Long Term Plan for Georgetown Nearing Completion

The long term vision for the Georgetown area is nearly complete.

This past week, the nearly-finalized version of the long-term vision for the Georgetown - Shallowford Road Corridor was presented to the public.

The meeting, which was held Wednesday at Peachtree Charter Middle School, was hosted by the City of Dunwoody and Urban Collage, the urban design firm hired by the city to do the master plan for the Georgetown and Dunwoody Village areas.

The reaction, overall, seemed positive.

“I think it’s pretty favorable,” said Shawn Hamlin, an architect who lives in the North Springs neighborhood of Dunwoody. “The planners and city have worked really hard and it shows.”

The finalized plan calls for:

• enhancing the area as a gateway to the city

• more greenspace

• better connectivity, both for autos and bicycles and pedestrians

• maintaining buffers for single-family neighborhoods

• coming up with a plan for the ‘PVC farm’

• optimizing redevelopment opportunities for properties along 285

Robert Begle, who is overseeing the development of the Georgetown Master Plan for Urban Collage, said the two biggest issues that kept coming up were street-scaping Chamblee Dunwoody Road to help beautify it and putting a new city park somewhere.

“We’re recommending it on the PVC site,” he said.

The plan would also add more connectivity between Shallowford Road and Chamblee Dunwoody Road and redeveloping the old DeKalb County School site.

After the presentation, people were given fake money to put into a variety of projects that would set the stage for changing the layout in the Georgetown area.

Hamlin put his money into cleaning up the PVC pipe farm between Shallowford Road and Chamblee Dunwoody Road or putting in a connecting road between Peachford Road and Chamblee Dunwoody Road.

Hamlin said that the area is very important, both as a commercial real estate area, but also as a gateway.

“When [people] think of Georgetown, they think of Kroger, they don’t think of all the other things that comprise from North Shallowford all the way to Chamblee Dunwoody,” he said. “The challenge is creating the identity of what it really is and what it really could be.”

The other challenge, from the city’s perspective, is getting developers to invest in the plan.

“A lot of it is not projects that the city is going to do, it’s a private sector thing,” Begle said. “It will be incumbent upon the city to try to influence the best ways it can. Some of these properties will need to be rezoned. On other projects, the city can do some of the public improvements which could create a market for some development.”

Dunwoody’s Director of Economic Development Michael Starling has already started meeting with possible developers on the plan.

“Now I have something to take to show them,” Starling said about the plan presented Wednesday.

For Hamlin, he hopes the improvements can start soon, so that people will begin to look at Georgetown in a new way.

“It’s so weird, nobody knows what’s there,” he said. “It’s like they want to put blinders on when they drive through and I think this is an opportunity to remove those blinders.”