October 28, 2008
On August 27 and October 13, crime meetings in “Northlake” were hosted by the DeKalb Chamber of Commerce at the newly refurbished Doubletree Hotel. The October meeting was advertised as a discussion for paying for added police protection.
The initial Doubletree meeting was convened abruptly after highly publicized “smash and grabs” in Northlake Mall and concern by property managers about panhandlers confronting hotel guests and shoppers. Police data also shows a 28% increase in area pedestrian robberies and 14 % in car break-ins in year-over-year data, incidents that inflame e-mail traffic among local neighborhood shoppers.
Twenty-one year neighborhood resident Mary Kay Woodworth attended the August crime meeting. Woodworth lives in a neighborhood close to the Northlake Overlay. Woodworth wrote in an e-mail, "My husband and I are concerned about the general decline in the area. We have recently purchased a new home…and feel that the perception (and reality) of crime in this community is of real damage to property values.” Woodworth added she is however encouraged by the “influx of new and renovated businesses”.
One of those new businesses is the Doubletree Hotel, which represents a large investment upgrade of the former Radisson at I-285. John LaBruzzo, the Doubletree’s Acting General Manager, has been caught off-guard by crime in the lagging East DeKalb commercial center, saying that he was not prepared for and is “disappointed” in the crime levels he has seen since opening less than six months ago.
LaBruzzo elaborated, “The recent spate of crime in the Northlake area only prompted (those) that came to the safety meeting to come together to avert the possibility of a negative perception maturing into a negative reality.”
DeKalb Police Department and Simon Properties, Inc. representatives were quick to relate an increase in reported incidents to a deteriorating economy, saying the entire region has the same issue. In an August 28 written statement, Simon stated, “…the incidents that have recently occurred at Northlake Mall are not isolated to the DeKalb county community, rather part of a larger crime ring that has taken place at 11 different locations throughout the metro-Atlanta area.”
Actually, crime statistics for the Atlanta region publicized by daily newspapers would indicate that increases in the Northlake Overlay are far lower than those in other deteriorating suburban counties—and the rest of DeKalb (see “Favorable” below).
According to police at the most recent October business meeting, department personnel are now inside the mall and Simon said, “an additional team of mobile security officers patrolling the property…has also been added to the current security program.” Apparently, security had been improved over 2007 also. According to data acquired by GoDeKalb.com from a police representative, there were only five reported incidents at the mall in the 12 months prior to September, 2008, extraordinarily fewer than 42 (mostly auto entries) in the 12 months previous. To put that in perspective, there were more than 30 incidents combined at the three apartment complexes in the overlay district in each of those time periods years, according to the same data.
Many business managers, like Robert Pillar at Hertz Car Rental and adjacent property owner Amin Haji on Northlake Parkway have yet to attend a crime meeting, but expressed interest when reached by GoDeKalb.com. Pillar says he has had an occasional car theft and police have coordinated stake-outs with him. Haji is close to opening a banquet hall between Hertz and DeKalb Tire. Although no apartment company representatives attended the first meeting, the second meeting attracted managers from gated communities owned by Worthing Southeast (The Heights and nearby Five Oaks) and Venterra Realty of Ontario, Canada (purchased Camelot and renamed “Providence”).
Thirty-seven (37) of approximately 500 reports between September 2007 and September 2008 were from one parking lot—that of the LA Fitness center on Crescent Center Parkway. The LA Fitness incidents were all “entering an auto", crimes that police representatives at both Doubletree meetings say are easily prevented. Police say most such vehicle break-ins are a result of carelessness by car owners, failing to pay attention to items left in plain site. The meetings resulted in tips to business managers for assisting the police with preventative practices.
DeKalb Police Captain Pat White presented a possible model for Northlake property owners to band together and pay for off-duty police. White discussed the program being operated by the Stone Mountain Industrial Park Association (SMIPA) in the management office of the business area. SMIPA’s off-duty coverage has been in place since 1992 and employs five rotating off-duty officers, one each night, the length of shifts being purposely varied. The association spent $95,000 between last October and this September, according to Patillo Construction Company Human Resource Director Jill Golod, who acts as the SMIPA manager. Member dues are $85 per year for each business owner and $15 for a business’ additional participants. Golod says she has no statistics, but says the longevity of the program bears out its success and popularity.
Taking Aim at “Extended Stays”
A few business members at this month’s meeting, including the Doubletree’s LaBruzzo, were concerned about some area hotel properties not being maintained and attracting a “criminal element”. Insurance executive Ray Williams, once a DeKalb Chamber of Commerce board member and Leadership DeKalb graduate, asked an attending representative of the Convention and Visitors Bureau (DCVB) what could be done about “extended stay” hotels, and got a garbled response about DeKalb not having many such hotels.
