said.