Call it the Metro Atlanta commuter backlash.

Fed-up commuters — conquering traffic congestion by simply moving closer to work.

And one of the most popular “live-work-play” communities is right in the urban heart of Metro-Atlanta’s vast, 28-county sprawl, a region that is now the fastest-growing in the nation, with 5.1 million people and counting.

The community is Midtown Atlanta, just north of Downtown. It was one of Atlanta’s first suburbs a century ago, filled with the grand homes and large yards of the times; it was one of the city’s embarrassments 35 years ago, with dirty, run-down flop houses and abandoned store fronts, as well as the hippies, prostitutes and derelicts that haunted them; it is now transformed and re-developed and exploding in population, especially along the Peachtree Street corridor, growing at a faster rate than the region as a whole is growing.

That corridor has become a “Million Dollar Mile” where developers like Donald Trump are racing to build high-rise condos to cash-in.

The million-dollar question — is it too much boom, too soon, that might soon “bust?”

“Well, it’s a great area of town,” Donald Trump told 11Alive News when he visited Midtown Atlanta on April 13 to promote the condos he’s going to build in Midtown. “And it’s a great city, maybe even more importantly. You know, it’s one of the fastest-growing cities in the country, in the world…. And we’re just happy to be here. We also think we have the best site within Atlanta, and that’s very important.”

Who would disagree with the “super salesman” and real estate developer? When Donald Trump says that Midtown Atlanta is the perfect place to build not just one, but two Trump Towers, right away, who would dispute him?

His company, along with Wood Partners and Beazer Properties, are about to begin constructing two high-rise, residential condos, with a total of 563 units costing between $400,000 and $1.3 million each, at West Peachtree and 15th Streets, across West Peachtree from the Woodruff Arts Center, High Museum and MARTA’s Arts Center rail station.

The first phase of the condos is expected to be complete in 2009, adding even more sparkle along the diamond-studded Condo Canyon that has transformed Midtown’s Peachtree Street corridor into Metro Atlanta’s Million Dollar Mile.

Who would disagree with The Donald?

Another Donald, as it turns out.

“Well if he waits three to five years, he might hit the next upswing in the market,” said Atlanta Economist Donald Ratajczak. “But if he breaks ground this year, I think he’s making a big mistake.”

Ouch.

Ratajczak believes the bloom is off the Midtown boom, for now.

For example, the plans for a new, high-rise condo at Peachtree Street and North Avenue, near the Fox Theater, have been put on hold. Six months after a demolition crew imploded the old Wachovia Bank building that sat on the site for decades, Atlanta-based Cousins Properties has pulled back and is now “monitoring demand to determine when we want to get started with that project,” a company spokesman told 11Alive News.

A matter of supply and demand.

“Too much supply,” said Ratajczak. “Midtown’s attractive… and we’re not going to build a lot of highways to solve the congestion problem” that is torturing commuters trying to drive in and out of Midtown and Downtown every day, where 10 percent of Metro Atlanta’s jobs are located. “So you are going to find people saying, ‘I don’t want to battle that, let me be home, in Midtown.’ … But unfortunately, the supply comes in lumps, and the demand sort of is more smoothly continuous. And, so, we’re now in the lumpy phase of too much supply.”

Hard numbers are hard to come by. In January, the Atlanta Business Chronicle reported that there were nearly 12,000 new condo units in all of the north side of the city, including Midtown, with nearly 6,000 un-sold; sales last year were down 43 percent from the year before.

But developers and sellers, positive-thinkers like Trump, like to think of the inventory “glass” as being half-full. In fact, there is evidence that the Midtown market is better off than other parts of the city are.

According to Atlanta Real Estate Consultant David Haddow of Haddow & Co., new Midtown condos were actually selling at a higher rate in 2006 than condos were in the north side of town, overall. In Midtown, Haddow told 11Alive News on Thursday, 57 percent of the units had been sold by the end of 2006, compared with about 49 percent of the units in the north side as a whole,

“I love it. Like, Midtown’s my favorite part of the city,” Toya Brown told 11Alive News while sharing lunch at a Midtown restaurant with three of her friends around one of the outdoor tables. All of them are in their twenties. “I used to live in Alpharetta and I used to take the MARTA train and the bus and all of that.” Brown said. “Now, because I live a couple of blocks away, I can walk, or take MARTA one stop.”

Brown moved to Midtown two years ago specifically so she could walk to work. Walk everywhere.

Brown’s cutback in driving is one of the reasons that vehicular traffic along Peachtree Street, between North Avenue and 10th Street, has actually decreased seven percent since 2000. According to the Georgia DOT, the average annual daily traffic was 25,000 vehicles in 2000. In 2006 it was 23,330 vehicles.

Brown’s friends want to move to Midtown, too.

“I like it, I wish I could do it,” said one of them, Andrea Brown (no relation to Toya Brown), because she wants to eliminate her daily commute between Lawrenceville and Midtown. But she said that she and her roommate have not been able to find a Midtown condo unit or apartment that rents for less than $1,200 a month. Relatively cheap, they believe, but still too pricey for them right now.

Another friend, Natalie Grasso, hopes to find a Midtown apartment now, and buy a condo later.