“Extended Stay” is actually a legitimate market-rate industry segment that caters to executive travel. However, the “extended stay” label is increasingly becoming attributed to industry a growing phenomenon of former “motels” serving transient low-income residents faced with difficult economic conditions—also sometime called “weekly rate” hotels. For instance, when GoDeKalb.com asked Gwinnett Village Community Improvement District (GVCID) Executive Director Chuck Warbington about crime in the CID, he said that weekly-rate hotel occupancy boomed with the Hurricane Katrina exodus.
The Northlake Inn, formerly a Ramada Inn and offering very low weekly rates, had only six (6) reported incidents in the past year, but Northlake Parkway businesses within a stones throw of the deteriorated hotel like the Stake and Ale restaurant have had dozens. Northlake Community Alliance (NCA) Chairman Tom Ulbricht told the October audience that the Inn’s owner has a redevelopment permit currently working its way through DeKalb’s permitting process—the property to become a home for the elderly.
This week, at the North Briarcliff Civic Association (formerly “Hawthorne”) annual meeting, DeKalb Police code enforcement officer said he had that same day conducted an inspection of the Shallowford Lodge in I-85 area “sweep”. The officer said he issued a citation for “a ton of violations”, equating the I-85 initiative to a similar effort on Glenwood Road, south of Memorial Drive.
Gwinnett CID Size Like Northlake "Area"- Crime Down With Extra Hires
GVCID’s Warbington makes no bones about the source of the crime in his several “hot spots.” Warbington flatly confides, “Crime in our commercial hot spots is directly related to extended-stay hotels, budget hotels now catering to transients. They (the deteriorated properties) are either producing crime or producing the atmosphere for it to happen”, Warbington told GoDeKalb.com
Extra policing was one of the primary reasons the GVCID was organized, says the self-taxing district’s head man.
“What’s interesting is the economy’s worse, but crime has been reduced (in the district). Warbington provided GoDeKalb.com with police department data tallied specifically for the CID area for the first half of 2008 showing 226 incidents compared with 317 incidents in the same six months of 2007—a reduction of 30 percent. GVCID 2007 figures had been nearly identical to the “Northlake” areas near Shallowford Road and Chamblee-Tucker (police sub-area 180) in 2007 before the CID’s extra effort.
The CID covers 12 square miles and has over 1,000 member-business properties in commercial/industrial areas along I-85 and three corridors that intersect the interstate—Pleasantdale Road, Jimmy Carter Boulevard, Indian Trail and Beaver Ruin Roads, The CID, which also extends into the city of Norcross, allocated $350,000 of a $1.75 million 2008 budget for the officers and spent “in the $250,000 range through September.
Relatively Favorable Figures in the “District”?
A look at several sources of data appears favorable for the Northlake Overlay District, when juxtaposed with other areas in DeKalb. The actual figure of nine pedestrian robberies through September, 2008 appears low compared to over 900 in DeKalb for only six months in 2008. Also, according to a police report provided to a developer with interests in Northlake, the numbers for the Overlay have been comparable to Perimeter Center in 2008, an area that enjoys paid off-duty police coverage in its Community Improvement District.
Other “Northlake” commercial areas such as I-85’s Shallowford and Chamblee-Tucker corridors had more than ten times the attacks on pedestrians than the Northlake Overlay.
The “Northlake” area is loosely bounded by Toco Hills in the south, I-85 to the North and Northlake Parkway/Lawrenceville Highway in the east—essentially police sub-precincts 230, 180 and 240 respectively. Single-family residential neighborhoods make up most of these areas, but bear little of the area’s reported crime. Only 17 percent of police incidents in area 240 were on neighborhood streets.
More than 60 percent of all “residential” crime is in commercial area apartment complexes or along apartment corridors. There were 11 “residential burglaries” in the Northlake overlay zone in the 2008 count—almost an insignificant number as compared with the I-85 commercial areas. Year-over-year starting in September, 2007 showed double that number at the three complexes, still almost an insignificant number as compared to the I-85 commercial zones. Two of three apartment complexes in the overlay area are gated.
About the author:
Tom Doolittle is a 15-year Northlake area resident and news source since 2002. Doolittle chartered Northlake Community Alliance, Inc. and conducted the Northlake Business Forum between 2001 and 2003.
http://godekalb.com/archives/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9031&Itemid=2873
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