14 | Community
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A bus tour moves ideas about Buford Highway’s future
Dr. Craig Smith
Dr. Cassandra Lichkay
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Gentrification tensions
Bringing busloads of mostly white, nonHispanic cultural tourists to Buford Highway was a tricky part of the bus crawl’s own
Why they love BuHi
Many attendees did just that, enjoying exploring Buford and trying out MARTA’s 39 bus. Katie Lambert of Atlanta and Linda Niederhausen of Marietta teamed up to join one of several groups led from stop to stop by volunteer guides. “This is one of the few parts of town
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Free movies
Road adjacent to Oglethorpe University
6/2: INSIDE OUT 6/9: THE PEANUTS MOVIE 6/16: GHOSTBUSTERS 6/23: PRETTY IN PINK 6/30: MY BIG FAT GREEK WEDDING 7/14: ICE AGE 7/21: CASABLANCA
Enjoy popcorn courtesy of SkinnyPop ®!
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ing out families” with “million-dollar townhomes.” Meanwhile, Brookhaven City Council member Joe Gebbia revealed that he wants the city to buy Buford Highway property to ensure redevelopment includes affordable housing and local businesses. City-owned redevelopments, Gebbia said, may be the only way “to serve the community and not just maximize the profit.” Similar food for thought was served alongside food for the belly on the bus tour. While noshing on sample plates, attendees heard from such officials as MARTA planner Amanda Rhein, who set up an easel at the Plaza Fiesta mall and explained the agency’s proposed transit-oriented redevelopment around the Brookhaven/Oglethorpe station. The bus crawl ended at Brookhaven’s Royal Lounge nightclub with keynote speaker Ryan Gravel, the urban planner who dreamed up Atlanta’s BeltLine park/ transit ring. “There’s certainly the challenge of change and displacing the thing that makes [Buford Highway] special,” Gravel said in an interview at the lounge about the corridor’s immigrant culture. “Nowhere else has that sense of identity, that sense of place…There’s nothing else like it” in metro Atlanta or most other suburban corridors nationwide, he said. “What happens to it is really important.” Without a new kind of culture-focused planning, Gravel said, the road’s main asset will be displaced for another generic stripmall suburb. He suggested turning two lanes of the roadway into bus-rapid-transit lanes. Instead of pumping money into standard redevelopments, he called for investing in affordable housing or “a venture capital fund for immigrant businesses.”
displacement discussions, and sparked some local curiosity. As one group walked through the Plaza Fiesta parking lot, a passerby cracked, “Did y’all’s bus break down? That’s a lot of white people.” Julio Penaranda, the property manager at Plaza Fiesta, said that Brookhaven city policies are displacing the mall’s Latino customer base, even as it adapts to serve a new, upper-middle-class “white Anglo” demographic. “Brookhaven has been, hands-down, anti-low-income, anti-Latino, anti-immigrants since Day One,” said Penaranda, pointing to the city’s approval of luxury housing in place of apartments, and its licensing crackdowns on local restaurants and nightclubs. He contrasted Brookhaven with the city of Chamblee, which he characterized as more supportive. Penaranda said Plaza Fiesta’s mall has changed with local demographics over the years, starting as a Woolworth’s department store in the 1950s, shifting to Asian businesses in the 1970s, and then a Latino mall in 1998. Now it’s making sure its retailers welcome the new demographic by accepting credit cards, using bilingual signage and showing “that it’s not scary to come into a place that is mostly Hispanic.” MARTA Army founder Simon Berrebi said bus crawl organizers tried to not present Buford as exotic, but instead to highlight the good and the challenging. “That’s how people who live and work here live it every day,” he reminded the nightclub crowd. “It’s not just, ‘Let’s go eat.’ It’s, ‘Let’s go eat and learn,’” said We Love BuHi founder Marian Liou.
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