New Crabapple Slab Homes Offer Great Skate Park
categories: Buyers, Crabapple, New Construction
Alpharetta and Milton are not just for horses and open space. Skateboarders are staking a claim in nearby Crabapple.
As higher density development approaches, signs of urban decay are alreay cropping up ;-> As if heelying in the grocery store were not enough, now there is a skateboard park in Crabapple! (My tongue is in my cheek you know…)
I witnessed the scene pictured on the left driving home Friday evening: a dozen or so of North Fulton’s most industrious young men who had converted new construction at Crabapple Crossing into a makeshift skate park.
Here’s the choice. You can pay $500,000 for a 4 bedroom home on a slab with a two-car garage - or you can turn it into a skate park. These young men hope that sales slump and their “park” is preserved because skating havens don’t abound in horse county.
The Crabapple Crossing neighborhood is one of a new kind of development in the area. Crabapple Crossroads by Williamscraft is across the street and offers a similar concept. Both these developments offer higher density, mixed use (major buzz word these days) communities with a focus on building “community” in the neighborhood by including sidewalks, courtyards and front porches. Perhaps that is just a way of putting a positive spin on higher density, but with the price of land, higher densities are inevitable.
Crabapple Crossing will have 21 single family homes and 16 garden homes, which are attached to each other. There will also be some commercial development as part of Crabapple Crossing and the vision is that a walking community will develop more within Crabapple, which consists mainly of a few antique shops and Miltons, a new restaurant that is getting good reviews from the locals.
Williamscraft goes so far as to say that, if you want “a little bit of NYC lifestyle in peaceful and placid 
surroundings”, then you should consider their community. You can get a Crabapple brownstone (shown on right) for only about $460,000 versus a few million in NYC…what a bargain!
Whether or not buyers elect for this product is still uncertain. My wife, who I must first say has lived (and liked living) in NYC, likes the concept. There is a community in South Forsyth county called Vickery that is also along these lines with mixed residential, commercial, green space, classical architecture, etc. and my wife likes this community, too, but that may also be because of the gelato shop.
Is my wife is typical of buyers? I bet not. However, she does like Martha Stewarts’ new home designs and I bet she is close to the mark that those will be hot sellers. However, Alpharetta/Crabapple/Milton is not New York City buy the longest stretch of the imagination as much as people want to embrace the romantic vision of pedestrians strolling along brick sidewalks ducking into interesting shops and bookstores and then relaxing on the patio for a coffee or cool drink.
My take at this time is that as idyllic as the vision is, the automobile is king in these parts, not the nikes. We don’t walk anywhere. Walking to the mailbox in August is about as far as anyone goes. I’m afraid to report that people in my neighborhood even drive their cars to the pool and tennis courts in the summer. Don’t want to get too much exercise or get too hot.
As far as homes go, what people tell me they want these days is space and privacy. They might not want the yard work that goes along with an acre lot, but they like the privacy and room for their kids to play.
How long it will take for Crabapple Crossing and Crabapple Crossroads to sell out is still to be seen. It will sell out; eventually everything sells it seems. John Wieland Homes is also building a new development in the area, which will add even more inventory. What is for certain is that the face of Crabapple is forever changed and there are going to be more people living there. For now, though, the boys are enjoying their skate park.
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