Well if you’ve watched the channel much you know that we talk a lot about where to live near two of Atlanta’s biggest employers: Emory University and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Well today we’re gonna hop north of I-85 to the lovely city of Brookhaven. With a population just under 60,000, Brookhaven is the largest city in Dekalb County Georgia. The city of Brookhaven was incorporated in December 2012, so they are coming up on their 10th anniversary. Brookhaven is a very well-run, very efficient city, with their own police department and their own planning and zoning committees. Planning and zoning have been very important in Brookhaven’s rapid growth and I’ll talk more about that later.
Now if you note on the map Brookhaven is entirely inside the perimeter in the north part of Atlanta. Brookhaven is conveniently located near three of Atlanta’s largest healthcare employers. On the south end you have Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta and Emory hospital, and on the north end Northside Hospital. Traffic is terrible in Atlanta, so if you’re moving here to work at any of these three healthcare facilities, Brookhaven would be an excellent choice. You’re going to have a very short commute and you’re never going to have to get on the highway.
To keep it simple we’re going to break Brookhaven down into three distinct areas and talk about those. The first part is historic Brookhaven, which is on the west side of Peachtree Road surrounding the Capital City Club and Oglethorpe University. Homes here generally start well above a million dollars. So let’s start in historic Brookhaven near the Capital City Country Club and Oglethorpe University. This part of Brookhaven is filled with homes from the early 1900s – you’ll see the same classical architecture that you find in Buckhead and Druid Hills and that’s because these were all Atlanta’s first suburbs. They were built in the early 1900s. This area around the Capital City Club is on the national register of historic places. In historic Brookhaven you’ll rarely see anything on the market under a million dollars.
Our second part of Brookhaven is located on the east side of Peachtree Road near the Brookhaven village. These neighborhoods are known as Ashford Park and Drew Valley. Ashford Park is north of Dresden and Drew Valley is south, but they are largely homogeneous. Now Ashford Park and Drew Valley were developed primarily in the 1950s and they were formerly filled with hundreds, probably thousands of these very small homes most of them under 1200 square feet and largely obsolete by today’s standards. These homes are being torn down on a daily basis and rebuilt as very livable modern homes, often with four more bedrooms open floor plans, gourmet kitchens and all the details you would expect in a modern home. As I mentioned earlier, planning and zoning has been critical to Brookhaven’s rapid growth over the last 10 years. Brookhaven has streamlined the process so that good homebuilders can do their jobs and build more single-family homes. Literally everywhere you look there are new homes under construction, every street seems to have two or three new houses being built every time you drive through. As you can see, Brookhaven keeps the home styles very classic, very refined you just don’t see the giant bomb shelter mcmansions popping up here like you do elsewhere in Atlanta. Now the good news is that many of these new homes are available starting in the low 700s in fact I just sold one over on Drew Valley road for 715 thousand dollars
Our third part of Brookhaven is north Brookhaven, which extends north of Oglethorpe University all the way up to I-285. The main section of north Brookhaven is the retail and park district at the intersection of Ashford Dunwoody and Johnson Ferry Road. North Brookhaven has a much more suburban feel. Most of the homes there were built in the 1970s up through the 1990s, so these houses are still very functional, with many homes well over 2500 square feet and four bedrooms. There is some infill housing here, but not nearly as much as you’re seeing in south Brookhaven. I mentioned Brookhaven’s terrific park system and north Brookhaven has two of the best and largest parks in the city: Blackburn Park has a large tennis facility a huge green space and several soccer fields just down Ashford Dunwoody Road towards Perimeter Mall is Murphy Candler Park which at 120 acres is the largest park in Brookhaven. Murphy Candler lake has a two mile trail loop and you’ll often see people fishing there. Plus there are more tennis courts, more baseball fields, more soccer fields, more football fields, a swimming pool, playgrounds and more. Brookhaven in fact has 18 different parks and recreational facilities. So if you love to be outdoors and enjoy the great Atlanta weather Brookhaven is a great place to live.