Thousands of new downtown dwellings take Chattanooga back to the future

Call it “Chatta-hattan?”

A few years from now, downtown Chattanooga should look and feel more like Manhattan, thanks to the biggest burst of residential development the city center has seen in decades.

It’s expected that new construction and retrofitting downtown will add some 1,740 apartments, 1,322 student beds and 564 hotel rooms.

Vacant office spaces – including the 13-story Beaux Arts-style MacLellan Building on Broad Street – are being re-purposed into upscale apartments.

New structures will soar skyward, too, such as the 10-story, 125-unit apartment tower on Market Street next to the SunTrust Bank Building.

Students from the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga will have more options to live downtown within walking distance of campus, due to a new 600-bed dorm on Vine Street and the 691-bed Douglas Heights Apartments on Martin Luther King Boulevard.

It’s not the first time dwelling downtown has been desirable.

“We’re going back to the future,” says Kim White, president and CEO of River City Co., the nonprofit company whose mission is downtown development. “We’re building back what was there. Everyone lived downtown (once). Over the years, so much has been decentralized.”

White doesn’t doubt that there’s enough demand for all the new living spaces, since large employers remain in the city center.

“There’s 55,000 workers downtown; 97 percent of them drive from outside in,” White says.

So only about 3 percent of those who work in downtown Chattanooga also live there. Meanwhile, the percentage is around 10 percent in comparable Southern cities, she said, such as in Charleston, South Carolina and Asheville, North Carolina.

The cost of rent at the new downtown dwellings shouldn’t keep people away, White says. Studio apartments are renting for $700 a month, although most apartments are priced far higher.

And rents could drop, White said, as more units come online.

“What you’re going to see is some price equalization,” she says.

Downtown only has one grocery store, now, the century-old Buehler’s Market. But new stores should follow as new residents move in, White said.

“There is tremendous pent-up demand for retail,” she says.

Sam Hall has photos online to prove how downtown Chattanooga used to thrive. Hall created the website, www.deepzoomchattanooga.com, as a labor of love. It lets users zoom in and out of old photos of the city that are incredibly detailed, because photographers then used large-format, 4-by-5-inch negatives.

The old photos show many long-gone apartments and hotels downtown, including an apartment building at least five stories tall that took up a city block at the corner of McCallie and Georgia avenues next to the Chattanooga Memorial Auditorium. It was the Elizabeth Apartment, according to a 1928 plat book that’s also on Hall’s website.

That’s just one example of a score of downtown dwellings that were claimed by the wrecking ball over the years.

Just that one section of downtown near the long-gone Elizabeth Apartment had about a dozen apartment buildings and “flats” that no longer exist, according to the plat book. They included the Windsor, Elwood, Monroe, Madison, Carolina, Cambridge, Carlisle, Breckenridge and Zula as well as the Hotel Clifton and Hotel Northern.

“It does seem evident that there were a lot more apartments a half century ago,” Hall says. “Perhaps we’re heading back to that.”