As Gainesville prepares to add more than 750 housing units in downtown and Midland, city officials said Wednesday they are working to ensure the roads around the developments can handle the additional traffic.
The city has been working with the Georgia Department of Transportation to make improvements along the Jesse Jewell corridor, including intersection improvements at Queen City Parkway and the addition of right-turn lanes, City Manager Bryan Lackey said.
Lackey said the Solis Gainesville development on the south side of the pedestrian bridge across Jesse Jewell has multiple ingress and egress access.
"The good thing about the Solis development and the Midtown development is that they have such good connectivity through the Midland area to the other corridors," Lackey said. "You have good access to E.E. Butler, good access to Queen City, as well as Jesse Jewell, so it doesn't just dump everything onto Jesse Jewell."
Those developments, along with the National development on the old First National Bank site, are expected to attract residents who want a more pedestrian friendly area to live and work. Rusty Ligon, the city's community and economic development director, said Millennials, as well as some retired people looking to downsize, will find the area attractive.
"We think these are great projects that we think are filling a void," Ligon said. "People want to talk about it being all Millennials that will live in these apartments. I think that will happen, but I also think that older, people in different phases of life will live in these apartments because they're looking for something a little different. They want to walk to restaurants. They want to walk to the greenway, and not get in their car every time they want to go somewhere.
The comments came Wednesday during a video meeting of the Greater Hall Chamber of Commerce's issues committee, which met to discuss apartments that are under construction or being planned across Hall County.
The high price of rent was discussed during the meeting. The downtown Gainesville projects are considered upscale developments with hefty monthly rents that some people can't afford. According to the United Way of Hall County's Community Impact Report in 2019, a household must earn $35,500 a year to afford a two-bedroom fair market rate rent of $842 per month without paying more than 30 percent of its income on housing.
http://accesswdun.com/article/2021/9/1039149/traffic-a-concern-as-gainesville-ads-downtown-housing