Prepared under the leadership of Mayor Kasim Reed, Planning Commissioner Tim Keane, Lead Designer Ryan Gravel ('99), and Project Manager Heather Alhadeff ('00), the team included these Tech alumni and students: Kevin Bacon Jr. ('08), Abishek Behera ('17), Jodi Mansbach ('10), and Quynh Pham (class of '19).

Her research focuses on leveraging open, big data, data science techniques and data visualization tools to address critical planning issues. Her dissertation explores the interactions between land use and transportation in the era of shared autonomous vehicles using an agent-based discrete event simulation. She has worked extensively in interdisciplinary environments to deliver techniques that can address real-world sustainability problems. Her research has received best student paper runner-up award in 2016 Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining (KDD) conference.

And yet, just days later, the Federal Transit Administration approached the agency with an issue that, for all its preparation, the MBTA had avoided. In a letter to MBTA counsel John Englander, the FTA Office of Civil Rights’ associate administrator Linda Ford wrote the Boston agency had failed to prove that its cuts wouldn’t disproportionately affect low-income and minority residents. The MBTA had simply skipped filling out an “equity analysis,” she said, which is required under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.

The equity analysis process has its shortcomings. Alexander Karner, an assistant professor at Georgia Tech College of Architecture, has reviewed a number of equity analyses and found a few problems. First, planning agencies often decide what services they want to cut or add before performing the equity analysis, so the requirements of the area’s most needy residents are only considered afterwards. “It’s a bit of a box-checking exercise,” Karner says.

Read the full story on the Atlantic's CityLab site.

It’s called the Charleston Lowcountry Lowline, a project to turn an abandoned railroad line in the heart of the Charleston peninsula into a 6.5-mile linear park — and a group of Georgia Tech students are helping take the first steps to making the dream a reality. 

The Lowline’s proponents imagine it as Charleston’s version of the High Line in New York City, where a park was built on an abandoned elevated rail line, or Atlanta’s Beltline, which has transformed old rail tracks into a thriving park-cum-transportation-corridor encircling the city center.

How, as a Georgia Tech Architecture and City Planning grad student in the late 1990’s, he hit on what seemed like a sort of out-there thesis idea — take four old railroad “belt lines” encircling downtown Atlanta and link them together to spur development and reconnect communities — and wound up creating the one-of-a-kind, still evolving Atlanta Beltline.

Telling that story again isn’t why Gravel wrote “Where We Want to Live” — not exactly, anyway. Instead, the new book that comes out Tuesday is meant as his big, “Attaboy!” to all of us here in Atlanta. And also, well, his enthusiastic “Keep it up!”

“I really believe we wouldn’t be building the Beltline if it weren’t for the fact that the people of Atlanta fell in love with the idea and made it happen,” Gravel said in an interview. “The real power, as we move forward is that people continue to have that sense of ownership in it.”

And to think it might never have happened. Read the full story on the AJC site.

Gravel is an urban planner best known for his 1999 Georgia Institute of Technology master’s thesis which was the catalyst for the Atlanta BeltLine. Since then, he has remained involved in its implementation and currently serves on the Atlanta BeltLine Partnership board of directors. Gravel now consults with communities on planning and design for investments in infrastructure through his company, Sixpitch.

Read more on the city of Atlanta website. 

These reservoirs, installed in 2007, collect water from an underground stream that flowed (wastefully) into Atlanta’s sewer system for many years; today, the stored water is used to irrigate Grant Field and other campus landscaping.

The result: the school is using fit-for-purpose water instead of irrigating with treated drinking water, reducing its impact on the Chattahoochee River (Atlanta’s water supply source) and saving money.

Read the rest of her article on the Atlanta InTown site. 

"It's a rar confluence of events," says Grag Giuffrida, who as a grad student at Georgia Tech worked on a study called Imagine Memorial and now serves as executive for downtoen organization Cenral Atlanta Progress. "The Potentiual for Memorial Drive has been recognized for a long time."

Read the full story at the Atlanta Business Chronicle site. 

