Targeting the Answer Tree

originally published February 7, 2007

On the corner of our yard grows a forked dogwood tree, unremarkable in itself, one of several dogwoods that hem one side of our corner lot, with tall pines along the other side. This particular dogwood, however, possesses an almost oracular wisdom that it shares daily with my 12-year-old son. Its name is Andrew, the Answer Tree. For years, my son has brought Andrew his troubles, his ideas, and all the questions that only a patient and silently observant tree can answer.

Now my son visits Andrew to apologize and comfort him in his waning days before Andrew and his brothers are cut down and their earth ripped up and paved over. The stately oak across the street, the field where on foggy nights you can see a family of deer venturing forth to forage, the gently sloping circle where my kids and their friends ride bikes and scooters without fear of speeding cars with inattentive drivers. Our house. My kids’ grandmother’s house. Their friends’ houses. All of it sits on the chopping block. We live on Kentucky Circle, just off Lexington Road, a neighborhood of houses and families so harbored from the manic traffic of the rest of town that even the pizza guys have to look for it. If you’ve never heard of it, don’t worry, it won’t be here much longer. We’re scheduled to be bulldozed in a few months in order to bring the residents of Athens yet another strip mall for their shopping convenience. If we estimate correctly, my children’s rooms will be the sporting goods department of the new Target.

Why Here?

There doesn’t appear to be much anyone can do about it, even if they wanted to. On Jan. 18, representatives of Faison Enterprises, a Charlotte, NC-based development firm, held a community meeting at the Johnson Road Baptist Church to discuss their plans for the neighborhood. Despite receiving a first letter from their attorneys at Blasingame, Burch, Garrard & Ashley announcing the meeting for November and then a follow-up letter that read, “Did we say November? We meant Thursday. Our bad,” area residents eager for a look at the preliminary site map and anxious about the potential impact on their properties packed the fellowship hall. Athens-Clarke County Commissioners Alice Kinman and Kelly Girtz were there, as were our landlords. Although there was a lot of skepticism among the crowd, there was little in the way of actual objection.

The plan calls for a 127,000 square-foot Target store as the anchor for the new shopping center, with smaller shops on either side and a pair of outparcels facing Lexington Road, expected to be family dining establishments. Only Target is on board, according to Faison’s Mike Cohn, with the rest of the outlets as yet untenanted but expected to fill up fast. The mall and its parking will cut deep rather than wide, bounded by Indiana Avenue and Lexington Heights Road and extending back to Mike Dekle’s in-progress Lakewood development. The proposed entrance won’t be on Lexington Road but on Indiana Avenue, which is expected to get a traffic light and handle 2000 cars a day. All in all, this project will require massive demolition and deforestation in the neighborhood, a complete overhaul of every street between Lexington Heights and Barnett Shoals Road, and major state participation, despite the DOT’s reported claim that the necessary upgrade to that stretch of Highway 78 is out of the question for at least six years, according to the Athens Banner-Herald.

Still, most of the questions raised had to do with the impact on property values (which of course are expected to increase once the monster is built), with street improvements and traffic management, with the adequacy of the current sewage infrastructure, with guarantees about the depth of Target’s commitment to remaining in place (nobody wants another Willowood Square, squat and empty). Only one person asked the question I’d been waiting to hear: “Why does Athens need another Target?”

According to Cohn, Target’s westside store has been doing tremendous business, owing largely to the rapid growth of Oconee County. A second Target on the Eastside would accommodate similar growth in Oglethorpe County and fall in line with the building boom along Lexington Road. The same economic impetus that supported a second Wal-Mart and a second Lowe’s Home Improvement would seem to support a second Target.

It’s a sound theory, except that Wal-Mart and Lowe’s are on the outskirts of town, toward the airport and the landfill… and Oglethorpe County. They are not a block away from the interchange of Lexington Road and the Loop, where traffic congestion is already a problem in a town where a traffic jam was unheard of only a few years ago. Lowe’s sits on a parcel of land that used to be a strip mall, already a commercially zoned property, and nobody’s houses were bulldozed to build it. If we subscribe to the paradigm wherein business on the Eastside can support another Target, then it can support another Target further down Lexington, with less environmental impact and better traffic management.

Big Questions

And then there’s the house where my family lives, with its kid-friendly yard and its marvelous Answer Tree. I wish I could save it and the little white house across the street where my wife’s mother lives. But we don’t own our houses. We’re part of that segment of the Athens population that falls through the cracks time and time again: resident renters. For 22 years, my wife and I have lived here, worked here, raised children here, but we’ve never made enough money to own property here. We’ve moved from apartment to apartment, situation to situation, always looking for a place where we could afford to live for a while, where our kids could set down roots. We thought we’d found it on Kentucky Circle, so much that my mother-in-law, looking for a place where she could retire after a lifetime of lower-middle-class struggle, moved into the house next-door.

We don’t own our houses, so we have no voice in our landlords’ decision to sell out. It’s their right and their prerogative, and Godspeed to them. All I can say is that Kentucky Circle was one of those commodities that Athens once had in abundance: actual neighborhoods. The people on my block look out for each other. Our kids play together. My car got stuck in a mudhole one Christmas Eve and my neighbors went into action with chains and a truck without a second thought. Our cat got stuck in a tree and out came a neighbor’s ladder. We once picked three buckets of strawberries and sent some round to our neighbors and they sent back barbecue.

Neighborhoods are the sum of the people in them, whether they own or rent, and in this town, populated as it is with an ever-shifting student population and ripe for commercial development as Atlanta’s sprawl marches in like Sherman, neighborhoods get more and more precious every day.

Faison plans to submit its zoning application in March, pending traffic and infrastructure surveys, and the ACC Commission will vote on it in August. At this juncture, however, there doesn’t appear to be enough opposition to the plan to prevent it from going forward. Perhaps the plan will fall through. Perhaps enough people will come forward with the idea that Athens’ need for yet another discount chain store can be reconciled with its need to keep its older residential neighborhoods intact to make the powers that be reconsider.

Those are some big “perhaps,” too big for even an Answer Tree to resolve.

John G. Nettles

jgnettles@charter.net