Forty years on Powers Ferry Place.
A warehouse, then a storage yard, and now a proposal to use part of it for something quieter than either. Here's the whole property, and what would actually change on it.
This building has been part of the neighborhood far longer than we've been asking anything of it. We'd like to keep it that way.
Nothing on this page is a change we're proposing. It's the property as it exists — the part we'd use is 17% of it.
Illustrative overlay on current site conditions · 10.73 acres.
What's there now
Ten and a half acres off Powers Ferry Place, backing onto I-75. A long concrete building, rows of storage units, a parking area, and a band of mature trees around the edge.
It's a working self-storage facility, and it will stay one. Our part of the proposal is the strip marked in blue — roughly 17% of the site. The rest carries on exactly as it does today, with the same business and the same customers.
The property in its warehouse years.
The building's forty years
It went up in the late 1980s as a warehouse — freight in, freight out, loading docks running through the day. In the 1990s it was renovated for self-storage, which is what it's been ever since: customers coming and going seven days a week, trucks in the lot, gates opening early.
We mention that history not to score a point, but because it's genuinely the context. This building has never been quiet, and what's proposed is the quietest thing it's done.
Illustrative. Zoning per City of Marietta records.
What the zoning already allows
The site is zoned CRC — Community Retail Commercial — inside a Regional Activity Center. Both of those were set long before we filed anything, and neither is being changed by this application.
That matters because it means the question in front of Council isn't whether this corridor should be commercial. It already is. The question is which commercial use goes in a building that's already standing.
What would actually change on this property.
Four things change. The rest of the list is the property as you already know it.
The existing perimeter buffer.
The trees, and why they stay
The mature trees along the boundary aren't landscaping we're adding. They're already there, and they're the screening the neighbors behind the property already have.
Keeping them costs us nothing and matters to the people who see them from their windows every day. They're on the list of things we asked the City to hold us to, which is the only reason that sentence is worth more than a sentence.
The surrounding commercial district.
Who else is on this block
This is a commercial corridor with something like 800,000 square feet of office space around it. There's already a data facility operating nearby, on this same block, run by another company.
We're not pointing that out to argue that the question is settled. We're pointing it out because it's useful context: this kind of use isn't new to Northchase Parkway, and the neighborhood's experience of the existing one is probably a better guide than anything we could tell you about ourselves.
Come and see it.
We'll walk the site with any resident who wants to look at it — no meeting, no presentation, just the property. Ask and we'll find a time.