Man bites dog: Suburbanites flee to the central city

This is a text adaptation of CNN's Special Report, "Where We Live," which will air Sunday, October 1 at 10 p.m. EDT.

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- While thousands of Atlantans are stuck bumper to bumper on the city's major interstates most mornings, Jennifer Burke doesn't need to pay any attention to traffic reports. Her drive to work takes five minutes.

"It's worth it to be close," says Jennifer Burke. "Even an extra 20 minutes was too far to drive. So we're pretty spoiled living as close to the office as we do."

Jennifer and Nelson Burke decided 13 years ago they'd rather live in-town than out in the suburbs of Atlanta. Eventually they bought a house in the Home Park neighborhood close to Jennifer's job at the Georgia Institute of Technology and close to Atlanta's Hartsfield International Airport for Nelson's work-related travel.

"We chose to live down here because this is where we work," Nelson Burke says.

But in order to live near their jobs, the Burkes made trade-offs: a smaller house than they could have bought in the suburbs; a street where cars are sometimes broken into; bikes and lawnmowers sometimes stolen from yards.

But the Burkes stand by their decision.

"We have a lot more time to spend with our family doing the things that we want to do because of where we live," says Nelson Burke.

The Burkes aren't the only ones who feel this way.

"We're seeing a huge movement. It's the biggest movement I've seen. I've been in the development business for 35 years and it's the most dynamic sea change I've ever seen in the development business," explains John Williams, Post Properties' chief executive officer

The sea change, according to developer Williams, is the reverse migration back into cities. He got rich building garden apartments in the Atlanta suburbs. But in the 1990s he changed direction. Today he's developing near downtown areas all over the country, including a "village" called Post Riverside in Atlanta. It was a business decision driven by demand -- he says his customers want old-fashioned neighborhoods.

"It doesn't mean that you still won't have people who will want to live in a single-family home in the suburbs on a one-acre lot," Williams says. "But for the first time, we're providing alternatives and options."

For Williams, the trend is a return to the way Atlanta used to be.

"I grew up in a neighborhood where I could walk to school. I could walk to church. There was a little commercial pocket close to my home and my neighbors knew me. I knew my neighbors," Williams says. "There's a lot of definitions for smart growth and New Urbanism. I have a real short-cut definition. It's really creating and preserving neighborhoods because that's what smart growth is all about. Smart growth is about neighborhoods."

When Williams returns to his old in-town neighborhood, he hopes it will also benefit from the trend toward city living.

"As we're seeing a rebirth and a regrowth of Atlanta ... since this is my old neighborhood, I hope it helps, happens here," Williams says. "You know, you got all the fabric here. You got sidewalks. You have homes nearby so people can walk here. And we're not buried in a sea of automobiles. The parking lots tend to be pushed off... It's remarkable how the fabric is still here, and how actually most of the buildings are still here, and this goes back fifty years."

Williams sees signs that the transition has begun. "The homes look better, they're in better repair," he says.

Eugene Dowling, who now owns the house where Williams grew up, agrees.

"Three or four years ago, I bought this and it was in bad shape and I worked on it myself and, in fact, my neighbor said that inspired him to do some work on his," Dowling explains. "It's a nice convenient area -- you know, five, 10 minutes from downtown. ... I think it's a question of economics, you know. Folks don't necessarily want to sit in traffic for three or four hours a day."

The economics may work out for Dowling. They certainly have for Williams. He charges premium rents for his in-town developments. In-town houses also are selling for sharply increased prices. The Burkes' home has almost doubled in value in three years.

"It's incredible what's happened. It's still possible to find a home in-town. But you're not going to find one easily," says Nelson Burke.

Will that slow the return to city living in Atlanta? Homeowners who want square footage find it cheaper in the outer suburbs.

"It is affordable housing if you're willing to make the trade-off that you're going to drive a long way and you're going to have at least two cars in your family," says Christopher Leinberger, a real estate developer and consultant who writes and lectures on growth. "Each car ... on average costs about $7,000 per year after taxes to own and operate. If you were to translate the value of those two cars to this household into a mortgage, which is tax deductible, that $7,000 translates into about $120,000 worth of mortgage."

Even if they apply what would be car payments to a mortgage instead, most low- and middle-income families can't pay what in-town houses now cost. Will the free market create cities of the well-to-do?

"The most difficult thing about in-fill development is how do we get middle and lower income [families] to work within the setting," Williams says. "Frankly it can't be done without substantial help from governmental entities."

A development that has received substantial government help during the past 65 years is Centennial Place. It was once known as Techwood Homes, the first public housing project in the United States, dedicated by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1935. But Techwood Homes deteriorated, as did many other public housing projects across the country.

"There was no disposable income here so there was no retail investment. There was nothing that you would tend to find where there was income around. So as a result, it was as disinvested as you could envision and the concentration of poverty brought on a lot of other challenges," says Egbert Perry, the developer of Centennial Place. "This site had the highest crime rate in the city of Atlanta."

The federal government concluded putting poor people all in one place is a bad idea. So it made low-interest loans available to private developers to rebuild public housing. In order to get the government money, developers had to make new housing mixed income.

Dovie Newell lived in Techwood Homes for more than 20 years before moving into her new Centennial Place apartment.

"All kinds of people live here now. And we have tax credit, market rate and public housing people staying next door to each other. You can't tell one from the other. You don't know who's who, and how much they're paying, and how much they're not paying," Newell says. "It's a much better place than what we had, say, 10 years ago."

At Centennial Place, people paying subsidized rents as low as $25 a month live near people paying market rents of more than $1,000 a month.

For Newell, the new program has meant a significant change in living conditions.

"A lot of things that we didn't have, we have now. We have dishwasher, garbage disposal, got freezers with icemakers, we have washers and dryers which ... come with the apartment," Newell says. "It says to me that the people that built the community here [were] giving everybody a chance to live in a nice, safe, decent and sanitary apartment."

"For 5,000 years of city building before the Second World War, we built a lot of mixed-income neighborhoods," Leinberger says. "In fact, most urban neighborhoods were mixed income. And it's only after the war that we got into this segregation by income as well as segregation by race. ... If we -- from a societal point of view -- chose to be income segregated, we can choose to be income integrated."

The Burkes live right around the corner from Centennial Place. They realize urban life may not be as kind to everyone as it has been to them.

But they took a chance on an inner-city neighborhood and an inner-city school system. And they say it's working out for them.

"Any school system anywhere is exactly what you can make it. I don't think that in the city of Atlanta we have any problems that, that school systems in any other part of Atlanta or any other city don't have," Nelson Burke says. "And I think really we're still living in a little secret neighborhood ... that many people in the city of Atlanta just don't know anything about. And in some respects, doing this sort of thing is broadcasting this. ... The cat's out of the bag."

ON MONDAY: Turning farms and fields into driveways and cul-de-sacs

PART III: How Atlanta paved paradise and put up a parking lot

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