Over the past year, City of Atlanta has lured The Coca-Cola Co. and athenahealth Inc., back inside the perimeter, bringing with them thousands of jobs. Some credit for the reinvestment in downtown Atlanta by major high-tech operations goes to the increased quality of life brought on by the BeltLine and other major projects in the city. Ryan Gravel (MCP/MArch '99), who imagined the 22-mile BeltLine in his 1999 thesis said, “Increasingly, instead of people moving toward jobs, which gave Alpharetta and places like that a strategic advantage a generation ago, jobs are moving toward the more compact, walkable, transit-friendly communities where young people want to live today.”