Affordable housing has become a hot topic in recent years as rental prices have risen while wage growth has lagged. An October 2015 report by Georgia Tech’s Dan Immergluck, a professor in the School of City and Regional Planning, found that 95 percent of rental units built between 2012 and 2014 were luxury apartments. The same report finds a decline in affordable, low-cost units.

Immergluck praised the mayor for calling on Fulton to address the affordability issue, but noted “even the 10 percent set aside by Invest Atlanta is a bit on the low side, especially for the large luxury high-rises that have received substantial subsidy.”

Immergluck repeatedly emphasizes that his estimates are conservative because the study only takes into account the impacts of vacant properties in poor or deteriorated condition. The report also only examines spillover effects on single-family properties up to 500 feet from abandoned homes, even though multi-family and commercial properties are also impacted, and previous studies have shown negative effects on property values up to 1,000 feet away or more. 

Learn more about the report on the Next City website.

Affordable Housing is best addressed through a combination of various policy tools that incentivize, restrict, and produce development patterns that will create and protect affordable housing. While the Decatur Housing Authority has done a tremendous job in the creation and management of low-income housing, the city has identified three policy tools to achieve a diversified approach to encourage the development of the “missing middle” housing for Decatur’s middle class workforce and older residents interesting in downsizing. These include community land trusts paired with the existing accessory dwelling unit ordinance, “cottage court” developments of smaller homes, and multifamily affordable housing. 

Read more about Decatur's, and Clark's, efforts on the Decatur website. 

With Prime Minister Narendra Modi driving the smart cities initiative, Subhrajit Guhathakurta, professor of city and regional planning and director of the Center for GIS at Georgia Tech, cautioned against marketing hype by technology firms like Cisco and IBM. "Smart cities is essentially about good infrastructure - water, electricity, transport. Robust IT connectivity is one of the components. When a city buys a technology, it must deliberate with public to seek out the appropriate one. The tech must not be a large complex system whose impact with be big if it fails. Instead, open standard should be employed and a climate created so that smaller firms can use it to innovate," Guhathakurta added. Read the full story on The Time of Indias website. 

The proposed study is part of the Imagine Memorial Project, an initiative that may someday lead to improvements to the Memorial Drive corridor.

The Imagine Memorial Drive Project first started as a graduate project for an urban planning class at Georgia Tech. It was spearheaded by Councilperson Natalyn Archibong and SCaRP professor Mike Dobbins, who previously served as an Atlanta Planning Commissioner.

After nearly three decades of failed attempts to redevelop the corridor, there is now more forward momentum to get these projects off the ground. Read more on the Decaturish site. 

Compounding those denial rates: The vast number of people who do not even apply for loans.

“The black-white homeownership divide in the U.S. is perniciously long lasting,” said Zillow Senior Economist Skylar Olsen. “We can talk about denial rates all we want, yet the divide begins before mortgage applications are ever filled out.”

“We have seen the re-emergence of a dual market in the mortgage market, with higher-cost FHA lenders dominating African-American neighborhoods,” said Dan Immergluck, a professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology and an expert in housing and community development issues.

While black neighborhoods and borrowers need FHA loans, they also need more conventional loans, Immergluck said. He called for increased scrutiny of fair lending practices among conventional lenders, as well as so-called “duty-to-serve” requirements of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac involving low- and middle-income families.

Such scrutiny would “make sure that all borrowers and neighborhoods have access to low-cost credit at equal terms,” Immergluck said.

Follow the link to read more on Zillow.

Into that discussion comes Georgia Tech professor Dan Immergluck, housing expert and professor in Tech’s School of City and Regional Planning. His new book, “Preventing the Next Mortgage Crisis,” explores the bust and its aftermath.

The AJC talked with Immergluck about his views on the causes of the crisis, the best measures of recovery and the chances of a repeat. Read the full interview on the AJC webpage. 

