New homes that brought hope to areas such as Vine City, Pittsburg now sit abandoned
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, December 23, 2008
For Tanya Mitchell, hope came in the sound of buzzing saws and clanging hammers.
The noise and commotion of an intown building boom promised a new era of development, higher property values and improved prosperity for Mitchell’s Center Hill neighborhood and other communities, such as Carver Hills, Vine City, English Avenue and Riverside.
Hyosub Shin/hshin@ajc.com
Adair Park resident Derrick Duckworth, a real estate agent, stands amid abandoned houses in Atlanta’s Pittsburg area, which is near Adair Park.
Hyosub Shin/hshin@ajc.com
When scores of pseudo-Craftsman and faux Victorian homes were built in intown Atlanta, many hoped they would revitalize neighborhoods. Instead, scenes such as this one on Jones Avenue N.W. near Gun Club Park emerged.
Hyosub Shin/hshin@ajc.com
After the 1996 Olympics, renewed interest in intown living brought a wave of new construction for the first time in a generation. But many of the potentially revitalized neighborhoods, such as this one on Jones Avenue N.W. near Gun Club Park, are now left to deal with the fallout from those speculative projects.
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“It was enough to make you hopeful,” Mitchell said. “You had all this vacant land folks were putting new homes on. You were glad to see the new homes built.”
But now, the real estate collapse and credit crunch are unraveling much of that progress.
It’s a uniquely intown Atlanta story, where areas once blighted by crime found new life from renovation and construction of an unprecedented level of new infill housing — only to see those same houses fall into abandonment and disrepair as the market crumbled.
Today, hundreds of new or nearly new homes sit vacant, depressing property values in areas where new construction once promised so much hope.
Some are for sale at rock-bottom prices. Others are vacant crime magnets.
“What became of the [building boom] is what you see now,” said Atlanta City Councilman Ivory Young, whose southwest Atlanta district has a considerable number of abandoned new homes.
“Four or five years ago, they were the promise of hope. Now, they are vacant and abandoned structures. If they are not crack houses, they are soon-to-be crack houses.”
The dirty truth
Several southwest Atlanta communities have banded together to create a group called the Dirty Truth Campaign, which has cataloged more than 1,200 vacant homes in their neighborhoods.
Robert Welsh, who bought a house in Pittsburg with his brother 18 months ago, estimated that 70 percent of the vacant homes in his community were built in the past few years. His home, built in 2003, was surrounded by vacant, newly built homes. He’s helped find renters for two of them.
Conditions are so bad that Welsh said his brother was robbed at gunpoint and his car stolen before he moved in — as crews were in the house to install an alarm system.
“I knew then I had to get involved,” said Welsh. “I couldn’t just stick my head in the sand.”
Beginning in the 1970s and for more than 20 years, Atlanta’s population fell.
After the 1996 Olympics in the city, renewed interest in intown living brought a wave of new construction for the first time in a generation.
The new construction heralded a boom that saw Atlanta’s population climb 15 percent over the past eight years to about 520,000, U.S. census figures show.
Many new residents couldn’t afford established addresses, such as Morningside or Virginia-Highland, so builders found a market for much cheaper new homes in communities such as Vine City or Pittsburg.
City records show that in the past three years, Atlanta has issued more than 3,800 permits to build new single-family homes.
The top ZIP codes for new housing permits, 30331 and 30318, are both in northwest Atlanta. They include neighborhoods such as Guilford, the Cascade area, Riverside and Center Hill. The third, 30310, includes southwest Atlanta neighborhoods such as Pittsburg, Sylvan Hills and Adair Park.
Routinely, the pricey new homes take the shape of faux Victorians or pseudo-Craftsmans with two stories and large porches. They often tower over old, run-down ranch homes, causing taxes and property values to soar, and creating an obvious tension between the past and a possible future.
The building also brought new life, new wealth and new residents to communities that hadn’t seen investment in decades.
“It started out as a positive,” said Columbus Ward, 54, a lifetime resident of Peoplestown. “You were hoping all these new residents were going to help the neighborhood.”
Today, Ward looks around Peoplestown and can’t help but feel the boom has been a bust for his community.
“All these new houses are sitting there and adding to the crime,” Ward said. “People have broken in and vandalized them. They are an eyesore and haven for people dumping trash.”
No quick or simple fix
Getting all the recently built, empty homes occupied won’t be a quick or simple process.
Cal Wimberly, an Atlanta real estate agent, said there are so many nearly new homes on the market in northwest and southwest Atlanta and so few buyers that new homes now sell for half or less than their original price.
He recently sold a nearly new house in the Pittsburg community for $30,000. It had once been listed for six times as much, he said.
Empty new homes can be found across southwest Atlanta, which has seen values fall through the floor because of foreclosure, mortgage fraud and abandonment.
Southwest Atlanta includes ZIP code 30310, the top in Georgia for foreclosure filings.
Current listings show a house on Wech Street — a 3-bedroom, 2-bath ranch home advertised as in “move in condition” — available for $24,900.
Young, who lives in Vine City and represents the surrounding area on the Atlanta City Council, said the boom and bust proves Atlanta needs some kind of long-term vision for development in its more troubled areas if they are ever going to prosper.
In northwest Atlanta, Councilwoman Felicia Moore sees the changes to her district as a mixed bag.
She has Parkview and Adams Crossing, successful new communities with dozens of new homes and stable new residents populating the Riverside community. On the other hand, there are dozens of vacant new homes scattered about.
She describes an area near the intersection of Jones and East avenues as “Duplex Death Row” because of the collection of more than a dozen dilapidated, empty, newly built duplexes.
On this day, Moore stops to look at one empty house built into a steep hill. On either side sit two unfinished foundations, one because a house burned. “Who’s going to live there?” she asks.
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