Alpharetta City Center Wins Development Of Excellence Award

Alpharetta City Center, the public-private partnership redevelopment in the city’s core, was honored Friday with a 2018 Development of Excellence Award by the Atlanta Regional Commission.

 

The project won the award in the category of Exceptional Merit for Context-Sensitive Town Center Development. The awards, given during the agency’s State of the Region Breakfast held Nov. 2, recognize the developments and places that are improving quality of life in the 10-county Atlanta region.

 

Alpharetta City Center’s walkable 26 acres are home to Alpharetta City Hall, a Fulton County Library branch, as well as restaurants, retail, offices, luxury apartments, single-family houses, and 2.5 acres of green space. The project is a result of a public-private partnership whose groundwork was laid 15 years ago when the city first set forth its goals to build a true downtown through its LCI program. In the years since, it has worked steadily to create City Center from mostly underutilized commercial spaces around the intersection of North Main Street and Academy Street.

 

The transformation is dramatic, as the project has replaced an assortment of empty lots and underused buildings with a unified building design that blends seamlessly with the surrounding historic downtown, including a network of bike-ped paths that connect housing to schools, retail, and other amenities. The development is designed around five major green spaces. At its center, the Town Green connects the new City Hall to the restaurants and shops of Main Street.

 

City Center has attracted a great deal of development, including chef-driven restaurants and residential, retail, and offices — including DataScan, whose headquarters now fill a 26,000 square-foot building.

 

The development has important green touches, too. Pervious surfaces — which help reduce storm-water runoff — make up more than 10 of its 26 acres. This was accomplished by replacing old streets and parking lots with greenspaces that house freestanding buildings. In addition, pervious materials were installed wherever possible to mitigate storm-water, and an underground system filters storm-water runoff before it reaches the property’s detention pond.

 

The top award, the 2018 Development of Excellence, went to La France Walk, a residential community in Atlanta’s Edgewood neighborhood that features varied housing options and price points to encourage greater diversity and walkability.

 

ARC also presented its Great Places Award to The Aerotropolis Area, a dynamic part of the Atlanta region that includes communities around Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport.

 

Other awards recognized: the city of Chamblee and Mercy Park senior housing and healthcare facility, and Constellations, a lovingly restored workspace in downtown Atlanta that honors the building’s history and the civil rights legacy of the neighborhood.

 

This article was first published by Patch on November 2nd, 2018 and was written by Kristal Dixon. To see the article as it was first published, click here.