Thousands are moving to a newly revitalized city center
Stand at the top of Forest Ave. and look down the hill at the Walnut Street Bridge. People are walking, cycling, talking, busking…thick as clover in May. Yes, people are swarming downtown like bees seeking a new hive. What are they looking for? What are they finding? And what do they need to flourish here?
To start exploring these questions, I encourage you to participate in the Explore Downtown Living Tour on Saturday, May 18. This self-guided, shuttle- and trolley-riding tour will let you explore 14 new apartment developments in the downtown area.
The Places and Spaces
What will you find if you take a stroll or trolley ride through Chattanooga with your eye on making this your new home? Well, it might be anything. Our oldest housing stock includes Civil War-era buildings; there are turn-of-the-last-century mansions, plenty of 1920s bungalows, Art Deco walkups, neat WWII-era cottages, and a wealth of newer structures, available in whatever stage of dilapidation or gentrification you can afford.
For a while, as white residents fled in the 1970s, deindustrialization decimated downtown employment opportunities, and population dropped in the 1980s, there were more empty buildings available; now, these are being refurbished and plenty of new development is filling the taps alongside.
Trends come and go; Craig Kronenberg, AIA, principal with Hefferlin + Kronenberg Architects, mentions styles that change quickly; industrial steel kitchens were in a few years ago; now, it’s airy lighting and white quartz. Design styles tend to cascade downhill from price point to price point, incomer to established resident, too.
In other words, new properties are typically purchased or rented by incomers accustomed to more expensive markets, who then sell in a few years to locals (or rents fall so locals can afford to move in). A newcomer from Chicago is eating from white quartz while a fairly affluent Chattanoogan is excited about last decade’s black granite, and so on.
(I find this trend continues for decades. Right now I eat off a plastic Walmart table and look out at my street through cracked Art Deco glass panes; last apartment, I ate off a 100-year-old trestle table and looked down at the valley from the East Brow, but then again, my roof leaked and my plumbing system consisted of a bucket under my sink to catch the wastewater. I won’t tell you about the toilet. Sic transit—)
New development tends to bring new styles, says Clif McCormick, also a principal with Hefferlin + Kronenberg.
“Parenthetically, when people come from Nashville or Atlanta or Chicago, developers follow the market around and develop in Chattanooga,” he says.
Kronenberg agrees: “All the large apartments buildings are not [by] local developers. And they bring their architects. Local architects did not touch pencil to paper.”
McCormick ticks off out-of-town styles that are entering Chattanooga on the hems of incomers: Rooftop decks, which are too hot for Chattanooga summers; tall narrow houses connected by a back room, which gained popularity in cities such as Nashville where, according to local zoning laws, lots couldn’t be subdivided—but could be built into condominiums.
Darlene Brown, president and broker/owner with Chattanooga Real Estate Partners, LLC, says that there are as many new styles as there are new residents—and both are incredibly varied.
“I worked with the developer on Loveman’s on Market when it came downtown,” she says. “I had a demographic I [predicted] would live there. I was so wrong. The building ended up being young, old, all kinds of people. It’s the same with housing requirements. Some want one-level living, some want town homes, apartments; it’s all over the board.”
While the stereotypical incomer is a millennial, many mid- and late-career folks are coming to downtown Chattanooga, drawn by comparatively low housing rates, as well as the city’s neighborliness—its “Chattitude”. That’s what you find when you go out your door into your larger living space—your street, corner park, church, coffee house or barber shop.
Places + People = Physical Culture
By the late 2000s, Chattanooga had regained the population loss of the 1980s, the only U.S. city to completely recoup these losses, according to a Times Free Press article of 2009. These people brought with them an interest in walkable spaces, start-up culture, nature and ecology, and Chattitude—the spirit that drives a resident to offer not a only phone but also a cold beer to a stranger in a broken-down car, according to local philosopher Jason Tinney.
This approach to outdoor, on-foot space is just about 180 degrees opposed to that of the 1970s, when people (I should specify: middle-class white people) wanted least of anything in the world to interact with strangers in a city. Our larger physical space, the canvas upon which downtown dwellers paint their lives, consists of the interaction between human, natural, and built elements, and it’s the alchemy between them that causes people to live here and love it, or else to run for the suburbs, locking their car doors on the way out.