On Oct. 22, Georgia Tech issued a request for qualifications (Step 1) and a request for proposals (Step 2) for “The Living Building at Georgia Tech.” The project is the dream of the Kendeda Fund, which provided a $30 million grant for the Living Building Challenge 3.0 — a venture that will become a research and educational center for the campus.

The RFQ and RFP stated that the building alone would cost an estimated $18.6 million and would have 42,500 square feet of space. The solicitation packages for the project are due Nov. 12.

Georgia Tech would then evaluate the proposals and issue notifications to the semifinalists by Nov. 20. The plan calls for design professionals to be selected and ready to start work on the building’s construction documents by March 2016. And the goal is to have the building open by the middle of 2017.

Never mind that it’s unclear whether major highway projects actually provide an economic boost (many of the supposed new benefits are simply a relocation of existing business activity). Congestion relief itself is a dubious claim when it comes to road expansions. Transportation experts have repeatedly found that building new roads inevitably encourages more people to drive, which in turn negates any congestion savings—a phenomenon known as “induced demand.” 

So it’s refreshing—and rare—to see the California DOT (aka Caltrans) link to a policy brief outlining key research findings from years of study into induced demand. Here are the highlights:

There’s high-quality evidence for induced demand. All the studies reviewed by Handy used time-series data, “sophisticated econometric techniques,” and controlled for outside variables such as population growth and transit service.

More roads means more traffic in both the short- and long-term.Adding 10 percent more road capacity leads to 3-6 percent more vehicle miles in the near term and 6-10 percent more over many years.

Much of the traffic is brand new. Some of the cars on a new highway lane have simply relocated from a slower alternative route. But many are entirely new. They reflect leisure trips that often go unmade in bad traffic, or drivers who once used transit or carpooled, or shifting development patterns, and so on.

Eric Sundquist, SCaRP PhD alumnus, of SSTI said via email that it’s “notable” to see Caltrans link to the policy brief, but adds that some DOTs have started to address induced demand whether they call it that or not. The big question, he says, is what policies get put in place to deal with its effects. Pennsylvania’s DOT during the Ed Rendell administration, for instance, “basically stopped building new highways and diverted resources to upkeep and non-car modes,” Sundquist says.

"In June, regional leaders launched the Atlanta Metro Export Plan (MEP), a regional export strategy to stimulate economic growth and create quality jobs through exports," Yun says. "The Atlanta MEP is a collaborative effort between the Metro Atlanta Chamber, Georgia Department of Economic Development and other regional public and private organizations." 

Click on the article link to read more.

The Foundation is now considering:

• Taking advantage of the 200 acres of right-of-way on the roadside to farm biofuel plants like corn, canola or sunflowers.
• Installing attractive, translucent sound barriers that also function as solar panels.
• Repurposing toxic hog manure as a replacement for the binding agent in asphalt.
• Creating living billboards made of plant material that help purify the air.
• Building a wildlife crossing over or under the highway to help reduce animal fatalities.

"Taxpayers in Hall County, who have never been given the opportunity to vote for the reservoir, have spent $16 million on consultants – lawyers, lobbyists and engineers who are working to secure the federal permits that must be issued to allow 18 miles of streams and 40 acres of wetlands to be destroyed during construction. (One of those consultants – lawyer Tommy Craig, who was paid at least $1 million by Hall County for his Glades efforts – no longer works for the county and has been fired by other local governments for overbilling and failing to deliver permits for similar reservoir projects.)" 

Read her full column at the Saporta Report site. 

The study, compiled by School of City and Regional Planning professor Dan Immergluck, says the metro area has been experiencing an apartment boom since the recession. As of March, there were 11,000 units under construction and another 9,000 proposed, according to cited research from Haddow and Co.

But those units, Immergluck writes, are almost entirely luxury rentals, with rents hovering around $2 or more per square foot. Meanwhile, rentals for $750 a month or less are disappearing. The Tech professor estimates these low-cost units were lost at a rate of about 4.4 percent annually between 2010 and 2013, a dip of about 1,600 each year.

Read Immerglcuk's report on the WABE site. 

