Business & Tech

Brookwood Hills Neighborhood Wants to Set Precedent with Cornerstone Development

Keeping buildings to a maximum of seven stories will prevent an urban canyon along that stretch of Peachtree Road.

Brookwood Hills residents want zoning conditions for the Cornerstone medical building development next to their subdivision to do something many neighborhoods fear – to set a precedent for future development.

Jim Stokes, who co-chairs the Brookwood Hills NPU/zoning committee, explains that the homeowners want to keep the medical building planned where Collier Road intersects with Peachtree Road to scale with almost every other multi-story building, which average 100 feet tall. That is one of their two main concerns.

The other zoning regulation they don't want ignored or given a variance is the transitional height plane. This determines how tall a building adjoining a residential neighborhood can be.

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"Holding that zoning line has been critical for our neighborhood for years and years and years," he said.

Medical Office Plans Change as Developer Talks to Brookwood Community

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Stokes said the Brookwood Hills committee has gotten great cooperation from the developer.

"I think they've got a very good plan," Stokes said.

"As we worked with the developer here over the months, we finally got to the point where we said, 'Look, this building needs to be in scale along with the other buildings on Peachtree," Stokes said. The 225-foot Brookwood condo building is out of scale with other buildings along the road.

What Brookwood Hills wants to prevent is the creation of an urban canyon along this stretch of Peachtree Road.

He said that takes in an area that starts at I-85 to Piedmont Hospital with five or six neighborhoods.

"They have all come together in a group called the Brookwood Alliance. We are in Brookwood Hills and this project is on our side of Peachtree, so we've been taking the lead on working with these folks."

Brookwood Hills is a big cul de sac, with 360 homes and no through streets.

"It's not a well known neighborhood, but it's a wonderful, great place for kids to grow up, a great place to live," Stokes said. "We are, in a way, in a bit of a no man's land. So we've been planning for what we would like to see happen ... on Peachtree and along Peachtree."

The neighborhood and the NPU are getting help from the Brookwood Alliance, which has worked out a plan for a complete street that serves cars, bikes and pedestrians. The complete street will go from The Peach Shopping Center all the way through I-85. Instead of today's three lanes north and three lanes south, Peachtree will get a "road diet." The road will have two lanes in each direction, plus a 12-foot turn lane for either direction. That leaves 8 feet of travel space.

"That's going to be used for two four-foot bike lanes, one north, one south," Stokes said.

"Given where this city is going with cycling, it's just very exciting," he said.

Some of the best news Stokes offers as a reminder is that this project already has a GA Department of Transportation project number and will be paid for by GDOT. It will take a few years for the project to visibly start. But it will tie in with the Cornerstone development.

In all of this, Stokes said they've gotten tremendous support from Howard Shook, who represented the neighborhood for years, and now from Alex Wan after Shook's district gained so much population its boundaries had to narrow.

"To us, the significance is that we very much want this to set the standard for development from I-85 at least to Piedmont Hospital and possibly to the Beltline. 


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