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I attended the Midtown Neighbors’ Association townhall meeting about the proposed Local Historic District on Thursday, June 7. I talked to Kim Wilson, a lead member of the MNA committee proposing the district (more info at preservemidtownatlanta.org), Doug Young of the Atlanta Urban Design Commission (which, for some annoying reason, doesn’t have an actual link to its meeting notices on its page), and Royce Morris, a property owner behind the counter-district website dontlowerourpropertyvalues.com.

It’s a rather contentious issue, leading one crotchety old man to get right up in the face of Kim Wilson with such hostile language that she had to get the hell away from him. While I’m leary of real estate developers, Royce Morris politely laid out his case to anyone who asked at the meeting and did concede that if a majority of the homeowners in the district vote to approve this plan, he’d take down his site and bow to the will of the majority (though probably after selling off his three Midtown properties, he said half-jokingly). The MNA argued contrary to Morris’ objections that a historic district would not necessarily mean property values would suffer, pointing to some studies on the web, including one about historic properties in South Carolina going up faster than average (see PDF here). And the AUDC rep talked about the extra steps required to modify a Contributing Structure in a historic district — a process that kicks in for any modification that requires a building permit (generally exceeding $2500) and would add about 3 weeks to the time to get final approval of the permit.

A key issue here is input: there were about 75 people in attendance at the townhall, out of some 1200 households that were sent a small flyer and a meeting notice postcard. There will be more MNA meetings on the proposed district before the final package is submitted to the city council for review and approval, but I’m still not clear if there will be an up-or-down vote on even submitting the package to the city that will be taken by some quorum of the residents of Midtown. Considering the permanence and economic significance of this decision, that would be the key sticking point to me, whatever the final outcome is.

I put all the recordings together for an episode of Politics is Vocal on the Georgia Podcast Network. Here it is:

[audio:http://shelbinator.com/audio/GPN-PIV-MNAtownhall.mp3]

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