Doraville, a bedroom community that has had a reputation as a blue collar town, is fading as the city leans into its progressive city council, booming residential development, popular cultural hubs, and dining experiences to build what the city has always lacked – a city center.
The vision for a city center has been in talks since 2016, when Mayor Joseph Geierman was a resident participant of the city’s comprehensive plan committee. Geierman decided to run for office because he wanted the plan to be implemented, and he felt the other council members were not taking the it seriously.
“When the mayor position came up, I ran for mayor and won, I think, on the basis of advocating for implementing this plan,” Geierman said.
Doraville City Manager Chris Eldridge said small steps have been made for years with this project in mind, like moving a cell tower, removing an underground storage tank, site analysis, and Brownfield remediation — a process to clean up former industrial sites and prepare land for economic reuse.
Doraville’s goal is to increase accessibility to city services and community spaces by taking 13 acres of city-owned land that Geierman called “underutilized” and building a city center, creating something from nothing.
The city center is expected to serve as a vibrant and inclusive hub designed for all who live, work, and visit Doraville, featuring a city services building, a public library, a public park, multi-family housing, retail, and dining. Renderings include street parking, a boutique hotel, and a 15-foot-wide trail.
“What we need is a way to start stitching the city back together and making it easier for people to connect with each other,” Geierman said.
Plans include a new street grid, a regional stormwater detention facility, and regrading of the land, including a decades-old public swimming pool.
“The police department’s the newest building, but it was built in the late 1980s, early 1990s. So it’s got plenty of age on it. It’s not efficient. It’s had water leakage issues, roof issues. No one’s real sad on staff about the changes,” Eldridge said.
History of Doraville
Doraville straddles I-285 at I-85 on the border of DeKalb County and Gwinnett County.
“We have a great location, great access to the rest of metro Atlanta, but at the same time, a lot of internal connectivity challenges. We’ve got over 10 percent of households who don’t have a car, so they’re reliant on public transit, their feet, taxis,” Geierman said. “It’s not always the easiest environment to navigate.”
The population of Doraville is just under 11,000 people, 56 percent of whom identify as Hispanic. The city’s website offers translation from the English language to Spanish, Korean, Mandarin, and Bengali.
The city is 3.6 square miles of zigs and zags around neighborhoods that have not been annexed into Doraville. Established as a farming community and railroad stop in 1871, Doraville became a hub for the automotive industry. In the 1940s, oil companies built gas distribution centers and General Motors built an assembly plant. In the 1960s, Doraville was known as “the fastest-growing city in Georgia.”
Geierman explained that the city grew around the industrial areas. Originally a railroad stop like so many other cities along I-285, the city was intersected by industry, highways, and MARTA.
“All these things are located here because of [Doraville’s] proximity to Atlanta. However, they also provide challenges to the city itself, sometimes, because it’s split up into different quadrants by transportation and other infrastructure,” Geierman said.
General Motors displaced a Black community – a school, church, and homes – to build the assembly plant. Residents were pushed into a neighborhood called Carver Hills, which was eventually destroyed for the expansion of Peachtree Industrial Boulevard and I-285, according to DeKalb History Center.
In the 1970s and 1980s, immigrants brought attention to the international corridor of Buford Highway. In his welcome letter to new residents, Geierman writes, “Doraville has one of the highest concentrations of international cuisine restaurants in the state.”
“As suburban expansion continued, a lot of the original residents started moving even further north into Gwinnett County, and we started to see more immigrants settling here,” Geierman said. “Starting in the 1980s, Doraville became known as a hub for a place where immigrants would go to get started. I’ve met lots of people whose parents moved here, started a business and got successful, then moved on,”
In the 1980s and 1990s, most immigrants were from Asian backgrounds: Korean, Chinese, Taiwanese. Today, the majority of immigrants in Doraville are from South and Central America, according to Geierman.
The most diverse mile
“Made in Doraville” is a documentary about “the most diverse mile in the American South.”
In the film, production manager Karen Ketchum and executive producer Dan Halron reminisced about their adolescence in Doraville, waxing poetic about summers at the pool and softball fields, riding bikes and playing in the street.
The filmmakers have submitted the film to numerous festivals, but future showings have not yet been announced.
Doraville is going to “thrive” under the new plan, Halron said.
“I personally think it’ll be great for this city, because that’s kind of what we’re missing. I mean, you look at Chamblee, what they’ve done in their downtown area with restaurants and shops and coffee … we’re really the only city that doesn’t have a true city center with walkability,” Halron said.
“While we’re super excited for the movie studios coming in and these new things that are being done, there is a concern about the small businesses. A lot of times when cities are updated, prices go through the roof,” Ketchum said. “What happens if things suddenly become more expensive?”
How will it be financed?
Doraville city center will be paid for by a $10 million bond referendum that passed with a 65 percent majority in 2023. A newly established tax district, Invest Doraville, will help pay for the new city center and related connectivity projects.
“[Invest Doraville] is a broad investment in Doraville’s future. Doraville has been carved up over the last 50 or 60 years. When I got here, we were doing the city’s 150 year celebration. You would never know the city’s been here 150 years, because most of that has been torn down. We don’t have a single historic structure in town,” Eldridge said.
Prepping for construction
The city’s partners are Kaufman Capital, Choate Construction Company, HGOR, Flippo Civil Design, and McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture.
“How do you design this from scratch? It’s both a challenge and an opportunity. We have a blank slate,” said Kaufman Senior Vice President Garry Sobel. “It’s perfect timing.”
When the city issued an RFP for the project, 16 architect firms applied. The amount of interest encouraged city council members, Eldgridge said, “just to know that the development community in Atlanta at large is paying attention to this project. It truly is unique to have 13 acres inside the perimeter at a MARTA station.”
By visiting city buildings in Woodstock, Suwanee, and Sugar Hill council members and city staff created a vision for an active building, not a 9-to-5 workplace.
“We want to make sure the city building is alive,” Eldgridge said. “Our building will be three or four stories, have a library in it, probably a maker space, space for the arts. And on the ground floor, we’d have some kind of coffee house. We noticed in visiting other places, city hall can make for a dead building after 5 p.m.”
Renderings show terraced patios and a roof deck overlooking a sunken greenspace right-sized for a festival or concert.
“Even though this is conceptual, I think this gets the goal of what we wanted, which was, in truth, a civic building for the people. Not a monument to certain politicians,” said council member Maria Alexander at a 2023 meeting.
A flag in the ground
Sobel said “within two years, you’ll have the infrastructure, the green space, the storm water and the city hall building, assuming no hiccups.” It could take up to five years for multi-family residential and retail spaces to be filled.
“The biggest mistake municipalities make is they put a flag in the ground, and they do a bunch of development, and they miss the mark. I’m not going to point fingers at any municipalities. I will just tell you that if you’re not careful, you can miss the mark,” Sobel said.
The city said once construction begins, they expect the city services building to be complete in 13 months.
“My goal is to get it done. If it can happen within [my] term, that would be great because people have been waiting for it for a long time,” Geierman said.
