As time moves on and Atlanta keeps growing, the horror stories from car commuters who rely on Huff Road are becoming increasingly common. One reader recently groaned about a one-mile trek to his gym off Howell Mill Road routinely taking a half-hour to complete.
Even scarier is trying to ride a bike on the tight, two-lane thoroughfare alongside impatient drivers. Or walking its subpar quagmire sidewalks, which tend to suddenly end when they aren’t indistinguishable from parking lots.
But a recent grant allocation from the Atlanta Regional Commission is lending hope that substantial Huff Road changes could be on the way. Eventually.
ARC granted $200,000 in May to the Upper Westside Community Improvement District, a localized government entity that aims to boost connectivity, greenspaces, and other lifestyle improvements in neighborhoods near Huff Road such as Blandtown, Berkeley Park, and Home Park.
As seen last autumn, residential development has exploded in recent years along Huff Road in neighborhoods such as Blandtown. The street was enjoying an increasingly rare moment of weekday quietude at the time.
The grant will fund what’s being called the Huff Road Multimodal Study. It will include recommendations from another analysis—the Upper Westside Creative Placemaking study—for dotting bus stops along Huff Road.
The goal for Huff Road, according to an ARC announcement, is to “reimagine this industrial freight corridor as an accessible, safe, and multimodal network, in line with the community’s goal of creating a restorative urban environment.”
The densifying, “urban” part has been noticeably underway along Huff Road for more than a decade. Numerous apartment and townhome communities have claimed underused land, and other sizable projects are in the pipeline, such as Empire Communities’ 5-acre Longreen and Crescent Communities’ new 250-apartment proposal that will include retail. (Crescent reps recently told Urbanize Atlanta they hope to break ground before year’s end and include “a much needed parking garage” in new construction.) But few would described today’s Huff Road experience as “restorative.”
The ARC grant funding comes as part of the agency’s long-running Livable Centers Initiative, which aims to create vibrant downtowns, commercial nodes, and livable transit corridors around metro Atlanta. A total of $1.6 million in LCI grants went to 10 planning studies around the metro this year.
Various types of residential communities have popped along the formerly industrial corridor in the past decade.
Upper Westside CID officials called the grant “exciting news” in an Instagram post, relaying that CID officials are “THRILLED” by the study’s prospects.
“Completing this study is the first step in determining constructable future improvements,” reads the CID post.
It’s worth noting the newest section of the BeltLine’s Westside Trail connects with Huff Road today, making it a key, direct route into Midtown for people not in cars. For those who dare, that is.
...
Follow us on social media:
• Photos: In Blandtown, nearly 200 more homes are taking shape (Urbanize Atlanta)