Newcomer Richel Albright, communications director for Mayor Andy Berke, moved to Chattanooga a tad over a year ago. A Franklin, TN native, she was looking for a place where she could be near water and mountains, but also close to her work.
“I wanted to have that quality of life where I could walk to work most days,” she says. She found a place catty-corned to City Hall, off 11th Street. “Typically I just park my car at City Hall rather than my apartment. Having that is a new adjustment to a quality of life I wasn’t used to. Rather than rushing at 7:30 to get to work on time, I get to walk [to work] on a gorgeous day. It has been awesome. I love living downtown.”
Albright walks at all hours, visiting Warehouse Row, Miller Park, Moxy Chattanooga, WanderLinger and other places downtown. From time to time, she stops to speak with people she knows.
“A lot of my time is spent between MLK and Main Street,” she says. “There are so many great restaurants and vendors. I think [it’s important to] make sure there is something for everyone, open public spaces where everyone feels welcome to enjoy their day. It’s been exciting to talk to the staff here and hear how everything has changed in the last several years. The revitalization of downtown has been exciting to see, be a part of, and live right in the middle of.”
Albright’s excitement is contagious. Yet the evolution of neighborhoods can evoke feelings of nostalgia and loss, too. “The Big 9”, as old MLK was called when it was Ninth Street, houses businesses that have been continuously owned since the 1930s, yet has also changed greatly, causing residents to lament old feelings of solidarity and home. (UTC’s “Stories from the Big 9” podcast series explores the history, progress, and gentrification along MLK.)
So we Chattanoogans are interacting in our shared physical spaces, though not without edges of old and new, privilege and lack, snagging against each other. It’s the willingness to let those edges touch that makes the difference—to call the space home, while acknowledging that a passel of other people also call it home.
Attitudes Have Changed
“When I lived in Highland Park, I was on the neighborhood association board,” McCormick says. “If someone said, ‘foot traffic’, that implied crime. [People were] against alleys and so on to get rid of foot traffic.”
Now, though, foot traffic has become highly desirable, and the quality of sidewalks and greenspaces is continuously being updated, at least in more affluent sections. Urban design plans are drawn specifically to encourage cycling and walking.
“Now, any development, near downtown especially, you want to walk from the Riverwalk to your front porch,” McCormick says. “A developer asked, [‘Is it] OK if someone from the Riverwalk can walk right up and sit on your front porch?’ and there was no problem with that.’”
“I’m still inclined to raise the level a couple of feet off the ground,” Kronenberg interjects dryly.
Still, the idea is that the road, as Bilbo says, goes right up to your front door; your porch is the start of a shared space.
“I have conversations with my neighbors all the time, porch to porch,” Cronenberg says of his Southside dwelling. “My neighborhood has changed so much it resembles Lincoln Park area of Chicago more than any other place in Chattanooga.”
Bus stops are other shared spaces; sit at a bus stop long enough and you’ll probably interact with somebody.
Perhaps illustrating the shoulder-rubbing that goes into creating physical culture, a couple of weeks ago, my son and his friend—a white youth and a black youth in their early 20s, carrying big backpacks full of D&D accoutrements—were sitting at the bus stop on MLK across from UTC, waiting to catch a bus home from work. A third youth, a little younger they were, approached them.
“Where y’all from?” he said.
“It’s none of your business where we’re from,” said Son’s Friend. (Point of fact, they’re both from Brainerd.)
“How bout I kill you?” said Third Youth, his hands in his pockets.
Son added: “We’re not looking for trouble, we’re just not about to tell you where we’re from.”
Listening later, I asked, “So how’d it end up?”
Son: “We talked him down finally.”
To unpack things a bit: Son and Friend were alarmed but panicked; they aimed not to get hurt but also to establish their presence at this bus stop; the conversation would proceed on their terms and they were not about to be pushed around by this other youth. They needed the bus to get home; this was their space.
Yet they weren’t trying to drive the other kid out of the space; provided he stopped hassling them and didn’t shoot them, they had no objection to him waiting for the bus. Certainly they had no intention of calling cops on him. It was, after all, his space, too; he just needed to modify his behavior.
