Is Crabapple Heading Toward Rotten Apple?
categories: Crabapple
The picture above is NOT what Crabapple looks like today. Rather, it was the vision.
This is the cover picture on the Crabapple Crossroads Community Plan, approved in June, 2003 and it is the work of photo editing.
The actual photo is below, after I reverse engineered it and removed the fabricated foreground.
What I don’t have is a picture of what this intersection looks like today, but suffice it to say that we got the proverbial ”finger” from Fulton County.
The county, in its last dying acts before responsibility was passed to the new City of Milton last Fall, authorized a number of building permits in Crabapple that essentially ignored the Crabapple Plan.
This plan had been worked on by untold number of local citizens since 1999 and offered something different than the typical suburban development that dominates the area with “one way in and one way out” subdivisions. For all intents and purposes the plan has been completely ignored.
Frankly, I’m ticked off. This is a case study of how government produces one outcome while common sense AND the opinion of EVERY person I’ve spoken with says just the opposite. It makes you really wonder how the decisions were actually made.
It is not just that some planning bureaucrats in Atlanta made 12th hour decisions that we must live with - sure, I’d don’t like the feeling of not being in control of issues that affect us so much. 
What really bothers me is that we are not talking about ordering a bad meal at a restaurant, something that can easily be undone. We are talking about permanent changes that have now been made and cannot be undone even thought City of Milton Mayor Lockwood says he wants to stop and evaluate what has taken place.
Not a single tree remains on most of the land in the northwest quadrant of Crabapple. Earth movers have been leveling every contour of the land for the past three months. The picture on the right is from early in the development.
Traffic is bad and only going to get worse; and I don’t know a single person who is happy with how things have played out in Crabapple. I just don’t know what can be done now that so much has already taken place.
The real pity though is the lost opportunity to create a community reflecting the character of the area while meeting the demands of modern life. The original Crabapple Plan called for design work to be done by Lew Oliver of Whole Town Solutions. Oliver, from Roswell, is one of the national leaders in New Urbanism, a school of design that highly values walkability, connectivity and sustainability. Oliver has been involved in developing such highly regarded communities such as Rosemary Beach, Celebration and closer to home, Vickery in South Forsyth.
Granted, Vickery was developed from a clean slate. Transforming Crabapple into a functional mixed use community certainly is not without challenges. But at this point, we don’t have the luxury of the experience of someone like Oliver. We are currently in the hands of John Wieland and the bulldozers. No one really even knows what is being built and there is no info on the Wieland website.
At least we are free of the shortsightedness from downtown Atlanta.
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