News | Peachtree City

Wieland promotes ‘new urbanism’ for 89-acre West Village tract

Thu, 08/30/2007 - 8:32pm
By: John Munford

A citizen committee studying the future development of an 89-acre industrial parcel in the West Village isn’t close to making a recommendation to the city council.

But Thursday night they learned quite a bit about the concept of New Urbanism from a representative of John Wieland Homes, which owns the tract.

Architect Michael Medick of John Wieland said one of the ideas behind New Urbanism is providing a wide variety of housing products co-existing in one area. Some ideas he proffered included townhomes, zero lot line development (where neighbors can build and landscape up to the property line).

As for the railroad tracks, Medick suggested that townhomes themselves could be used right along the railroad tracks to buffer the remainder of the tract, which he said has been successful in other communities.

The railroad tracks play a key role in large part because of the nearby location of a rail siding which is used by CSX Railroad to park trains for up to 48 hours. Although the city has convinced the railroad to invest on landscaping to buffer the area, the 89-acre parcel borders the railroad track and Ga. Highway 74.

Another railroad issue is the wish from CSX to close the existing at-grade railroad crossing directly across from south Kedron Drive, which Wieland needs to make the community more mixed-use in nature with office and retail uses in addition to residential uses.

But any residential development on the tract will require a rezoning from the City Council as the parcel is currently zoned for industrial use.

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Train wreck in the making
Submitted by bowser on Fri, 08/31/2007 - 7:31am.

If I read this right:

CSX wants to close the railroad crossing, which I assume means closing the road since they aren't going to close the track.

But Wieland needs the road open for access to its fab mixed use thing.

Question for Wieland: If the road and crossing stay open, how is traffic going to be handled whenever the crossing gates are down? This will happen many times a day, since that's a main CSX line that stays pretty busy.

The crossing is right off 74, and it's easy to envision a dangerous mess several times a day as highway traffic piles up behind people waiting for the train to go by so they can turn into Wielandville.

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Train Wreck in wiesleland
Submitted by skyspy on Fri, 08/31/2007 - 7:35am.

wiesle doesn't care what happens because he won't be living there. I have heard that wiesel is using his southside developments as a tax write off. It doesn't matter to him if they fail to sell.

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Zoned for Industrial Use???
Submitted by skyspy on Fri, 08/31/2007 - 7:08am.

Geee ya think???????

Um ya, it was zoned industrial because most normal people don't want to live in a cracker box ontop of railroad tracks. Especially not tracks that are as busy as that one.

When riverdale gets here I guess they will need a place to live and sell drugs.

Here's a tip for wiesle, why don't you finish selling one area of cluster homes before you start building another? You can't even finish selling centenial because of the railroad. You had to drop the prices on that mess and you still can't sell them.

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Downtown Woodstock..
Submitted by McDonoughDawg on Thu, 08/30/2007 - 10:16pm.

They have a nice mixed use development right on the tracks in downtown Woodstock. Trademark I believe was the builder. Might be worth a look. If the property is zoned commercial already, I think we need to be open to something like this.

Otherwise, we'll get cookie cutter like the rest of the West Village.

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Pack 'em in tight
Submitted by new2ptc on Thu, 08/30/2007 - 9:17pm.

Is this the phone booth from days past? Just how many houses can you put on 89 acres?

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