This post was contributed by a community member. The views expressed here are the author's own.

Community Corner

Facing a Dilemma in Hedges/Gramling

What happens to a neighborhood when a city-backed redevelopment project runs into a recession and a housing bust? Both sides are still looking for basic answers.

Liz Helenek’s corner of the world is almost two acres.

“My son is here, he lives next door, and I have a grandchild, so I would say I’m pretty well set here,” Helenek says. “What I have is so neat; it’s like a family compound.

“I’ll take you to my backyard.  It’s like an oasis in the city of Marietta. I have a huge garden.”

Find out what's happening in Mariettawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Sounds nice. 

“I love it.  I absolutely love where I am. There is so much in this area that is so positive. If only the city had a vision. If only. Famous last words.”

Find out what's happening in Mariettawith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Whoops.  Sounds like trouble in paradise.

Helenek lives in a meticulously renovated home on Gramling Street in a neighborhood that has become known as Hedges/Gramling. That’s something of a fake name given to the area after the Marietta Redevelopment Corporation (MRC) bought about 10 acres in the area in 2007.

The idea was to gather up a bunch of parcels and convince a developer to buy it all and build something that would enhance the aging neighborhood.

The collapse of the housing market and the Great Recession put an end to all that, and when or if it will happen is anyone’s guess.  Meanwhile, Helenek says, she and her neighbors are suffering.

“It’s put the neighborhood in a dilemma,” she says.

Hedges/Gramling is a pyramid-shaped area with the Marietta Confederate Cemetery at the top. West Atlanta Street runs down the east side of the pyramid and Powder Springs Road runs down the west side.  The cross streets are Cemetery, Hedges, West Dixie Avenue and Gramling.

It is, for the most part, a Bell Bomber neighborhood, single-family homes and duplexes built in the 1930s and 1940s as workers poured into Marietta before and during World War II.

The area had seen better days when the MRC spent about $4 million to buy land on the neighborhood’s west side, off Powder Springs across from the Marietta Conference Center and the Hilton Hotel. The nonprofit group used $2.1 million seed money from the city to secure a $6 million line of credit from the Bank of North Georgia to fund the deal, said MRC Executive Director Reggie Taylor.

The MRC is a tax-exempt corporation that serves as the redevelopment agency of the city, according to the group’s Web site

The Marietta City Council appoints the group’s board of directors. The board controls day-to-day operations of the corporation.

The MRC’s principal mission “is to strengthen the economic and residential base of the City by revitalizing neighborhoods, commercial areas and other distressed properties.”

Taylor, the MRC’s executive director since 2008, said a nonprofit group has more flexibility than city officials in buying and selling property and dealing with developers. “We are a real estate-based company,” he said.

Many of the homes in the Hedges/Gramling area are empty, with boarded-up windows, and some that are rented out are in shoddy condition.

Helenek and some of her neighbors had a meeting in July with Marietta Mayor Steve Tumlin. They asked that all the MRC properties be demolished. “At the time there were vagrants living in some of them,” Helenek said.  “They said, ‘OK, we’re going to do it.’ Well, nothing’s been done.”

Late last week, Taylor and Teresa Sabree, the MRC’s project manager, said that’s about to change. While the overall project is on hold due to the economy, Sabree said, up to 10 of the MRC-owned homes will be demolished this year.

“First and foremost, we want to get the dilapidated housing down,” said Taylor, who hopes $130,000 in federal Community Development Block Grants will get the job done by this summer.

Sabree said the MRC owns 10 vacant lots in the neighborhood, along with seven single-family homes and 15 duplexes. Taylor said the MRC is collecting $5,650 a month in rents.

“It’s going to take awhile for the project to come back,” Taylor said.

So visions of new housing and mixed-use areas and improved streetscapes and expanded parks are blurred. Meanwhile, Helenek and the South Square Neighborhood Association want a clear vision on what will happen next, along with basic area clean-up and more stringent code enforcement in the meantime.

Taylor is looking to the neighborhood for help.

“We ask that they be patient,” he said. “Bring us ideas. Nobody has a cookie jar of answers. We want community support. Stay with us, come to meetings, be part of the process.”

At the meeting with the mayor in July, Helenek said if the city would demolish MRC-owned homes, some of the land might be used for a community garden.

“I think that’s a great idea,” Taylor said last week. “We want to get folks to help her.”

Helenek, a real estate broker, has a long-term investment in the neighborhood. She moved to Gramling Street in 1979 and into her current home in 1984. She and her husband moved here from Los Angeles when he enrolled at Life University.

“I loved the big trees,” Helenek said. “I thought the trees were incredible. Coming from California, they were incredible.”

They bought the house, built in 1897, from the estate of Cliff King, a pharmacist in Marietta. “He had left everything to the First United Methodist Church,” Helenek said. “The house was in really decrepit shape, and of course no lender would lend on it because it needed to be redone.”

So the church held her mortgage for many years.

“I’m telling you,” she said, “it was an absolute pleasure to write that check every month.”

Back then the Bell Bomber houses in her neighborhood were in better shape, Helenek said, “and they were still occupied by the people who used to work at Lockheed.”

Today, she added, “you have a situation where who have a lot of rentals and a lot of absentee owners.”

Helenek, who along with her two acres on Gramling owns a duplex on the street, has been  frustrated since the MRC’s Hedges/Gramling project hit the brakes.

“Honestly,” she said, “the city is so unwieldy in their attitude that I don’t know any developer that would really want to come in and do this.”

So, the MRC is looking for ideas. What would she do with the area?

“I would do something similar to what they’ve done in Smyrna,” she said. “If they could do something like a market green that would face the conference center, and then surrounding houses similar to what they did [in Smyrna]. It would be wonderful.”

Taylor said he believes the MRC can “get the ship righted.”

“The bank will work with us,” he said. “They are community-minded bank. We’re not worried. If we can make it for 36 to 40 months, we feel the recession will be over.  There’s money on the sidelines.”

Helenek has made her annual planting of hundreds of tulips in front of her house and is hoping that her neighborhood does not deteriorate further around the MRC-owned property.

“I think the neighborhood association will do everything that it can to see that it doesn’t happen,” she said.

“I suggested to Mayor Tumlin that we have a landlord liaison person, I even volunteered to do it. I haven’t heard a word about that. The city needs a liaison with their landlords to communicate in a much more effective manner.  ‘Hey, clean up your property, make it nice. Come on.’ ”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We’ve removed the ability to reply as we work to make improvements. Learn more here

The views expressed in this post are the author's own. Want to post on Patch?