The Second Public Meeting
I didn’t plan on taking a summer break from posting remembrances on the movement that lead to the Fulton County Overlay 20 years ago with new zoning that followed. The break just happened with weekly procrastination. I will pick up with remembrances of the second public meeting and will try to post regularly leading up to a celebration toast this fall.
As a reminder, this overlay and zoning established the 40,000 acre Chattahoochee Hill County as one of the most progressive areas for balanced growth in a US metro area . The overlay led to Serenbe’s groundbreaking in 2004 and the establishment of the city of Chattahoochee Hills in 2007.
The purpose of the second meeting was to better understand our land owner groups and their respective visions for the future of the area. By this time, we knew we had divided landowners. Half thought the best way to reap the value from the land was to allow and encourage the development patterns of metro Atlanta. On the other hand, the idea of our pastures, forests and hills being turned into cul de sac subdivisions and strip malls horrified the other half of the land owner group. Our task was to explore how to bring these two diverse groups together and find a new vision that addressed both concerns verses the norm that many times took lawyers to negotiate a compromise between the two visions.
ECOS, our land planing & public engagement firm, suggested using both a written survey and a visual survey to test what people said they wanted vs what they emotionally responded to. The written survey suggested people wanted one house per 10 acres while the visual survey responded to clustered development resulting in four units to an acre with open fields.
These differing results produced by two surveys on the same evening by the same group of people was very revealing. When we shared the results, it opened people’s minds to rethink their respective positions regarding development. We discovered the pro development group thought traditional development was the only way to receive value from the land that they had either inherited or bought on speculation as an investment. Our task was to find ways to maximize value while saving as much land as possible.
During our family visits to England, we were enchanted by the rural landscape dotted with the villages and hamlets. Our dear friend Alice lived in a hamlet southwest of London called Selborne. We visited her often during this period and I began inquiring about English land law that had produced this tranquil pattern of land development. England’s post World War II pattern of development contrasted dramatically from the US pattern of sprawl and it seemed the English version was a model we should learn more about and share with the group.
In America, we found that others were exploring ways to preserve land and increase the values through development models that were different from the suburban sprawl pattern that metro Atlanta and most urban areas were repeatedly approving and building. Randel Arrent published, Rural by Design in1994 which looked at alternative development models for green field development. This book shared images of rural ares with urban sprawl and then examples of how clustered development patterns can accommodate the same number of dwelling units and commercial buildings by clustering the development. Clustering was the natural pattern of development before 1940 and exploring versions of this seemed like our path forward.
With the survey results and clustered models of development in hand, we began preparing for the third public meeting.