As of this summer, there were more than 11,000 apartments under construction and another 11,000 proposed, according to consulting firm Haddow and Company. The vast majority of those fall in the luxury category says Georgia Tech SCaRP professor Dan Immergluck.

“There’s essentially no new low-income housing development,” says Immergluck, who studies housing and real estate markets. “There’s also very little for moderate income folks, and so there’s this mismatch, and what it’s going to force people to do is stretch.”

According to Georgia Tech, the project will be integrated into the Institute’s Eco-Commons, a series of campus green spaces designed to conserve natural resources, including energy and water, and provide the community with educational and recreational amenities. This endeavor not only supports Georgia Tech’s goal to use its resources as efficiently as possible, but also manages stormwater runoff and helps protect drinking water sources.

A $1 million grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation (which also provides funding support to Next City) will help launch the MetroLab Network, which will see more than 20 city-university partnerships working on 60 Smart City projects. The University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University, in Philadelphia, and Georgia Tech and Georgia State University, in Atlanta, are four of the universities on board.

"Cities are part of larger economies: regional, national and global economies and they are subject to the economic forces of those economies," she says. "Cities will weather downturns emanating from those larger economies better by making strategic decisions (1) to promote diversified economies, (2) develop anchor economic activities that are always in demand, and (3) create a high quality of life for employees and business owners."

Rhein is the Senior Director of Transit Oriented Development and Real Estate at MARTA. Along with the projects in Brookhaven and Chamblee, she is leading MARTA TOD projects in Oakland City and other communities south of I-20.

"Where disconnected developments consumed time, taxed our infrastructure and reduced our quality of life, equitable TOD builds community, promotes inclusion and strengthens the fabric of the region," says Rhein. "With seven TOD projects under way and even more private-sector development near our transit stations, MARTA is helping to ignite a community-driven, 21st century approach to creating unique regional destinations in a growing metropolis."

Read more about her love of common ground, and the nonprofits that help support such spaces, in the Atlanta Intown article. 

Recently, the Boys’ High Alumni Association (ABHSAA) signed an agreement with Timothy Guiney, Grady’s principal, to hand over the entire assets of its foundation – currently worth more than $800,000.

The graduates of Boys’ High simply want to express their deep gratitude and affection for the education they received. At the same time, they seek to help Grady High continue to be one of most outstanding institutions of learning in Atlanta and Georgia.

The MetroLab Network will provide the opportunity to share successes, address challenges and build shared platforms for experimentation and data between cities and universities necessary to increase the tangible results of new innovations. 

“As an urban research university, Georgia State is deeply entrenched in Atlanta’s success and in the success of cities around the world,” said Georgia State President Mark Becker. “We welcome the opportunity to work closely with the City of Atlanta and Georgia Tech to find creative solutions to critical societal issues.”

“For years, various disciplines within Georgia Tech have helped cities throughout the state to develop potential solutions to infrastructure challenges,” said Georgia Tech President G. P. “Bud” Peterson. “For example, our Center for Urban Innovation supports interdisciplinary research on urban sustainability and partners with other groups. The Metro Lab Network allows us to take this work to a new level as we collaborate and leverage expertise in the smart cities effort,” he said.   

Louisville in Kentucky will soon become the first major US city to develop an urban heat-adaptation plan, says Stone, who is leading the project. The effort is driven by necessity. Louisville has the fastest warming urban heat island in the United States, and temperatures there have climbed by more than 4 °C since 1961. Part of the problem is that the city has lost 54,000 trees per year to insects, ice storms and lack of care. 

If Louisville implements the strategies that Stone recommends, it could become a testing ground that will reveal how changes to a city's physical surface alter the urban heat island — and its pioneering programme could point the way for other cities to follow. “We're already crossing thresholds that are pretty sensitive,” says Stone. “Cities are going to be contemplating more aggressive action. But cities can measurably slow the rate at which they're warming over a decade or two.” And that's pretty quick, he adds, because even if we eliminated greenhouse-gas emissions tomorrow, “we're still going to warm for a couple of hundred years”.