“It takes about three hours out of my day,” to commute between Lawrenceville and Midtown, Grasso said. “I would love to see that be left behind.”

“I’m thrilled about it,” said Nancy Fuerst Belazi as she gave 11Alive News a tour of her new condo in Midtown. “It’s really just going to be a complete lifestyle change.”

Belazi is a single career woman moving into the brand new Reynolds on Peachtree, in the “SoNo” area of Midtown, just south of North Avenue. She is moving from a single family home that is in the suburbs of Cobb County – moving to Midtown even though she still works in Cobb County. The reverse commute, she said, is 15 minutes each way.

“I like that city feel. So, I’m thrilled,” Belazi said. “I’m looking forward to the summers and walking to the park and getting up in the morning and walking to get coffee and breakfast, and walking to a restaurant at night…. I like the walking aspect of it. It feels like a city.”

So, developers and sellers insist the over-supply is not the result of demand that is decreasing, because the demand remains red-hot.

Midtown’s population is up 76 percent since 2000, according Shannon Powell of the Midtown Alliance, growing from 17,000 people in 2000 to 30,000 in 2006. Most of them are either younger singles and couples with no children, or older “empty nester” couples.

And that’s the bottom-line reason more condos have been built in Midtown since 2000 than anywhere else in Metro Atlanta.

According to the Atlanta Regional Commission’s 2006 Population and Housing Report, the number of multi-family housing units in tiny Census Tract 12 (which encompasses the part of Midtown that’s between North Avenue and 10th Street, and between West Peachtree Street and Argonne Avenue) doubled from 2000 to 2006, going from 2,799 units to 5,599 units – a net gain of 2,800 units, a 100 percent increase. There was zero net gain or loss in the number of single-family homes during those years.

By comparison, one of the Buckhead census tracts, Census Tract 96, which is much larger, geographically, and is also experiencing a boom in new condo high-rises, had a 38 percent increase in multi-family housing units. There were 3,813 in 2000, and 5,264 in 2006, a gain of 1,451. There was a 1.5 percent gain in the number of single-family homes.

“We didn’t have this type of affordable housing seven-to-ten years ago in Midtown,” said Eli Saleeby of Morris & Draper Realtors, the sales manager for The Reynolds. “So it really is a wonderful thing. And it [the current supply of condos] is absorbing” the relentless demand.

Saleeby said that since May of 2006 when The Reynolds opened, half of the 130 units have been sold and only five of them to non-resident investors. The rest are occupied by the owners.

“We’re on schedule,” he said. The Reynolds’ buyer profile: 39 percent are from cities in other states, and 27 percent are from Metro Atlanta’s suburbs.

“Five million people,” he said of Metro Atlanta’s population, and more and more of them “want to live in town…. They want a short commute. And they want to be where the action is.”

But – MORE high-rise condos in Midtown Atlanta? More construction, and orange cones and cranes blocking traffic? Now?

“Now the time is right,” said the project director for Trump Towers Atlanta, Ivanka Trump, when she and her father visited Midtown on April 13. “The market’s hot. The market’s extremely strong. You know the media likes to say that it’s not. But in certain areas it is very strong. And it’s as strong as it’s ever been.”

So ready or not, here they come.

The Midtown Alliance says that the number of condo units already under construction and planned in Midtown will soon double the number of units that were built in the past ten years.

The entire City of Atlanta, not just its Midtown neighborhood, is booming.

In 2006, for example, Atlanta, alone, issued more building permits than each of the ten nearest counties did; Atlanta issued 10,779 building permits, compared with 6,794 in 2001.

In 2006, the county that issued the most number of building permits (aside from the City of Atlanta) was Gwinnett, with 8,956; five years earlier, Gwinnett issued 9,901 building permits. 2006 was the first year Gwinnett did not issue the most number of building permits in the ten county region. Atlanta now holds that prize.

According to the Atlanta Regional Commission, which researched U.S. Census figures, Atlanta issued 35 percent more building permits in 2006 than it did in 2005. Atlanta is in select company. Only four counties out of 20 in Metro Atlanta issued more building permits last year than they did the year before. All the rest issued fewer, with DeKalb County at the bottom, with a decrease of 28 percent.

Although the biggest population increases are due to singles and couples moving into Midtown without children, the population of school-aged children is booming as well at the public schools in Midtown, Virginia Highland and Morningside.

According to the Atlanta Public School System, Grady High School in Midtown has 437 more students in the 2006-2007 school year than it had in the 2001-2002 school year, an increase of 56 percent.

Inman Middle School nearby has a 12 percent increase this year compared with five years ago. Morningside Elementary School has a 25 percent increase in students.

Information from: www.11alive.com

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 28th, 2007 at 1:42 am and is filed under Condo, Real Estate. Tags: Alpharetta Andrea Brown Atlanta Bandon bank bank building Brown Century Community Condo Diamond Donald Trump Georgia Inventory Ivanka Midtown North Avenue Oman Orange Paris Peachtree Peachtree Street Real Estate real estate developer Realtor Realtors restaurant Shannon The Times Trump Tower Virginia Wachovia Wachovia Bank Wood Partners Woodruff Arts Center . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.