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June 17, 2009
The following is an email from Bill Draper, a resident immediately behind Sembler Brookhaven, who has been involved from Day 1 with the Brookhaven LCI Overlay and trying to make Sembler and DeKalb County follow DeKalb's own zoning laws. Bill has been threatened with lawsuits by Sembler and yet keeps on trying to prevent them from getting away with the equivalent of armed robbery. Please read this and share with friends and neighbors.
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Last week Jeff Fuqua convinced me that Sembler's version of Town Brookhaven just isn't going to work anymore.
At Mike Jacob's town hall meeting last Monday about the pending Sembler tax abatement, Jeff Fuqua, president of Sembler in Atlanta, was more persuasive than I expected about issues I thought we disagreed on. We now seem to be of one mind that a full Town Brookhaven is all wrong. I replayed the tape several times to be sure I wasn't projecting onto it. I'm convinced.
I don't mind Fuqua pointing me out in public meetings and claiming I am a longtime Sembler critic. Or maybe that was the AJC. It was something like that. I expected it when Sembler started procedures to imprison me and others to keep us quiet. Threatening a lawsuit against me because I was helping neighbors in need was disappointing, but "Libel Per Se" is a hoot.
From time to time, Sembler and I, like most concerned residents, simply disagreed about compliance, enforcement, height, density, intensity, access, runoff, traffic, green space, buffers, trees, variances, streams, influence, tall tales, site plan changes, taxes, and the overlay. That was my responsibility to the community, but Sembler just made it incredibly time-consuming. I learned a lot from Sembler.
I have always believed Town Brookhaven, an idea I liked, was too big, too uncreative and too overstuffed to be successful for long. At the town hall meeting Fuqua admitted the new economy proved me right. Not in those words, and maybe unintentionally. But he laid out the best arguments I've heard so far for why Town Brookhaven isn't right anymore. And why it needs to be rethought in terms of the new economy.
"We started [in 2006] in a white hot economy," Fuqua said, "where tenants could actually pay rent, people could actually buy condos and rent apartments, and have jobs. And that doesn't exist anymore." He said a few places like Atlanta were once capable of developing projects like this, "but we will never see it again in our lifetime." A bloated Town Brookhaven falls smack in the middle of that category. The time for the original supersized plan has passed, and according to Fuqua's definition of huge mixed-use developments, it can't happen again.
So why should DeKalb purchase an oversized, no-longer-viable project? Fuqua stated that he and five other Sembler executives were so personally invested in this that it was "unbelievable." Fuqua told the Development Authority on May 12 that without the bailout, Sembler would just have walk away from the project. There were just no alternatives. At the town hall meeting he said he still wanted to build it as big and dense and opulent as he envisioned it in 2006, when "tenants could actually pay rent" and "people could rent apartments." That is the only real reason for the tax abatement - building something doomed so six rich guys don't lose one of their shirts.
Fuqua's argument against huge mixed use retail developments places a good bit of stress on the assumptions and estimates Sembler is using to indicate the amount of sales tax revenue Town Brookhaven might create. The numbers are based on 90% occupancy over 20 years, even though other developers say this never happens. Drive through Lindbergh Plaza, one of Sembler's more recent comparable retail centers, and count all the empty anchors and shops. Compare that to 90% occupancy.
But Dr. Gene Walker, chairman of the Development Authority board, said he understood that the retail in Town Brookhaven was now greatly reduced. It's not, and you can't believe in Sembler's plans. In its April 13 proposal, Sembler stated it intends to build 502,974 square feet of retail, no office and the same number of residential units as before. The breakdown in the proposal's Master Plan only includes 482, 257 square feet of retail, but Sembler always uses interesting arithmetic.
If you think a commissioner-approved site plan can't change much, you don't know Sembler. In the revised May 12 version of its proposal, Sembler increased the amount of retail to 522,974 square feet - 20,000 more than the total the month before or 40,717 more than the actual retail number the month before.
It now includes only about 40,000 square feet of retail less than that originally approved in 2006, and the number keeps rising. Last month, Sembler expanded retail use enough to quadruple the size of planned Large Format Retailers. According to the new Master Plan, Sembler lost five restaurants, reducing the number of eateries from 24 to 19, but inexplicably increased the retail area by 71,279 square feet - the size of another major anchor department store. Dr. Walker could not possibly know what he's buying.
This is what Sembler wants taxpayers to subsidize in a bad economy - an unknown quantity that doesn't seem to stop changing and growing. The sheer magnitude of new tenants with discounted lease agreements will pull business from all the other retailers in the area; retailers holding on by their teeth who can't afford to lose more traffic to artificial competitors. But Sembler is counting on it. That's how competition works in a white hot market. Or did. Or will when it's the government is running the other retailers out of business.
In calculating potential jobs, nobody is considering the cost in jobs lost up and down Peachtree for every job created at Town Brookhaven. It isn't measurable; it isn't based on a national statistical average. Thanks to a government-owned, artificially-occupied, mega shopping center in a bad economy, Peachtree will begin to resemble the "Blighted Zone" we hear so much about. From Jeff Fuqua.
The Authority's expert data verifier will probably check to see that the assumptions match Sembler's "national statistical averages" and correctly represent its "potential occupancy ratio" - which of course it will. Sembler has done this before. So has the Authority, which cannot be concerned about the health of existing businesses. Their job is to foster new development, and now bail out struggling developers by purchasing their competing retail developments, no matter what the cost to business, schools, county services and taxpayers. They plan to go on the road with this new spend-and-tax venture, so they certainly don't intend to kill the first client.
For those who just want to see new shops and restaurants at any cost, Fuqua never mentioned that many of the local shops and restaurants in Town Brookhaven are already built and will be occupied soon, sans abatement. They are on the bottom floors of the huge apartment buildings. If Sembler is out of options, then maybe the nation's sixth fastest growing developer just has to take a hit on this one. And let someone else handle it differently. The time for a huge Town Brookhaven is over. I agree with Jeff.
The Development Authority meets Thursday morning, June 18, at 8:00 at 150 East Ponce de Leon Avenue, Suite 400, Decatur, GA 30030 - unless the location changes. The Sembler tax abatement proposal is on the agenda and may be up for a vote. It is open to the public, although you wouldn't know it.
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Please also visit Rep. Mike Jacobs website and AtlantaUnfiltered.com for further financial analysis of this proposed bailout and why it MUST NOT be allowed to occur.
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Previous Messages:
- Kittredge Park Festival-AND-Rep. Mike Jacob's "Town Hall" meeting
- Dekalb Dev. Auth. to Give Sember $51 MILLION Tax Break
- Bd. of Comm. to vote on Williamsburg/Toco Hills Town Center
- Bd. of Comm. to vote on Williamsburg/Toco Hills Town Center
- Toco Hills Senior Living Design Charrette