OK, I'll chime in about my part of Atlanta. Living here is great. My community is highly walkable with a system of walk/bike trails with an increasing amount of public art. I use my car on average twice a week. One of those trips is church on Sunday and I can bike there in Summer or I could take the train if I wanted to. I can walk to numerous restaurants with a great diversity of cuisines, several grocery stores including Asian and Hispanic, hardware, clothing, home goods stores. I walk to my bank branch. My insurance agent is about 4 blocks away. A city park is nearby via one of the trails. It has all the usual park amenities as well as several acres of woodland trails. My condo is less than a block from a MARTA rail station. From there I can ride to midtown for events or all the way to the airport. My community is fairly progressive and is committed to becoming even more pedestrian, bike and transit friendly with lots of public spaces for a live/work/play environment. The transformation over the last few years has been amazing.
Okay. For one thing, as you know, Atlanta is not built on any waterway or lake or around any sort of natural feature. Atlanta was founded as a railway junction in the middle of the woods. I like water of some kind. Atlanta gets HOT in the summer, yet we have no real lake in or very near the city and we're too far from the ocean for a day trip. It gets cold in the winter, even a dusting of snow--in some years enough to cause havoc on the streets, but yet we don't have enough for winter sports. Another thing that bothers me is that being the "city in the woods" I can't see anything but trees. Atlanta is fairly flat, and there are few wide-open spaces where you can see the sky to watch a sunset or sunrise. Certainly no mountains to gaze at off in the distance. Oh, wait, there's Stone Mountain, the monolith--impressive as it may be--with the bas-relief of Confederate generals.
Natural beauty aside, there is no "core" to the city, let alone a vibrant city heart with, say, a riverside pedestrian walk, or greenbelt or something like that, as many cities have capitalized on in recent years. The Beltline project along the old rail beds encircling Atlanta is too little too late, and hardly convenient for most of the population. Piedmont Park is nice and was probably considered spacious in 1915, but it's small for a city of Atlanta's current size. Instead of a core, we have a hollowed-out older "downtown" that the city gave up on as urban blight took over, while businesses effectively recreated a new downtown in what was and still is called Midtown. Midtown has indeed become quite liveable, but having been built up recently and quickly, it kind of lacks a soul. Bars and restaurants that have been around for decades and become institutions are as rare as hen's teeth. It's mostly new and hipster-ish stuff. Sure, Atlanta has Asian and Hispanic restaurants and markets, and I'm thankful we have DeKalb Farmer's Market, etc., but many US cities nowadays have a big Asian and Hispanic presence. Decatur is a city of its own within the intown Atlanta area--an enclave. As I see it, Atlanta is just a weird hodgepodge as cities go. No character, no identity. Where is Atlanta's famous landmark? Our Empire State building, our Golden Gate bridge, our Space Needle, our Gateway Arch? Is it the Fox Theatre that was just barely saved from demolition?
But I know what you mean. I lived in a condo in Midtown for 20 years--until just a couple of years ago. The shooting in 2023 that occurred in my doctor's office on W. Peachtree kind of shook me, but my move farther out from the city--likely closer to where you live--was a long time coming. I agree there are pockets of liveability throughout the intown area. And there are certainly worse places in the US one could live. But as a city as a whole, especially for its size and supposed prominence, it lags behind other major cities and metro areas. MARTA rail goes virtually nowhere compared with real cities with real transit systems. They built that toy of a trolley system in 2014--all 2 miles of it, mostly used by tourists--and ran out of funds, while cities like San Diego, where I used to live, have slowly built up world-class trolley/light rail systems. The transformation of intown Atlanta in the years I lived there was indeed "amazing" as you say, but it didn't and still doesn't happen fast enough, and I don't think it can really happen anymore because the density is too high and the tax base too weak. Have you seen the rats-nest of higher-rise condos on the West Side that look like great improvements in urban liveability until you realize the streets have not been widened since horse and buggy days--the congestion is abominable. I won't even mention how I love sitting in traffic on I-285. Maybe Atlanta is fine if one mostly just holes up in their enclave. I'd prefer a world-class city.
Cue that current thread on
Where to Retire in the US.
