Dinner Parties And Peach Cobbler

It's amazing to think about how fast time goes yet how different we are today.

Steve Nygren knew he had to protect the land that was his backyard, but he didn't yet know what that looked like. He had seen the 70-30 plan inside Prairie Crossing, so he knew it could work but didn't want what had happened there (everything outside the community followed tradition, non-preservation practices). Always the hospitality man, Steve brought his neighbors together over dinners and homemade desserts to create the Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance, which started the process of determining what everyone wanted and what their best option was for preservation and development.

At one initial meeting, residents were asked to mark maps for everything they would want to save from historic structures to streams. The next step was figuring out how the area could be developed. If they took the route other Metro Atlanta areas had in the past two decades, they would most likely disturb 80% of the land for 30,000 homes. They knew it was their responsibility to find those 30,000 houses while disturbing significantly less land, so land planners created different density options that included these future housing areas and the areas and structures selected for preservation. After these determinations were made, Steve brought large land owners back to the table with the Nature Conservancy, Phill Tabb and others for the planning charrette to put real plans into place. Except these plans now had to go to several different planning departments with Fulton County, and all had separate requirements that were not based on the others'. The proverbial road blocks at a regulatory level began.

Atlanta's Public Works Department, unbeknownst to the public, had made plans to bring sewer down to the Chatt Hills area at a scale of 1 house per acre. The implication of this was that they would bring in 30,000 new users, but the Alliance's clustering plan wouldn't work with the Public Works plan. Luckily, there was a consensus among Chattahoochee Hills residents. The map large land owners had agreed on during their meeting showed that they wanted development to happen on their own land, and the map small land owners pushed development to the large land owners as well. Because they agreed, the CHA was able to go back to the Public Works Department and get them to allow new regulations. Development fever hit the South Fulton area in 2007, and when you look at that map compared to what the CHA had approved by in 2002 you can see the line where preservation begins. They had predicted what had happened just in time, now they had to build it.

Questions Answered

What was going on globally, nationally in 2000?

When you knew you were going to build Serenbe, what kind of rules did you have to change?

How did you implement the 70-30 Development Rule?

How did you approve rezoning, development and preservation plans when Fulton County's approval departments were all separate and didn't make determinations based on other departments' needs?

What was the Public Works Department against the Chatt Hills development plan?

How does this environmentally-friendly way of developing allow for more housing than traditional sprawl division?

What does clustered development mean for the future?

Why was it important to incorporate Transfer Development Rights? How do they work?

People + Organizations Mentioned

Living Machines

Microsoft

Nature Conservancy

Quinn Nygren

South Fulton Parkway

Phill Tabb

John Todd

Toyota Prius

Ted Turner

University of Georgia

Atlanta Public Works Department

Charles, Prince of Wales

Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance

Environmental Council of the States

Jane Fonda

Fulton County Economic Development

Fulton County Planning Department

Georgia Conservancy

Al Gore

iPhone

Episode Transcript

Monica Olsen (1s): Hey guys, it's Monica here. I wanted to tell you about a new podcast that I've started with my very good friend, Jennifer Walsh called Biophilic Solutions. Our last season of Serenbe Stories, Building a Biophilic Movement, was so popular that we decided to dedicate an entire podcast to it. Every other week Jennifer and I will sit down with leaders in the growing field of biophilia. We'll talk about local and global solutions to help nurture their living, social and economic systems that we all need to sustain future generations. More often than not, nature has the answers. You can find Biophilic Solutions on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe and follow us today so you don't miss an episode.

Monica Olsen (41s): All right, now let's get back to Serenbe Stories. Serenbe is a place where people live, work, learn, and play in celebration of life's beauty. And we're here to share the stories that connect residents and guests to each other, and to nature. This is Serenbe Stories.

Monica Olsen (1m 25s): Steve, welcome back. Today we're going to talk about community organizing and really making the changes to protect the land that was your back yard.

Steve Nygren (1m 34s): Thanks. Happy to start remembering.

