The Walker’s Bend subdivision was approved in 2003, as developers started building in Covington, a town of 13,000 in fast-growing Newton County. The development was to have 249 homes across 50 acres, a layout that would have made most urban planners cringe– big homes with attached garages smushed onto small lots, with lots of pavement and oddly-shaped yards.
Sales stalled in 2007 with only 50 homes sold and 79 built, though the roads and infrastructure had been installed for hundreds more. Developer Timber South went bankrupt, leaving eight different banks the titles to 160 empty lots and abandoned homes. A map of who owned what in Walker’s Bend at the time looks like a Monopoly board—there were lots owned by Bank of North Georgia, United Community Bank, The People’s Bank, and Enterprise Bank & Co.
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Home values were in free fall. Banks started auctioning off the homes to investors, who in turn rented them out to anyone who would have them.
The crime problems started soon after that. Families who still lived in Walker’s Bend were victims of daytime burglaries. Many of the homes were isolated, and residents felt unsafe coming home late at night.
In many places, the city would have shrugged and hoped that eventually, the market would come back, and the subdivision would be completed. But city planning director Randy Vinson didn’t want to wait.
Vinson seems an anomaly in conservative Georgia — he drives a mini-Cooper, which he parks at the planning department in a sea of Ford pick-up trucks — and believes in the kind of walkable development that’s now becoming popular in many parts of the country. A compact-housing development he helped spearhead in Covington, called Clark’s Grove, looks like something out of a quaint New England village — not the sprawl of Atlanta.
He’s been criticized by some locals — in a letter to the local newspaper, one Covington resident called him a leader of a “den of wolves,” though the writer acknowledged that Vinson is “thought by some to be God’s answer for everything and by others as the worst thing that ever happened to Newton County.”
Vinson’s plan for Walker’s Bend was unusual — he wanted the city of Covington to spend $1 million to buy up the empty lots there. They’d create more green space and parks, and work with developers to put in some affordable housing, a senior center, and perhaps a business incubator. Rather than allow landlords who don’t screen tenants, or who fail to evict bad tenants, to run the development, the city figured it could control who owned property in a time of rampant speculation.
“We thought, we’re going to have rental in here, its obvious, but we can’t let the vultures come in and pick it apart,” Vinson told me.
At the time, many cities just left similar projects to rot, said Dunham-Jones. Some didn’t have the money Covington had– the city has generally had balanced budgets, even during the recession — others didn’t have the expertise to get involved in buying and selling real estate. No one had any idea of how to do this type of intervention, and there was no guarantee the city would earn back any of the money it might invest in the area.
“It was a controversial idea — the city becoming master developer,” Dunham-Jones said. “But I thought the planning director just did a really extraordinary job.”
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“We hand-selected our landlords,” he told me. “There are landlords out there that could definitely bring down the value of the neighborhood because of the way they handle things — we found landlords who run very tight programs.”
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Dunham-Jones, the architecture professor, says it’s too soon to make any final pronouncement on Walker’s Bend. Residents need to wait until the market picks up so that builders are willing to build market-rate, single-family homes to make the neighborhood more mixed-income.
“I do think that the concerns that its just going to become this ghetto of subdivised housing are legitimate concerns,” she said. “But the structure is in place to allow the market to play itself out — it’s certainly too soon to really tell.”
A two-bedroom home in Covington could now sell for about $85,400, according to Zillow, still 26% down from the peak in 2008. But it’s up 50% from a low less than two years ago. What’s more, Covington home values generally are helped by the development, and by fewer foreclosed lots on the books, Dunham-Jones said.
“It just depends on how you are defining success,” she said. “Are you judging success according to the homeowner who bought a house in a subdivision that sadly, went bankrupt, or are you judging it on a community finding ways to meet the needs of your low-income residents?”
This article originally appeared on The Next Economy, a joint project of The Atlantic and National Journal.
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