Alpharetta: The Corner Office of the South

publication date: Jun 9, 2008

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author/source: Alan Sverdlik / STAFF

By Alan Sverdlik / STAFF

In the white-gloved Alpharetta of old, people held the door for one another as they bade pleasant good mornings. Men tipped their hats to the ladies, and if they were eligible, did their courting after the Sunday sermon.

Republicans were shoo-ins well before GOP placards sprouted from every small town lawn in Dixie, and membership in the Junior League and the Episcopal Church meant you had made it. While the “Fergit? Hell!” chauvinism of the nearby mountains was too rabid for Alpharetta’s genteel sensibilities, old-timers prowled the libraries and historical societies for any familial tie to the Confederacy. To many in-town Atlantans, it was a splendid place to ride horses, but otherwise too apple-pie for their tastes.

Today, Alpharetta embodies the antithesis of a sleepy southern burg. It’s the Silicon Valley of the south. It’s a business Mecca on steroids.

With so many of its residents working in telecommunications and related industries, the city has become a high-tech hub of multinational repute.

The transformation has been rapid-fire, and to some, disconcerting.

“We’re experiencing a tug of war between rapid change and a sense of identity,” says City Councilman D.C. Aiken, who has lived in North Fulton since 1972. “People are trying to embrace the future while at the same time hold on to the things that made Alpharetta special 30 years ago.”

Alpharetta’s business climate has been balmy since the inclement weather of the early 2000’s. Its affluence, a given for much of Alpharetta’s recent history, is well documented. Two-thirds of the city’s adults have had four or more years of college and earn more than $100,000 a year, twice the American family average, according to the latest census figures. Their homes are worth an average of $400,000, also twice the national average, and they have nearly twice as many rooms as the average house.

Expenses, on the other hand, are relatively low. “It’s not like L.A., where the cost of living is exorbitant,” Aiken says.

The sector that includes telecommunications and information technology has been a phoenix since the bust of 2001 and 2002, and it remains dynamic. “That market has already gone through its correction,” says Councilman David Belle Isle.

In the long run, telecom’s fate may hinge on advances in the technology that produced cell phones, Blackberries and other wireless gadgets, as well as the laying of underground or underwater fiber optic cable. Software start-ups and their established peers dot Alpharetta, but on the whole, the outlook for these firms is even more speculative than telecom, investment bankers say.

Banking, insurance, financial services and other Old Economy sectors are also important to the local economy.

“We’re a 150-year-old city that’s been very blessed,” Belle Isle says. “We have a strong upper middle class, Fortune 500 companies and a corporate campus environment.” He adds: “There’s still plenty to be done, however. One priority is re-vitalizing our downtown.”

According to Aiken, the city’s demographics will cushion it from the full effects of a recession, if one occurs. Belle Isle concurs, saying, “Our neighbors in the Atlanta area,” particularly on Fulton County’s south side, are more susceptible to a downturn.

A Tale of Two Cities
Optimism abounds within the City Hall bureaucracy.

“The fundamentals of the Alpharetta market are very strong. Our borders are sealed and locked,” says Deputy City Administrator Jim Drinkard, formerly the head of economic development. “Alpharetta will become an economically self-sufficient city, which has been our vision all along.”

Calling Alpharetta and Roswell “co-dependent, close siblings with unique traits,” Drinkard adds, “They’re a few years older than us, so we’re trying to catch up and reach their level of maturity. We’re constantly competing. The ultimate question is, ‘Who’s going to be No. 1, and who comes in second?’”

In Alpharetta’s go-go economy, there are still prosperous people who didn’t count on the grueling traffic, on how far away everything seems and on the isolation that comes with having no deep connections, no old friends, no family ties.           

                          
It’s a tale of two cities – one reveling in material success, one adrift in rootlessness.

A Transient Workforce
Alpharetta’s population has increased tenfold since the early ‘80s, a startling statistic attributed to its business-friendly ethic. Most estimates put it at 52,000. The population swells even more if you count commuters.

“We have 150,000 by day,” Belle Isle says. “By night, there are about 52,000 left.”

The growing pains have been particularly acute, as familiar cultural cues disappear under the crush of people and sprawl.

Very little about Alpharetta and its future, however, is discernable in the landscape: The city’s 23 square miles are a dizzying and inscrutable tableau of glass and brushed-metal office parks, multimillion dollar mansions, pristine horseback trails, colonnaded stucco banks and strip shopping centers. Just off Main Street, flanking an alley between two small parking lots, a pair of white wooden arches proclaims “Historic Downtown.” But they lead only to a back wall of stores.

Alpharetta is a paradox of the Information Age, which was supposed to free up a wired work force to live wherever it pleased. Without the traffic of a bloated capital city, Alpharetta gets uniformly good report cards for its students’ high SAT scores, the safe streets and roomy houses. But the daily grind has worn on peoples’ nerves, many of whom complain about the overall quality of life.

