Larry Wills
I grew up in Marietta in the 1950s when it was making the transition from a walking and bicycle village to an automobile village. Even then the upper class did not walk. It rode in chauffeur-driven touring cars to work and social functions and had a store deliver, or sent a servant to pick up, their purchases. It received most of its walking on the country club golf course and dance floor. Today this class is still not into walking, except on a treadmill or to relieve the dog.
The laboring class has always been, and will forever remain the pedestrians. They cannot afford one or two automobiles.
Today, this walking/taxi riding population is mainly composed of Hispanics, and they have given Marietta an honest-to-god walking village. The commercial center of their pedestrian world is Wal-Mart. Within a quarter mile radius of this provider of their financial, medication, clothing, grooming, household goods and grocery needs is affordable and well-built rental housing, a good neighborhood school and Spanish specialty stores located along Roswell Street. This walking village developed as a result of the "Invisible Hand of Capitalism" and did not require the establishment of a Tax Allocation District, an $8 million bond and pro bono government subsides of private developers.
Instead of learning the lessons of this walking village, the city seems intent upon destroying it. Its residential anchor is the Huntington Lane Apartments, originally constructed as Blair Homes during World War II and later known as Pine Forest when I was a teenager.
Once containing its own playground, swimming pool and some 200-rental units, these sturdy brick duplexes and triplexes have thick plaster walls, hardwood floors and solid bathroom fixtures that provided safe and affordable housing for Mariettans for 68 years. It may be the state's oldest privately owned rental village and probably deserves its own Historic District.
The city has changed Huntington's zoning from "Residential" to "Office and Institutional" in an effort to hasten its demise, and the MRC is directly competing with it and other privately owned rental properties for Marietta's working- and walking-class renters.
The MRC offers 35 units on Hedges and Gramling Street for rent. These World War II-vintage wooden duplexes have the same floor plan and square footage as the brick Huntington units and vie for the same clientele. Most of the MRC tenants have Hispanic surnames and pay $700 monthly rent. The MRC's occupancy rate is approximately 50 percent. The rent at Huntington is $550 and it has 85 percent of its 98 units occupied. Approximately 60 percent of its tenants are Hispanic, 20 percent black and 10 percent white.
Like all commercial properties, Huntington is suffering from the recession and can stand little competition from government. According to Diana Mejia, the Huntington Lane property manager, her residents like its campus look, not having strangers living above and/or below them, solid construction, functional floor plans and the kitchens.
"Latinos love to cook," she explains.
Mejia came to America when very young after her father, a successful businessman, was kidnapped for ransom and killed by gunmen in Colombia. She is known as the "Angel of Huntington Lane" because of the interest she takes in the problems of her tenants.
The big difference between Huntington and the MRC rental property is that she and her lone maintenance man are not paid nearly as well as the taxpayers pay MRC director Reggie Taylor, his staff and a vendor to manage and maintain the city's rental property.
Huntington also contributes $55,000 annually in city, county and school taxes, while the MRC property, valued at $4 million, has been exempted and contributes $0.
The main lesson to be learned from the Wal-Mart walking community is that a village must have a mercantile heart to satisfy the wants and needs of its residents. Downtown Marietta has an adequate supply of entertainment and restaurants and an oversupply of government buildings, law offices and antique stores.
The question remains: How is the city going to insert the retail space and sense of excitement that will induce the upper middle class to walk to the Square? Without such an upscale mercantile heart, the city will have wasted $50 to $100 million in a pipe dream.
Larry Wills is a retired recycling consultant.
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THAT IS WHY THEY WALK.
Good advice on writing. Try to make the middle and end have some association with the beginnnnning.
Make the Square a pedestrian zone lik eis done in Europe. It will only get nicer. ( but then it how can it get "worser?"
Yesterday, in Mexico, armed gunmen stormed into a drug-rehabilitation center, lined up 17 people along a hallway, opened fire, blowing all their brains out!!!
We are creating more towns in America that will have events such as this, instead of art festivals & food tasting.
PC'ness doesn't allow for reality!
maylib seems to be on the right track, but the key is that people need to live near the Square to actually walk there frequently. Converting the vacant space to apartments would go a long way. There is plenty of retail space on and immediately off the Square.
I hope we figure out a way to make the square more walking friendly but, I fear too that traffic along on the streets that surround it will keep people from the larger neighborhoods away.
I think what most middle class folks do is drive to the square, then get out and walk. And it's usually event based, not day to day.
It would be nice if we could develop a real, honest to goodness market with meat and all sorts of local produce to sustain a daily walking community. Street vendors too. But the kind of shopping needs you give as examples are provided mostly by Walgreen's which is just off the square and sits on a MAJOR intersection of traffic. Not walking friendly.
But, you're right. So much of the square is taken up with govt offices that are dormant at night it will be difficult to meet the demands of folks. And with the economy hurting, demand is down already as is the risk taking to meet it.