Monica Olsen (1m 36s): Yeah, so, you know, one of the things that I think is always interesting to me is sort of thinking back and setting the stage to the time that this all was happening. This was about 2000 and I'd love you just to sort of set up like what was going on, what was happening just globally, nationally, and then, you know, what did you start doing to make these changes?

Steve Nygren (2m 0s): It's amazing when we think about how fast time goes, but yet how different we are today. 2000, we had just survived turning from 1999 to 2000, where there were so many predictions that systems were going to crash that all this unbelievable things. And we came right through it without a glitch that I remember. And so that's sort of where we were when we think about the environmental picture, gosh, the first LEED building hadn't been certified, there were some voices around the world about this, but there was not any real efforts from general population, really being concerned about it.

Steve Nygren (2m 50s): Like we are today, it's in the press all the time. Back then it was an occasional story of prince Charles or Al gore, or Paul Hawkin had mentioned something. And then Ray Anderson was a voice, but the, the, the voices were few and it was a different world. I think our general listeners can, it can think about the fact that we didn't have iPhones and that's, you know, that shows you something that we just take for granted as part of our life. Right? It, it was the same, same with all the environmental conversation just was not present.

Monica Olsen (3m 28s): Yeah. Well, and I think Quinn who works with me, your daughter, your youngest still drives a Prius that I think you guys bought around that time.

Steve Nygren (3m 36s): That's right. We, we had signed up to be one of the early purchasers and I believe Georgia got six of them and it was Ted Turner. It was, I think Jane Fonda, Ray Anderson, us and I didn't recognize the names of the other two people, but well and we just, the thing, I never thought much about it until a couple of years ago, one of the young technicians in the service place opened the door. I said, oh wow. And I had never realized that they were numbered and he actually could see the number. And, and we were in the nations, I mean, like 426 or something.

Steve Nygren (4m 18s): And he just like, whoa, that was a, that was amazing. Pretty cool.

Monica Olsen (4m 23s): So environmentalism or sustainability was still sort of this thing over in the corner, wasn't sort of present day and obviously increasingly important to our lives. And so when you knew you were going to build this place, that was eventually going to be called Serenbe you know, what kind of rules or what kind of things did you need to do to change? W like what, what do you, where do you start there?

Steve Nygren (4m 48s): Well, a number of things, number, number one, it just seemed natural that we would be doing an environmental, and I'm not sure that we put tags on it. It's sort of like, we, it reminds me of when I hired an organic gardener and by the end of the interview, I said, well, we do practice organic gardening. And she said, I have no idea what that is. And then I talked to a little more to explain to her, she, oh, well, that's the way my grandmother taught me. So it's the label. Sometimes we put on that. So when we thought about building a community, we didn't necessarily think about building an environmental community. We thought about building a responsibly developed communities.

Steve Nygren (5m 29s): So I think it's interesting, the play of the words and how we have to label everything today to be clear. But I being naive as a developer because I had never actually developed real estate. I had developed restaurants within real estate projects, but I did not realize how much of what we needed to do or wanted to do to be responsible was actually not permitted or illegal in some cases. The, the first realization is I visited other places who had had cutting edge things, whether, you know, it's it's years ago, Davis in, in, in California, if you look at Seaside in Florida, Prairie crossing outside Chicago, they all had cutting edge ideas that people responded to.

Steve Nygren (6m 27s): But in looking at what happened after they became known, the neighboring landowners did not share the same practices. This was especially evident to me when we visited the Rainey's of Prairie crossing and they shared the heartache that they thought they were going to be the example for that section of, of sprawling Chicago. And they actually accelerated the deterioration of the area as far as development, because they save 70% of their land. And I saw how you could do that.

Monica Olsen (7m 6s): Right.

Steve Nygren (7m 7s): But then everyone who came in next to them did not save any land. They simply snuggled as close as they could to the save land at Prairie crossing. So they could take advantage of it without actually participate.

Monica Olsen (7m 22s): Right, so they became a magnet.