Although cool roofs and green roofs can strongly curb temperatures at the tops of buildings, they do not always yield benefits at the street level, and they may trigger unwanted effects, such as reducing rainfall in some places. On top of that, it is unclear whether the limited programmes currently in place will have a measurable effect on temperature—and citizen health—and whether cities will expand their efforts enough to produce results. “If you're just putting green roofs on city hall and schools, it's not going to move the needle,” says Brian Stone Jr, an urban scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

Despite all of the heat-related risks that cities face in the future, few have put heat-management plans in place. Louisville in Kentucky is one: it will soon become the first major US city to develop an urban heat-adaptation plan, says Stone, who is leading the project. The effort is driven by necessity. Louisville has the fastest warming urban heat island in the United States, and temperatures there have climbed by more than 4 °C since 1961. Part of the problem is that the city has lost 54,000 trees per year to insects, ice storms and lack of care.

Stone is now collecting the baseline data that most cities lacked before embracing cooling steps. He is travelling around Louisville measuring tree cover, finding hot spots and identifying areas with vulnerable residents. The next step is to create a blueprint that combines cool roofs, green roofs, tree plantings and cool paving materials that could change the fate of the city's most at-risk residents. Stone is starting with modest but realistic assumptions in his modelling: the conversion of just 100 buildings to green roofs, for example. At the same time, the city hopes to increase its number of trees.

Ross outlines several milestones that, in part, were initiated because of efforts on the state level. She empasizes the need for continued action within the Legislature and state agencies for biding the region together.

"Since the political environment at the state and local levels will dictate the viability of regionalism in metro Atlanta, we need to engage with it. Letting your city, county, and state officials know that the strength of the entire region matters can help make it a priority. Otherwise, local and state issues can easily eclipse our regional health."

Georgia Tech students produced a framework plan for the West End area. This plan was the outgrowth of the students’ previously completed framework plan for Northside Drive, including the communities around the new Falcons Stadium. The framework study suggests that West End is ripe for new investments in retail and residential. Although the area faces plenty of problems, including blight and a high percentage of vacancies, the report found glimmers of hope.

SCaRP Professor Dan Immergluck says developers built new neighborhoods like crazy, until the market crashed. Now unfinished subdivisions like these are problems for cities around the country where the housing boom mostly meant more single-family homes. Construction is returning in some places, but not everywhere. "Well, Atlanta's a paradox because as a metro, the indicators are pretty positive," Immergluck says. "Job growth has returned. Housing demand has returned."

But, Immergluck says Atlanta is a dual market. "I think we have a bigger kind of race and space divide than lots of other cities."

Gravel sent an email to his friends and associates Thursday saying he has formed his own firm – Sixpitch. “I’ve been chasing the Atlanta BeltLine for nearly 16 years, and today I’m excited to announce the next chapter in that journey – a new small consultancy called Sixpitch,” Gravel wrote in the email. “It will allow me to be more agile in my chase to unlock the project’s potential, explore related challenges like equity, politics and regional vision, and also translate ideas from our story to a national audience.”

Gravel joined Rose Scott and Denis O’Hayer on “A Closer Look” to discuss the original concept for the BeltLine project, how he first envisioned it, when he realized it no longer belonged just to him, and more on  “A Closer Look.”

“These buildings give us an idea of what Peachtree was like, ‘Once upon a time,’” Kirk Henderson, records manager for the Georgia Tech Library and an exhibit organizer, said in a statement. The exhibit provides a sense of what Franklin D. Roosevelt saw in 1932, when he rode in an open car along Peachtree Street. More than 25,000 citizens lined the street to get a glimpse of the presidential candidate whom some already considered an adopted Georgian, because of the time he spent at Warm Springs, according to a report on Galileo, an online initiative of the University System of Georgia.

