Quote:
Originally Posted by DNR
I was thinking along the same lines. These Midtown regulations are a little peculiar.
I understand that the cost’s associated with building taller can be more, but If it’s cheaper to build two buildings on two separate city lots, then the land must be relatively cheap – comparatively speaking.
As far as these restrictive Midtown Zoning regulations are concerned, there seems to be a large number of buildings in various development stages that worked through these restrictions to propose taller buildings than these relatively “squatty” buildings that we keep seeing pop up all over Midtown.
We have 1105 W. Peachtree of course at 29…or is it-31 stories? Cousin’s Properties appears to be working through the regulations to construct a 30-story office building down the road at 7th & 8th Street. CA Ventures is proposing a 33-story & 27-story residential buildings. Trillist Company is working on a 46-story residential tower. How are these companies building taller buildings?
If the restrictions only apply to this part of Midtown (in the vicinity of Tech Square) it would seem prudent if the City or Midtown worked on reviewing these restrictions so that we don’t end up with a huge portion of Midtown having a condition of what we can loosely called of “height monotony” or just looking like an uninteresting swath of ordinary.
Yes… I know, it shouldn’t matter what a building’s height is as long as the street presence is pleasing, but we all know that we often judge a city by how interesting it’s skyline is from a distance – not only at street level. Of course you can always have a taller building and great street presence too!
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There are many tricks that developers use to get tall towers in Midtown:
https://www.midtownatl.com/_files/do...lines_rdcd.pdf
10.2 is the max FAR in this document, it may be a little higher now, but I don't think by much maybe 12 or 15 since the midtown zoning update.
That means if you are building roughly the entire lot (max buildable area of a lot is 85%) you can only expect to build a 12-story building. I don't know that parking is part of the FAR calculation so hence you see with Portman's buildings ~20 stories with half the floors parking and the other half occupied office space.
Often developers use setbacks to get higher, or have the building take a small footprint of the lot, or they transfer development rights from a property that will never be redeveloped.
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