Steve Nygren (7m 23s): And so it was a little bit of urban sprawl all right, next to their preserved model. Seaside, we started going to Seaside when the girls were small in the eighties. And so we saw that as this wonderful little beach village with the sand dunes on each side, and you visit Seaside today, and it is one development along a string of developments. And you have to look carefully at the landscaping to know when you've entered one and last. And so I knew that if we were going to do something as a responsible model on our land, we had to figure out a way that we didn't actually accelerate the destruction of this greater area Southwest of Atlanta.

Monica Olsen (8m 13s): And that was the way, or you kind of saw the 70/30 rule where if you can take acreage and if you can protect 70% and build on the other 30 sort of Prayer Crossing was one of those places that did it. I know you've mentioned Boulder and

Steve Nygren (8m 27s): Well, the big thing that I realized, eh, as I thought about it was that we had to bring the larger community and that this wasn't something that was something I could do on my land to change it, or I'd be an island. And so the first conversation began with two large landowners who had more properties than we did in this general area. And, you know, I, we invited to dinner.

Monica Olsen (8m 57s): Okay.

Steve Nygren (8m 57s): Marie was a great cook. And we had several cases of wine, so everyone accepted. And of course, large landowners were, were pro development. That's why you held large land holdings would, it would be adventure to develop. And this was a complete new idea that I was suggesting. And I wasn't really suggesting a specific idea only that how could we save a portion of this land without totally asphalting it over? And of course the Southwest part of Atlanta was not in the highly desired area in 2000. So people were willing to talk like this.

Steve Nygren (9m 38s): Luckily, both land owners were European heritage or connections. And so they really understood, I didn't, I didn't have to create a new language. They understood what I was talking about, density and villages and hamlets. They just didn't think it would fly in America. And the market was interesting. And so they said, well, why not? Let's try it. So I felt that, wow, I had, I had my, my speaking points together and I was ready. And I remember another thing that happened in 2000 is Excel had been released somewhere that near future. At least I was a brand new user,

Monica Olsen (10m 16s): The Excel spreadsheet?

Steve Nygren (10m 17s): The Excel spreadsheets. And so-

Monica Olsen (10m 20s): I was like, what.

Steve Nygren (10m 21s): I, yeah, the county has announced that you can download the tax records now for the first time. And so I downloaded the tax records on an Excel spreadsheet and practiced sorting landowners to see who, who had the largest land holdings. And I wanted to gather those who own the largest parcels in this area, looking at zoning maps, there was 40,000 acres in the Southern tip of Fulton county that was still agriculturally zoned without any interruptions from any of the neighboring cities. And, and they just had not been expanded.

Steve Nygren (11m 4s): And so I realized that that was my target is, is who owned land in that 40,000 acres. And if I could sit down with the ownership of 51%, then I could create a consensus of who these people were. And if they were agreeable, I could be a spokesperson as I move forward to the county government as to what we wanted to do. And so I was excited about how convincing I was, and we sent an invitation and being hospitality people, we had a great dessert spread and 32 of the 36 showed up.

Steve Nygren (11m 47s): And it was anyone who owned 180 acres or more. Now this was a collection of folks who had inherited land regenerations. It was land speculators and people like us who had found this rural paradise so close to the city.

Monica Olsen (12m 2s): Sure.

Steve Nygren (12m 2s): Yeah, and from the professional fields in Atlanta. And about 90 minutes into the meeting, I called it off because it reminded me of the worst zoning sessions I had ever sat through. And the very animated conversations where the inherited landowners, half wanted to save this area so that their grandchildren could enjoy it as they had. And the other half were expecting payday. Right on the bulldozers. You know, how else are we going to get the money? And, and so they had no problems calling each other names across the room, they'd grown up together and we were getting nowhere. And so I called that off and I realized I needed more research.

Steve Nygren (12m 44s): I needed a more convincing story. And fortunately at the time, the Urban Land Institute doing some studies, because in the eighties and nineties, we were building golf courses everywhere. We had an incredible number and the financial community loved them because they, they saw the premiums that these lots were bringing. And so they were willing to fund developers if they were putting golf courses in. And so we were really feasting on this one particular development pattern for upper end housing in America, and so the urban land Institute conducted a study to understand this.

