Hanover Co. Planning Hotel and High-rise Residences in Atlanta

• 
  SAVE
• 
  SHARE
• 
  TEXT SIZE
• 
  PRINT
• 
  COMMENT
• 
  PDF

. October 14, 2008

By Julie B. Hairston, Leon Stafford, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Knight Ridder/Tribune Business News

ATLANTA, GA, December 28, 2005. The developer of the Paramount luxury apartment complex near Peachtree Road has filed plans to build upscale condominiums and a high-end hotel behind Phipps Plaza mall, adding to the boom in Buckhead construction.

Hanover Co. of Houston hopes to build 530 high-rise residences, a 250-room hotel, 50,000 square feet of shopping space and 8,500 square feet of restaurant space on Phipps Boulevard at Wieuca Road. The mixed-use development, to be built in phases, would be completed in 2012, according to a proposal filed last week with area planners.

Hanover has asked the Atlanta Regional Commission and the Georgia Regional Transportation Authority for a ruling on the impact of the project. The project also would require rezoning approval from the city of Atlanta for increased density.

Calls to Hanover's corporate office in Texas failed to reach anyone who would comment. A spokeswoman for Simon Property Group of Indianapolis, the retail real estate company that owns the land where the new project would be built, declined to comment Tuesday.

Neighbors in surrounding residential pockets say they worry that a glut of new residences, businesses and shops could overwhelm already strained roads and sewers. Market analysts say the proposed hotel rooms would serve a swelling population of visitors, many of whom gravitate to the Phipps area for shopping and entertainment.

Metro Atlanta has about 93,000 hotel rooms, one of the biggest concentrations in the country. Hospitality officials expect 2005 to end as Atlanta's best year for hotel occupancy since 2000. Occupancy rates have climbed steadily since bottoming out in 2003.

If current trends continue, new luxury hotel rooms will pay off, said Mark Woodworth, executive vice president of PKF Consulting, an Atlanta firm that tracks the hotel industry. Upscale accommodations fared well in 2005, mostly because of a strong resurgence in convention and business travel.

"High-end hotels have consistently outperformed the market as a whole," Woodworth said.

He said that, until the opening of the InterContinental Hotel in Buckhead last year, Atlanta's north end had not opened a new luxury hotel in years. "Perhaps we will look at the InterContinental as the beginning of a new cycle in Buckhead," Woodworth said.

By February, 19 high-rise developments in Buckhead will be somewhere in the zoning or development process, according to Atlanta City Councilman Howard Shook, who represents part of Buckhead.

Some neighbors view the Hanover project warily as they measure the effects of the development wave expected to hit the Phipps/Lenox area over the next five years. "If there is anything else, it is going to choke everything," declared Walda Lavroff, zoning chair for the North Buckhead Civic Association.

But Shook, who said he met with Hanover officials several months ago, said mixed-use projects now under development are more balanced and economically viable than proposals of 10 years ago. The live-work-play design cuts down on traffic, and the residences and businesses benefit from their proximity to each other.

"It's a fascinating evolution," the councilman said.

---|-

To see more of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, or to subscribe to the newspaper, go to http://www.ajc.com.

Copyright (c) 2005, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution