A panel of housing experts said developers need to build quality projects with higher densities to supply missing middle housing for Dunwoody’s Perimeter, but assistance will be needed from elected officials.
Edge City 2.0, a seminar series exploring growth options for Dunwoody’s Perimeter area – was a joint effort by the city and the DeKalb Board of the Perimeter Community Improvement District to create a blueprint for strategic growth.
Thursday morning’s panel discussed “Evolving Suburban Housing Options.”
Sam Shenbaga of the Atlanta Regional Commission (ARC) said the housing issue is every city’s issue. The ARC found that 95 percent of the people who work in Buckhead don’t live there for lack of housing. He said the community had a housing issue, not a traffic issue.
Geoff Koski, president and owner at KB Advisory Group, said the average household has gotten smaller since 1960, with two parents and two children at the time.
Metro Atlanta can turn to the past to create middle housing, Koski said. Building two to four housing units on one lot as duplexes, triplexes and quadplexes could be part of the solution. Putting additional units on the lot would be a gentle density, he said.
The financial system is set up to build large apartment buildings and single-family homes, Koski said.
Adding to the problem is that it’s impossible to pay $1,000 a month for housing in this region, Koski said. Rising prices have created more cost burdened households spending more than 30 percent of their income on housing.
Paul Corley, regional president of Empire Communities, said since the recession of 2007 the nation hasn’t caught up with its housing deficit.
Mortgage rates have increased significantly, Corley said. Housing costs doubled from 2013 to 2023 as household income failed to keep pace with inflation.
Empire has bought old office buildings, scraped them off the lots and built homes of 1,100 to 1,300 square feet at a density of 28 units per acre. The Empire Buckley development gives people a place to live in Buckhead, eliminating their long commutes to work.
“Density is a good thing if it’s done at the right place and the right way,” Corley said.
He said to get middle housing that’s attainable for buyers, developers need density and should build smaller homes with simpler architecture. Corley said they need local governments to ease regulations and zoning processes as well as reduce governmental fees. To avoid higher costs, developers also need faster permitting and approval timeliness. The developers need to make creative development of land sites and redevelopment opportunities.
Lew Oliver, principal of Lew Oliver Inc., said his firm puts a variety of housing types in its designs. He said housing developments should prioritize pedestrians as his firm has done in developments such as Trilith in Fayette County, where every other street in the town is a pedestrian street for people and their pets.
Builders at one of his first development designs, Hartness near Greenville, SC, saw seven spec single-family homes of at least 3,000 square feet sit empty for three years before his team convinced them to build the micro-housing in his plans. Oliver said the first 1,000-square-foot home sold within two days.
Sandy Springs City Councilmember Jody Reichel asked how a city could spur redevelopment of an aging apartment complex that wasn’t the best use of its property.
Koski suggested prioritizing issues. The area has older, aging housing stock but it is 95 percent occupied. He suggested the lower hanging fruit is strip malls and empty parking lots. It would be easier to spur that redevelopment than get 400 people out of a cash flowing apartment property.