To move into downtown Chattanooga, or, I reckon, any downtown space, you have to be willing to subject yourself to anecdote, because you never know who you’ll meet or what they’ll say or do. A busker may ask you to dance to his fiddling (always dance to the fiddler). A one-time society belle may tell you about 1930s-era balls as she sits at Miller Park with all her possessions in a brown paper bag at her feet. Demographic shift doesn’t trump the gnarly incandescence of individual human interactions.
“[You’re] sharing the public realm with a lot more people than you would in the suburbs,” Cronenberg says. In Chattanooga, “you are forced to be friendly or turned into a recluse.”
What Do We Need?
The Explore Downtown Living Tour alone includes flats and lofts on the Southside, refurbished downtown structures such as the Tomorrow and Maclellan buildings, new construction along the Riverfront, and apartment buildings on the Northshore, where one new complex evokes Atlanta with the moniker “5 Points North Shore”.
One-bedroom apartments start at $1,184 a month, so yeah, there’s definitely an Atlanta vibe. One thing we badly need in downtown Chattanooga: housing that local dwellers with middle and low incomes can afford.
The challenge is that prices which raise scorn across a swath of communities here (progressives would call them “gentrified” while suburban and rural dwellers would call them “citified” or “hipster”) in fact look like rock-bottom rates to incomers from Chicago or New York.
However, the city does offer tax credits for below-market-rate developments. In fact, some developers come to town specifically to develop below-market units in return for tax credits, Cronenberg says.
Still, below-market may still be unaffordable to many people, especially since there are people with plenty of money ready to drive the prices up. Buildings constructed as affordable housing may be snapped up by investors who resell for a profit or manage them hotel-style.
“It’s hard for a city to fight gentrification,” McCormick says. “If the market decides [an area] is cool, it’ll find a way to squeeze. It’s hard to build at an affordable rate, and if you do, people sublet and move elsewhere. What’s underreported is that the city has programs for low- to moderate-income home improvements with guaranteed interest rates.”
“If you own your home, [the city] can help you with improvements that will keep you in your home so you don’t have to sell to a developer who will tear it down,” Kronenberg says.
Gentrification can benefit owners who either improve or sell, Kronenberg says. However, there’s a huge caveat—rising prices almost inevitably hurt renters.
“The city should look at where you will go [if you’re priced out of your neighborhood] and what will happen to make those decent neighborhoods,” McCormick says. “[Chattanooga should] look at neighborhoods where people are being displaced to, and make it a nice target.”
Donna C. Williams, administrator of Chattanooga’s Department of Economic & Cultural Development, agrees. The city focuses on white-collar newbies, without exploring the needs of lower-income newcomers or those displaced by rising prices.
“Yesterday, someone came to the lobby, a homeless woman who moved here to escape a domestic violence situation,” Williams relates. “ I was going between meetings—I gave her a list of a few service providers she could make contact with. I would have loved to ask her, ‘Why Chattanooga?’ Has she heard we are working on affordable housing? Does she have family here? Did she have just enough gas to get here?”
Another “wish list” item, of course, is groceries. We have food deserts in low-income areas, and that’s a continual shame on our city, but in fact no one in downtown Chattanooga, except perhaps Northshore dwellers with their Publix, is satisfied with the availability food. There simply aren’t fresh groceries in walking distance—not even convenient driving or bus distance.
Enzo’s didn’t make it long enough to benefit from the full Southside boom, and the entire city center, from Carter Street as far east as Arts and Sciences, from the Aquarium all the way to Missionary Ridge, and south all the way down Broad Street, is a grocery wasteland. You have to cross the river to Northshore, drive out to 23rd Street, or maybe take the Alton Park or St. Elmo line down to the foot of Lookout Mountain, just to get your groceries.
Still, as Brown says, people are falling over themselves to move into downtown Chattanooga, and they are likely to keep doing so into the near future.
“Any [neighborhood] that touches downtown is quite popular and getting more popular as we continue to grow,” she says. “We have a vibrant city and our city is spending some money to make it enjoyable to work and play in the downtown area. People want to be in the middle of things.”