The digital renderings of a new Chattanooga neighborhood are meant to give viewers a glimpse into the future, a future in this case that could be as soon as 20 or 25 years away.
But the renderings are so good, they look like photographs, some of them street views and some of them overviews of a neighborhood taken from a helicopter.
The renderings show a clean, mixed-use, tree-lined, artfully planned downtown neighborhood between Riverfront Parkway and the Tennessee River. Yes, there’s that much room there, between West M.L. King Boulevard and 19th Street, 112 acres worth of prime real estate.
The schematics are so inviting, you want to believe someone could create the whole neighborhood somewhere, pick it up and put it in the place of the acres of asphalt and some of yesterday’s manufacturing buildings currently occupying the area.
The neighborhood, once occupied by venerable Combustion Engineering (then by Alstom and then owned by General Electric Power), is the dream of real estate developer Jimmy White and hotelier Hiren Desai. The pair bought the property from GE Power in 2018 for $30 million, an absolute steal.