Not many residents of Atlanta can say they remember what the Atlanta skyline looked like 30 years ago, because many Atlantans did not grow up here, just relocated later in life. Maybe it is this reason that the Atlanta Business Chronicle celebrated its 30th anniversary by looking back at Midtown Atlanta to see how it has changed and grown over the past 30 years. This article “Midtown: From hippies to high-rises” gives the history of Mitdown Atlanta starting with the hippie population of the 1960s. The concentration of the hippie population was  on “the strip” - Peachtree Street from Fifth Street to 14th Street. A near riot between hippies and police broke out at Piedmont Park in 1969, and while this one incident probably did not directly cause the decline of Midtown, this hip part of the city did indeed begin to decay in the 1970s when the suburbs began to boom. However this decade was also the time that the first mixed-use development appeared in Midtown, Colony  Square.

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Forbes.com recently published an article announcing “America’s Most Stable Housing Markets,” and our great city of Atlanta made the list. When compared to other cities, Atlanta has a low cost-of-living. A house that sells for $200,000 here would be double or triple the price in cities like San Francisco and New York City. Banks and lenders are uneasy and reluctant to approve unmanageably large mortgage loans. But, because Atlanta’s median home-sale price is only $175,000, it is easy for people to be approved on a mortgage loan, and the city maintains consistent real estate activity.

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