Still Atlanta confronts more dubious measures that lead the nation in the suburbanization of poverty, the lack of income mobility, and by most measures, income inequality. These trends are related. This infrastructural legacy is not only a threat to our economic prosperity, but it is wreaking havoc with much of our suburbs today, as a real estate investment tide is pouring into “walkable” nodes in the “favored quarter” stretching from Midtown to Alpharetta while receding rapidly from suburban areas cut off from economic activity and transportation choices.

Archibong asked Georgia Tech to choose Memorial Drive as the subject of the year’s Design Studio class. Every year, the studio selects an urban feature in Atlanta for analysis. Students have examined Atlantic Station, the Beltline, Northside Drive, and Fort McPherson.

In her 215-page thesis developed last year at Georgia Tech, architecture and city planning master's candidate Audrey L. Plummer examined the potential for repurposing a closed golf course in DeKalb County, Georgia. She found that a high-density, mixed-use concept supported by the nearby community for the central portion of the site would be financially infeasible because it is located too far from the city center and significant transportation infrastructure. 

SCaRP alumna Deanna Murphy chose Decatur Street and Boulevard Tunnel. She porposes capping a portion of the Boulevard tunnel to create a "living room" park, a greenspace where people can enjoy each other and the views. In addition, redevelopment of the vacant lot into neighborhood retail, dining, and housing would complement the "living room" by bringing more people to the area and really enlivening this intersection.

One of largest-scale urban redevelopment programs ever undertaken in the United States is the Atlanta BeltLine, a sustainable redevelopment project in Atlanta, GA. The project is converting 22 miles of disused Civil War-era railroad tracks encircling the city into a new transit greenway – a walkable green space – that links over 40 neighborhoods across the city like never before. The project is still in its early stages, but has already stimulated dramatic changes in people’s understanding of where they live and how they interact with their space. With plans underway to incorporate the city’s existing subway system, its new streetcar, and a system of multi-use trails across the city, the BeltLine is fast becoming one of Atlanta’s defining features.

The project’s origin is just as remarkable. The BeltLine began as a “kernel of an idea,” the subject of a Georgia Tech graduate student’s 1999 Master’s thesis on architecture and urban planning. Now an urban designer at Perkins+Will, Ryan Gravel’s original vision for the BeltLine has expanded beyond what anybody imagined in the project’s early days.

“Today the vision…include[s] ideas like 1,400 acres of new parks, a linear arboretum, public art, new streetscapes, brownfield remediation, significant investments in affordable housing, and a list that continues to grow,” says Gravel.

“It’s not a global rulebook,” he cautioned. “They’re guidelines, which is to say ways that planning can be most effective.” Importantly for planners, the guidance reflects contemporary ideas about participation and bottom-up approaches as opposed to older, top-down methods. “The guidelines are very clear that planning, when done right, is participatory, engages stakeholder constituencies and considers a wide variety of objectives in order to make appropriate decisions,” Stiftel said. “All too often, planning is a tool for the top leadership of the country to impose their ideas on the nation rather than a way in which the nation itself defines where it wants to go and sets courses of action.” 

Whatever choices Chicago makes, expect neighborhoods as well as political leaders to have their say in them. Chicago – more than most cities – has a well-organized collection of local groups that live the credo that all politics is local. “This is a critical component of the planning infrastructure,” said former Chicago resident Dan Immergluck, now professor in the Georgia Tech School of City and Regional Planning. “There are hundreds of neighborhood economic development groups (in Chicago), many of which have had serious impact on the city.”

Professor Brian Stone is one of the country’s foremost experts in urban heat. “Cities essentially create their own climates,” he says. “And the urban heat island effect is one way to measure that. There’s a heat island effect, really, in every large city.” Stone’s research found that Louisville is warming at the fastest rate of any city in the nation, causing summer temperatures in the urban core to be up to 20 degrees higher than surrounding areas. Louisville is taking this possibility seriously and, in the process, has been more aggressive and comprehensive than any other city in tackling the problem, including securing private grants to fund a $135,000 study of the city’s urban heat island. The analysis, which is scheduled to be done later this year, is the first of its kind in the country, and possibly the world, according to Stone, who is leading the project.