Atlanta, GA — The Kirkwood Neighbors’ Organization at its May 10 meeting voted to recommend the city of Atlanta approve rezoning for property along Memorial Drive.

The developer wants to rezone the properties located at 2246 and 2250 Memorial Drive, the current site of Zion Pentecostal Evangelistic Church of God in Christ. The developer wants to rezone the property from family R-4 zoning to medium density MR-3 zoning in order to construct multiple homes.

The property owner, Wendel Matthews, wishes to remove the church and put five small detached homes on the property.

Each home will be about 2,600 square feet on the interior and have a two-car garage that is attached. The units will all have four bedrooms and 3.5 bathrooms. The price range is $650,000 to $750,000, which is the price the properties would naturally appraise at, Matthews said.

The original plan was for townhomes but the KNO zoning committee pushed back on that in an effort for the development to have less density.

The area where the property is has mostly single family homes and the neighborhood wanted to keep the character of the area, zoning committee member Susanne Blam said.

“The development that happened on Second Avenue also reflects that,” Blam said. “We’ve just been trying to stay at least within a semblance of a single family residential feel versus the townhome feel which is occurring further down toward the city.”

The original proposal that Matthews presented to the zoning committee was for five townhomes.

“One of the other reasons we did it is townhomes all abut and they create a wall and so with these you have some break between the units and an opportunity for it not to feel like one big mass,” Blam said.

A couple of years ago, the committee also worked with a developer on the opposite corner from the church property on a similar arrangement of single family homes, KNO Zoning Chair Nazeer Kutty said.

The KNO’s approval came with the condition that the project is site plan conditional and that the homes cannot exceed 35 feet in height.

The KNO zoning committee is also asking for native plants to be planted and for screening at the end of the driveways so headlights don’t reflect into neighboring homes.

The medium density zoning also requires a streetscape which includes significantly wider sidewalks than what is currently on Memorial Drive. The street will have 10-foot wide sidewalks as well as the buffer between the sidewalk and the street.

There is a MARTA bus stop in front of the church on Memorial Drive and Matthews and his team are working to integrate the stop into the design of the project.

“The plan is to make sure that that bus stop doesn’t go anywhere and that it’s fully compliant with MARTA code and the MR streetscape standard because that whole area is part of that same space,” Matthews said.

The property sits on the corner of Memorial Drive and East Lake Terrace. A sidewalk will additionally be added on East Lake Terrace and end at the next property line.

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