Peachtree City’s village retail centers could stand some changes, and some help from the city as it turns out.
A study of the Glenloch, Kedron, Aberdeen and Braelinn shopping centers authored by Georgia Tech architecture students and Professor Richard Dagenhart was unveiled Tuesday, providing several recommendations to help them thrive into the future:
• Provide easy, pleasant access to the shopping centers, particularly for customers coming by golf cart;
• Increase the diversity of businesses in the centers to provide more than one reason to visit the area;
• Shopping centers should host community activities such as a farmer’s market or other children’s activities in an effort to lure shoppers. Dagenhart suggested monthly and even weekly activities would help increase foot traffic; and
• Village centers should create a “sense of place” to provide another reason to visit other than to go to a shop or eat at a restaurant. Dagenhart suggested that large green areas could be built in each center to provide an attractive place for community activities to occur, for example.
Dagenhart and the students were commissioned for the study by the Development Authority of Peachtree City, which hosted a meeting on the recommendations Tuesday.
Dagenhart advocated for the city to build new cart paths to the village centers that would make trips shorter and therefore more convenient for patrons. Doing so would cost an estimated $382,000 but would provide a much larger return on sales at the Glenloch, Aberdeen, Braelinn and Kedron shopping centers, Dagenhart said.
There is also a possibility for redevelopment to occur at the various village centers, perhaps adding new buildings and creating golf cart parking close to stores, Dagenhart suggested.
To make room for the large green community areas at each shopping center, it’s a simple matter of disposing of unused parking spaces, Dagenhart said. He suggested that businesses only really need about three spaces for each 1,000 square foot of retail footprint.
Dagenhart also urged the city to look at allowing alternate uses in the village centers, including perhaps housing above retail shops and also office uses. The city could possibly adopt a special zoning category for the village centers to accomplish that goal, he added.
In terms of a variety of uses, Dagenhart used the example of a small independent restaurant that opened near his home, which then spun off a dessert business and also improved the business of a nearby bar. The bar would take customers waiting to go into the restaurant, which had long wait times, and in turn the dessert business was helped by folks leaving the restaurant.
“All that happened just because somebody opened a little restaurant,” Dagenhart said.
Dagenhart said such “small entrepreneurs” can be successful additions to village centers instead of more conventional leasing strategies.
The meeting also featured input from local business owners, several of whom said it was important to attract shoppers from outside of the city.
One suggestion was to improve signage for businesses and shopping centers, and such “wayfinding” signs have been bandied about by city planning staff in recent months.
Another suggestion was to have a “golf cart trolley” to show off the ambiance of the city’s path system on the way to shopping centers.
Joel Cowan, one of the founding fathers of Peachtree City, said one of his greatest regrets was not being able to create a “downtown” for Peachtree City. He said the city still needs to keep high standards for signage.
Cowan also supported the idea of having a common space at village centers for activities such as Girl Scout cookie sales.
“By definition, a community center has to be somewhere somebody goes to for other than just direct shopping,” Cowan said.
Cowan also said another way to increase customers in village centers is to allow some type of housing there, which could face a park area at the rear of the complexes instead of the parking lot.
The expansive parking lots also are a great opportunity to convert into community gathering areas, Cowan said.
“I’ve never seen Braelinn anywhere close to a full parking lot,” Cowan said.
