News & Opinion

“It’s just getting harder for bees to do what they do,” Keith Delaplane says. Increasingly, honeybees and other pollinators face survival challenges from climate change, pesticide use, and habitat destruction—in addition to bacteria, parasites, and viruses that can swiftly decimate a hive. But researchers like Delaplane, a professor of entomology at the University of Georgia and the director of UGA’s Bee Program, are working to offer beekeepers tools to combat at least some of these threats. Next year, Georgia—home to one of the biggest commercial beekeeping industries in the country—might also be home to the world’s first vaccine for honeybees.

Each of MARTA’s 1,500-odd bus drivers has a unique badge number. The lower the number, the higher a driver’s seniority; a new recruit might be assigned, say, Badge #1480. That makes Coy Dumas Jr., Badge #1—who just celebrated 50 years behind the wheel—something of a transportation sensation.

Doug Elliott, a retired higher-ed executive, sits down to breakfast every morning with a coffee, perhaps some cereal, and Kim Kardashian’s boobs in his face. The billboard sits across from his apartment downtown. It’s one of several new billboards that have been erected in the Arts & Entertainment Atlanta district—an initiative, approved by the city in 2017, to “awaken” downtown by introducing outdoor media displays by local artists as well as advertisers.

The excitement about new development obscures an awkward fact that the city and developers have to reckon with: Downtown already has more buildings than it has people who want to occupy them. It already has more road, rail, and bus capacity than any eastern U.S. downtown south of Washington, D.C. On weekdays, there are plenty of people there. The problem is that, at 5 p.m. on Fridays, the place clears out. Downtown Atlanta is often filled with a large, diverse group of people, but not many of them are residents.

It’s a “stitch” as in a way to sew together the moribund patch of no-man’s-land between the Civic Center MARTA station on West Peachtree Street and Folk Art Park at Piedmont. A. J. Robinson, Central Atlanta Progress’s president, floated the idea in 2016: a cap on I-75/I-85 to create a pedestrian-friendly space about two-thirds the size of Centennial Olympic Park. Basically, we’d build a roof over about 4,000 feet of the Downtown Connector and plant trees on it.

Darin Givens—cofounder of ThreadATL, a nonprofit advocacy organization that aims to influence city planning and policy—explains why this cross-section of Forsyth and Poplar streets in the Fairlie-Poplar District has it all.

“There’s always been a fight for visibility for the creative community here. A lot of the artists feel like underground legends, even if they are known worldwide.”

Eviscerating a century-old office building and refashioning it into apartments is no easy feat. Older offices are nonpliable, stubborn things, riddled with secret problems and outdated floor plans. But the hassle was worth it for Centennial Yards Company, the developer behind a 162-unit project called the Lofts at Centennial Yards South, a remake of half of the long-vacant Norfolk Southern Buildings.

Hard to keep all the numbered buildings and buzzwords straight? Here’s a quick guide to what’s proposed, what’s underway, and what might have been.

In 2013, the City of Atlanta agreed to fund $200 million of the $1.6 billion price tag for billionaire Arthur Blank’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium. However, that covered only upfront development costs and did not account for operating and financing expenses, which will be paid with nearly 40 percent of the city’s hotel tax over the next 30 years, for a total investment of roughly $700 million. Blank pegs private dollars at $850 million, leaving 40 percent of the total cost coming from public coffers.