Dunwoody planning officials: Perimeter Center mixed-use idea isn’t dense enough

Dunwoody officials want dense development in Perimeter Center, as evidenced by the city planning commission’s request to beef up plans for a mixed-use proposal in the area.

The Dunwoody Planning Commission again recommended approval of a development at 11 Ravinia Parkway earlier this month, where Ashford-Dunwoody Road meets the Interstate 285 Perimeter, which would deliver a hotel, restaurants, and retail, according to Reporter Newspapers.

But commissioners weren’t happy to see that developer GMC Real Estate Acquisitions, after fielding concerns about traffic from the Dunwoody City Council, had decreased the project’s density. The planned hotel shrunk from eight to five stories—and, subsequently 270 to 156 rooms. The height of planned restaurants and retail spaces was also lowered.

In this part of Perimeter Center, buildings can ascend as high as 30 stories, per the publication.

So planning commissioners, in a unanimous vote to recommend rezoning for the project, voted to urge the developer to turn back to the denser plan with taller buildings.

The city council is scheduled to review the revised (again) plans in November, and a final vote on the rezoning effort could come in December.

The move to densify the budding project follows a recent trend around the Perimeter subdistrict.

Last year, Dunwoody officials unanimously approved developer Grubb Properties’s plan to squeeze 900 condos into four towers.

As part of planned mixed-use project Park at Perimeter Center East, those condos would accompany some 500,000 square feet of new office space (that’s on par with Ponce City Market’s office allotment), roughly 12,000 square feet of retail, some for-sale townhomes, and almost three acres of green space with a 12-foot-wide multi-use trail.

Elsewhere, more than 10 years after it had initially been proposed, the High Street project, a potentially $2 billion development spanning 42 acres, appears to be moving forward, too.

Neighboring Dunwoody’s massive State Farm campus, High Street would become a roughly 8 million-square-foot campus featuring 400,000 square feet of restaurants and retail, 635,000 square feet of high-end office space, 1,500 apartments, a 400-key hotel, and a public park.