The New Old Neighborhood
New Urbanist Town Centers Find Success in Two Southern Cities

By Shanta McGahey

    Smart growth has finally gone mainstream. Frustrated with the amount of time spent in their cars, suburbanites are becoming new urbanists.  Town center projects connecting families, shops and work are popping up around the country, particularly in the South. Developers and architects who formerly shied away from the “new” concept, because of higher costs and lack of buyer interest, are now extending urban planning to the suburbs. The developers of Birkdale Village in Huntersville, North Carolina and the City of Decatur, Georgia, have acquired the Holy Grail of new urbanist planning—they have created financially successful and community-friendly smart growth—in two suburban settings.

Birkdale Village

Developed in 2000 by Crosland, Inc. and Pappas Properties and currently owned by Inland Real Estate Group, Birkdale Village is the future of shopping. The 52-acre site is 14 miles north of Charlotte, North Carolina in an archetypal suburban community. Surrounded by traditional post-WWII-style housing developments, Birkdale Village’s Nantucket-inspired, three-floor buildings stand out. Twenty-seven buildings, including 10 mixed-use structures, contain 320 apartments from lofts to three-bedroom models, two office buildings (one corporate and one medical), a movie theatre and more than 60 boutiques, restaurants and national retailers. A village green sits in the center of Birkdale, hosting live bands on Friday evenings from May through October.

“Everything is based around the green,” says Elizabeth Lord, marketing director of Birkdale Village. “If you don’t have a ‘heartbeat’ like the green, [a town center] won’t work.”

The Birkdale Village green certainly gives it the flavor of a small town, hosting annual seasonal events like the 4th of July water fight, Christmas tree lighting and Memorial Day parade. Birkdale offers limited parallel and diagonal parking along the edges of the green, but the majority of parking sits on the outside of the development, requiring shoppers to park and walk to their favorite stores. As Lord found out, “People like being pedestrians. The first year we opened, we offered trolleys from the parking lot to the center of the Village, but nobody used them. They wanted to walk.”

Shoppers are pleased to find all their favorite stores, like Ann Taylor Loft, Victoria’s Secret, Gap and Banana Republic, as well as eclectic local and regional boutiques like Pandora and The Jewel Box. Pappas and Crosland recruited traditional big-box retailers like Dick’s Sporting Goods and Barnes & Noble to Birkdale fairly easily. “The national retailers signed on as soon as they saw the kind of traffic that was moving through the Village,” Lord says. Birkdale has only three, soon-to-be-filled vacant spaces, a testament to the design’s growing popularity in the shopping center industry.

Birkdale traffic ranges from residents walking their dogs to tourists stopping through on their way to Florida. Birkdale takes advantage of the work force surrounding the center as a source of revenue during the weekdays. Recently, a covered bridge was built to connect a large Rubbermaid office building to Birkdale Village so Rubbermaid’s employees can walk to lunch and run errands.

Although the noise of the “urban” town center is an adjustment for some (restaurants and bars are Birkdale’s anchors), Lord says most residents “get it.” Apartments facing Birkdale’s Main Street are usually leased within one week of becoming available. While residents of the apartments consist mostly of young professionals, Lord says there are a surprising number of empty-nesters living in the Village, who love the convenience of living, shopping and being entertained in one neighborhood. Young families that planned on renting temporarily have made Birkdale their permanent home because of its safety, school bus stops and kid-friendly atmosphere.

Behind the apartments, a dog park separates Birkdale Village from a neighborhood of townhouses that purposefully contains sidewalks and lacks cul-de-sacs.  Two other housing developments are within walking distance of Birkdale, with homes ranging from $100,000-$300,000. Birkdale’s success is not surprising to Lord. “When you move from development to development as so many people do these days, you lose the community events that we loved when we were kids. Birkdale provides what I refer to as ‘street magic.’ We have that sense of energy a community needs.”


City of Decatur

According to Deputy City Manager Hugh Saxon, in the 1950s, big-box commercial stores and malls pulled residents out of the downtown section of Decatur, a small city east of Atlanta. Beginning early in the 1980s, the City of Decatur set out to revitalize its downtown using smart growth planning, adopting a Town Center Plan in 1982. The plan embraced several design standards and guidelines through the years, resulting in a town center designed to last, with several mixed-use properties branching out from an historic courthouse in the center of the city.

Despite the excellent (and very clean) public transportation available, metropolitan Atlanta struggles with getting area residents to use it. Decatur city officials are combating this by providing the easiest access possible to their town’s residents. The Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA) has three stations within Decatur’s city limits and a free shuttle transports students and employees from downtown Decatur to Emory University. One of the MARTA stations in Decatur is next to the Old Courthouse and within walking distance of five residential complexes.

Townsquare Condominiums, a 105-unit complex, was the first mixed-use, residential development in Decatur’s downtown commercial district. Started in 1999, the project was developed by Ultima Holdings and contains well-known stores like Subway, Natural Body and Great Clips, as well as local businesses Kaleidoscope and McKinney’s Pharmacy to keep the small town flavor.

Townsquare’s original market was intended to be young professionals, but as in Birkdale Village, many of the residential units were sold to empty-nesters ready to sell their single-family homes in the suburbs for the convenience of a downtown condominium. Sixty percent of the residential units were sold when construction started in 1999, proving that there was a large demographic waiting for a development like this one.

Joanne and Pat Murphy purchased a condominium at Townsquare four years ago, when they decided to downsize from the home they lived in for 41 years. Joanne explains, “We liked all the different age groups and the convenience [of Townsquare Condominiums]. It’s across the street from my church, the rec center and the public library. We can catch the MARTA on the corner to get to the airport or downtown Atlanta.”

This enthusiasm for town center living is quickly spreading through the Southeast, indicating a significant sea change towards reducing sprawl and reconnecting communities.

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