The swanky City in Northern Fulton County has seen it’s share of growth in the past 30 years.
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Continuing the Suburban Spotlight series after a long break with a look at Alpharetta. But first, take a look back at the earlier installments of the series.
Alpharetta sits about 25 miles North of Downtown Atlanta along GA-400. The vast majority of workers endure long commute times. However, a few bus routes connect to the North Springs station. Despite early talks of extending the Red Line up to Windward Pkwy in the mid-2000’s, those plans were never serious and have shifted to potential BRT service which will run in-line GA 400’s 9 Billion Dollar Express Lanes system.
Through the years, the City has evolved from a sleepy outer-ring suburb with a small traditional center surrounded by low density sprawl to a thriving mixed-use City through years of infill design and connectivity.
Images: GoogleEarth
As with most of these higher end suburbs, the design is impeccable. However, this leads to outrageous housing prices. Just about everything for sale within walking distance of the core is well over $1 million. Another unfortunate thing about these higher end suburbs is their tendency to be extremely anti-renter as evident by the lack of rental units in the core. It’s almost like people will pay a premium to live in walkable areas and we should maybe build more of them!
Images: Zillow
Despite this, I can’t help but appreciate the quality of design, outdoor spaces, connectivity, and mix of housing styles present all within walking distance of everything needed for daily activities. For many suburbanites, these types of developments are their introduction to “urban lifestyles” and play an extremely important role in the future of sprawl repair and the building of better suburbs.
Alpharetta has demonstrated that it’s not just for show either, dedicating tons of resources to parks, greenspaces, and their version of the BeltLine, the AlphaLoop which will cohesively connect most of the City.
Alpharetta’s early answer to Atlantic Station – Avalon, has been a hit success to and has nearly seamlessly blended with Downtown at this point connected with dense infill and a trail system.
Despite the economic slowdown, the development pipeline remains strong with key parcels getting developed, office parks evolving, the traditional mall potentially being redeveloped, and a NHL arena?! Ok, that last one isn’t technically Alpharetta, but actually South Forsyth with an Alpharetta mailing address.
Check out my collection of photos from a few recent visits to the Downtown Center.
Overall, Alpharetta is a beautiful City with impressive architecture, density, and mix of uses that shows that we can design suburbs better. Unfortunately, until we build more of them all over, they will continue to be out of reach to most due to inflated prices. As more and more suburban cities take note, I believe suburban sprawl repair will become the norm! Let’s hope so.
Stay tuned as next time we’ll explore Milton / Crabapple.
FURTHER READING
InPhil Designs: InPhil Designs
All ideas: The Urban Connector
All things Atlanta: ATLANTA
Phil Veasley is a Professional Engineer and CNU accredited member working to design safer multimodal infrastructure in cities throughout the US.
My goal is to create cities that are safe and effective for all people to move about outside of cars. To achieve that we have to focus on creating equitable, dense, and vibrant cities full of walkable neighborhoods with a various mix of housing choices, schools, restaurants, transit, and services. We cannot have safe multimodal infrastructure without the density to support it and we cannot have equitable density without safe multimodal infrastructure. Outside of designing safe streets, my passions are sketching ideas for infill neighborhoods, floor plans, urban photography, and exploring our cities on foot or bike. Please check out the menus above for all of my ideas and also check out my YouTube, Instagram, BlueSky Social, and Twitter accounts.
Opinions and insights are my own and are not representative of my employer or any organization.
Phil Veasley 
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