“No one dares ride a bicycle or walk a dog,” says Bob Smothers, a 44-year-old specialist in CDMA, the infrastructure that powers mobile phones. “As a pedestrian, I’d rather take my chances on the craziest L.A. street than Windward Parkway.”

The clotted roads aside, there have been some pleasant surprises. Standing on the spongy Bermuda grass in the front yard of his three-story, varnished oak house, Smothers, who relocated from California in 2003, is thankful that Alpharetta’s wealth is too new to harbor the pretensions of old-moneyed towns. Despite a salary in the upper six figures, he would like to find a diverse social network, which thus far has been an elusive quest.

In the main, Smothers socializes with other highly paid professionals, largely in the Brookdale and Wildwood subdivisions, the quarters of Alpharetta’s meritocracy. “None of their names are on any social registry and none attends charity balls,” he says. “Most are not even from Georgia.” They are data analysts, franchise chain managers, biotechnologists, plant managers and other employees of global business.

Smothers, a divorced father of two pre-teens, says he tries to keep his friendships casual because multinationals often jettison their top people to other locales after three-year stints. 

“My kids finally make a friend, and pop, the family is off to Singapore,” he says.

‘Re-locatees’ Fuel for Real Estate
In real estate jargon, homeowners who pull up stakes every couple of years at the behest of corporations are referred to as “re-locatees,” according to Teressa Holtzclaw, an associate broker with ERA Realty. Before the clients arrive, Holtzclaw usually talks with their company’s personnel director to assess the employee’s needs. Holtzclaw says she doesn’t resort to “real estate puffery” to deflect concerns about the traffic, which, along with schools and crime, are the main worries.

“They’re usually in a time frame,” she says, referring to homebuyers dispatched to a new city by their bosses. “If they’re being relocated, they probably know they’re going to be relocated again.”

It is hard to determine how many of Alpharetta’s highly trained workers are just passing through, as the Census Bureau does not single out “re-locatees.” But the census did conduct a survey in the early 2000s that identified an estimated three million people who had recently been transferred to another state or country. Real estate agents in Alpharetta say that a substantial number of homeowners who bought in the last decade had taken new assignments within a corporation.

There is still plenty of stress etched in the faces of the people, but it’s existential. In many cases, they feel rootless and unstable, knowing that a chain reaction that begins on the other side of the planet could mean a call to a midnight mover and another break in the continuity of life. Hemmed in by traffic, a sense of confinement, more psychic than physical, constantly hovers.

Everybody here feels it and articulates it. Even weighed against the salaries and perks enjoyed by many in Alpharetta, the uneasy sensation, something akin to claustrophobia, is still a talking point at the dinner table.

“We have a rule in this house that we don’t do anything on the weekend that takes us more than a mile away. I get tired of sitting on the horn and pleading with people to just go,” says Kate Kittle, 39, whose husband, a fiber optic engineer, accepted a transfer that brought the family of four from suburban Chicago to Alpharetta.

From Windward, one mile barely gets you out of the sub-division.

“I know,” Kittle says. “I’m exaggerating a bit.” Whenever there’s a street fair or cultural festival in Roswell, the Kittles usually make it, but Atlanta just seems too far away for an outing.

A Kind of ‘Company Town’
The Kittles weren’t here when scandal-ridden WorldCom laid off workers at its Alpharetta plant and dragged down the entire telecommunications sector. It was an economic earthquake that hurt retail, the housing market and the sense of exuberance.  “Jobs went away,” Drinkard recalls. “Lease rates of properties plummeted. Restaurants emptied.”

But Alpharetta Councilman John Monson says that the city is more protected from any future potential bust, if only because of the mass of commuters.

“Since two-thirds of Alpharetta's work force commutes in, presumably from outside Alpharetta, the city and its residents won't bear the full brunt of layoffs and other cost-cutting measures, assuming they occur,” Monson said.

The boom-and-bust cycle reminds historians of coal and agriculture and the company towns that flourished and suffered along with industry. In some ways, Alpharetta’s executive gypsies are the white-collar, privileged successors of itinerant miners and farm hands that hop scotched across the country.

“They are a fluid group, as random as an isotope you’d see under a microscope,” says Andrew Washington, a Georgetown University business professor and author of “Wireless: An Inside Look At The Telecom Revolution.”

“With the spread of global industry’s satellite office parks, they churn through towns like Alpharetta. They’re the shock troops of a revolution, but they certainly don’t look like the types to carry one out.”

Wheeler Wheels and Deals
Commercial real estate developers remain a robust force behind the city’s vibrant and flourishing economic growth. Diana Wheeler, Director of Community Development for the City, has earned a stellar national reputation as the one of most business savvy new development government officials in the Southeast. She gets project after project done in pristine fashion, using tough but fair negotiation tactics with developers while simultaneously navigating them through the rigid City Hall approval process. As a result, Alpharetta keeps adding marquee development projects, like Prospect Park, the Stanbury Hotel and the Verizon Amphitheater.

As Alpharetta Mayor Arthur Letchas is fond of saying, “The sun is always shining in Alpharetta.”

A more apt statement might be, “Its raining money in Alpharetta.”