Fifteen years ago Gwinnett County northeast of Atlanta was one the country's fastest growing places—a center of ravenous suburban expansion—widening boulevards and parkways, strip shopping centers laced along gasoline alleys, disconnected office parks, residential subdivisions off dead-end cul de sacs, and swaths of blacktopped parking spaces. Local officials blocked extending the Atlanta MARTA subway system into the county, ensuring car dependence while consciously setting up transit barriers from poor sections of the metropolitan area to the south.
So today in Gwinnett commercial development activity is nil. The most familiar signs at entrances and driveways to local office buildings are either “space available” or “for lease”—take your pick. A CEO client I visited on Friday dragged in late “after being stuck in traffic for an hour.” He's contemplating moving the office closer to the core or at least the original I-285 perimeter. But he confronts a familiar local problem—there is no central location anywhere that can satisfy the commuting needs of any group of employees, who live scattered in often far-flung areas off a spider web of roads.
Major Atlanta employers increasingly favor office sites near transit stops to give workers greater options and cater to the Generation Y employee cohort, which favors living and working closer to in-town retail and entertainment districts. Working in some out of the way office park 40 minutes from Buckhead or Midtown does not generate much interest from the average millennial. Gwinnett just is not where the action is anymore.
Not surprisingly much of the commodity suburban construction, dating from the mid-1990s, is not wearing particularly well. These buildings feature creaky HVAC systems without sustainable (LEED) features and are not well-suited to the open floor plans sought by many tenants today. Outside pavement cracks in parking lots start to appear and you have to wonder why no one thought about building sidewalks or considered bike paths, let alone setting aside land for public parks.
For the future, local officials eventually may have the opportunity to turn some of these empty and half empty office parks into real parks to give residents some relief from the suffocating over-developed and under-planned hodgepodge around them. As office users continue to consolidate and shrink their space needs many of these anachronistic complexes will be ripe for the bulldozer and re-use into public recreational spaces. Boulevard lanes may be willingly sacrificed for bus rapid transit or even rail extensions so that surviving commercial nodes can be reached without the traffic hassle. We may even see lanes on bisecting roads re-purposed for sidewalks or bike lanes—imagine that.
In the shorter-term, owners of many of these suburban properties operate in survival of the fittest mode—find the right price points to lease up the surfeit of vacant space and look to sell out. Caveat emptor reigns. Other owners must prepare to take their losses.
In suburbia—it's just not a pretty picture.
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Jonathan D. Miller
A marketing communication strategist who turned to real estate analysis, Jonathan D. Miller is a foremost interpreter of 21st citistate futures – cities and suburbs alike – seen through the lens of lifestyles and market realities. For more than 20 years (1992-2013), Miller authored Emerging Trends in Real Estate, the leading commercial real estate industry outlook report, published annually by PricewaterhouseCoopers and the Urban Land Institute (ULI). He has lectures frequently on trends in real estate, including the future of America's major 24-hour urban centers and sprawling suburbs. He also has been author of ULI’s annual forecasts on infrastructure and its What’s Next? series of forecasts. On a weekly basis, he writes the Trendczar blog for GlobeStreet.com, the real estate news website. Outside his published forecasting work, Miller is a prominent communications/institutional investor-marketing strategist and partner in Miller Ryan LLC, helping corporate clients develop and execute branding and communications programs. He led the re-branding of GMAC Commercial Mortgage to Capmark Financial Group Inc. and he was part of the management team that helped build Equitable Real Estate Investment Management, Inc. (subsequently Lend Lease Real Estate Investments, Inc.) into the leading real estate advisor to pension funds and other real institutional investors. He joined the Equitable Life Assurance Society of the U.S. in 1981, moving to Equitable Real Estate in 1984 as head of Corporate/Marketing Communications. In the 1980's he managed relations for several of the country's most prominent real estate developments including New York's Trump Tower and the Equitable Center. Earlier in his career, Miller was a reporter for Gannett Newspapers. He is a member of the Citistates Group and a board member of NYC Outward Bound Schools and the Center for Employment Opportunities.
