Green Peachtree Hills

The developers of the stalled Peachtree Hills Place senior living center on Peachtree Hills Avenue have been sued by BB&T Bank, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.  BB&T says that Andy Isakson and Kevin Isakson, respectively the brother and son of U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, together with their business partner David Barnhart, failed to repay a $26.7 million real estate loan.

Isakson-Barnhard used money from the loan to purchase and demolish the old apartments surrounding the intersections of Peachtree Hills Avenue, Kings Circle, and Virginia Place. But before they could build the 274 planned units on the 23-acre site, the economy turned south and Isakson-Barnhard found it very difficult to sell the units.  Construction was suspended, and the site remains a tangle of undergrowth, fencing, and unfinished lots.

The Peachtree Hills Civic Association has had discussions with the Isaksons about the state of the property, and it is hoped that improvements will be seen soon.  The developers had hoped to work out some kind of plan with their creditors, but this lawsuit seems to indicate that they were unsuccessful.  Plans for the site remain in limbo.

The Buckhead Eco Collection event at the end of March was a big success.  Take a look at this list of stuff that was diverted from landfills and will now be safely recycled or disposed of properly:

• 25,811 pounds of electronics disposed of safely
• 20,000 pounds of paint disposed of
• 8,960 pounds of paper shredded and recycled
• 300 printer cartridges recycled
• 160 pounds of light bulbs recycled
• 100 gallons of aerosols disposed of
• 60 gallons of medication disposed of
• 15 gallons of batteries disposed of

25,811 Pounds?!!? That’s 12.9 tons of electronics, to say nothing of all the other stuff.  What’s more, they raised over $8,000:

We raised over $8000, which is enough to provide at least nine Buckhead elementary school classrooms with idbid kits to teach the next generation to enjoy and protect the environment while learning essential fundamentals of science, math and English language arts.

They’ve posted a video slideshow on Facebook where you can see the event as it unfolded that rainy Saturday.

Green Peachtree Hills played a small part.  We took a full pickup truck load of recyclables from the neighborhood to the Eco Collection.

Congratulations to BATMA, Livable Buckhead, LiveThrive, and everyone involved for making the Eco Collection a success.  We’re looking forward to the next one.

Walkability was just about the last thing Atlantans had in mind as the city was growing in the ’60s, ’70′s, and ’80′s. This city was all about the automobile. But our “built environment,” with its inherent bias toward cars, strongly inhibits active forms of transportation such as walking or biking.

A video from the nonprofit group Everybody Walk makes this point very clear. It describes the Beltline as a means of retrofitting Atlanta for pedestrians.

Peachtree Hills excels in walkability for an Atlanta neighborhood. We are fortunate to be adjacent to a shopping center, two major thoroughfares, and a transit station. Walkability is one of the big reasons I live here. A quick mental tour of the immediate area outside the neighborhood on the Peachtree and Piedmont sides finds that we live within walking distance of at least 40 restaurants! *

Tell that to your suburban friends the next time traffic comes up.

* To get this number, I mentally walked as far as Piedmont and a little ways up Sidney Marcus Blvd. on the east side, and down Peachtree Road to about Colonial Homes Drive on the west side. And it’s easy to walk even farther than that.

Here’s a quickie.  I stumbled across links to live webcams from construction sites along the Atlanta Beltline.  Why bother?  Well, as Abraham Lincoln reportedly said about a particularly long-winded preacher, “For those who like that sort of thing, that’s the sort of thing they’d like.”  Same here.

Construction site for Stanton Park