Steve Nygren (13m 30s): And they understood that the financial community liked it, but to their surprise, they found that 92% of the people who owned the lots, the people who paid those premiums played golf twice or less a year.

Monica Olsen (13m 45s): Wow.

Steve Nygren (13m 46s): So that was the realization that these people were paying us for the open space and it had nothing to do with golf courses. And so that really gave me the information I needed because in this pro development pro preservation group, it really did not have a lot to do for the, the, the, the pro development group. It wasn't about development. It was about value of their land. And if I could say we had a better value on the land as a whole, if we save 70% while developing 30% using the model, the ratio that I saw at Prairie Crossing is I got my 30/70, I saw it could be done, that we could actually answer the value question, right.Steve Nygren (14m 40s):While preserving 70% for the preservation community,

Monica Olsen (14m 43s): Interesting and satisfy both sides.

Steve Nygren (14m 45s): So I thought this is great for the, for these large landowners. This is a good setup. This is a good way to bring the two together.

Monica Olsen (14m 53s): Okay.

Steve Nygren (14m 54s): And so I said, now, I just have to get them back in this room.

Monica Olsen (14m 58s): Right.

Steve Nygren (14m 58s): Because the meeting did not end well. And I knew I had one of the big voices who was a property rights person, a man in his eighties who sends to seized. And I called Mr. Thompson and I said, I've got this, I've got some more information. Would you, would you come back one more time? And he's, "Nobody's going to tell me what to do with my land son." And I was glad that he thought called me son I was in my fifties, but I, now I know that it's just perspective, no matter where you sit. And I said, "Well, Mr. Thompson, if, if someone builds a housing development across the road from you, when they sell it, you've just given away your property rights by staying silent.

Steve Nygren (15m 49s): And I'm inviting you to participate in a conversation to maintain your property rights so that you have a say so on, what's going on." And he thought about that for a minute. And he said, "Are you going to have cobbler?" I said, "Absolutely." Third person I talked to wanting to know if we were going to have the bourbon pecan pie. I said, "Absolutely." So Marie kept baking. I kept calling meetings and gradually, got a consensus between the pro development pro preservation groups. But that was only the first leg. These were my large landowners, right?

Steve Nygren (16m 30s): This was 36 people out of over 500 landowners. And so I realized that if we had a consensus with the large landowners, that would breed suspects from the other landowners, just kind of where we are in America today, if something, if one group thinks is good and they're not part of your group, you must think it's, it's something wrong with you.

Monica Olsen (16m 57s): It's so sad I know.

Steve Nygren (16m 57s): So with that, and I realized there were 500 people that don't anywhere from a half an acre up to the a hundred and, and 79 acres. And so we divided them into six groups. I ask six different people if they would be team leaders. And we divided them into these groups, according to the amount of acres that they own. And we started coffees in people's homes and the churches, community rooms, the team leaders always had to have fresh baked goods. And I came with a PowerPoint and we talked about the issues, not the solutions, just that the issues.

Monica Olsen (17m 36s): Right.

Steve Nygren (17m 36s): And we asked them if they, they want me to be empowered to decide what our future was versus wait for a developer to decide what they wanted to do.

Monica Olsen (17m 46s): Right.

Steve Nygren (17m 47s): And then we realized that there was interest. And we then received a grant from the Fulton County Economic Development in partnership with the Nature Conservancy. So as we moved forward, it was always with that balance of preservation and development moving forward. With that grant, we placed an RFP out for a design group to lead a public effort. ECOS was the small local group. And that we awarded that contract to and started planning public process. About this time, our county commissioner called me and said, "Steve, what are you doing?"

Steve Nygren (18m 28s): I said, "Oh, commissioner, we've got some great ideas." And he said, "uh huh?" He said the, the, the north end of the county, now people that are not aware, Atlanta is in the middle of Fulton county and Fulton county's, 80 miles long.

Monica Olsen (18m 44s): Right.

Steve Nygren (18m 44s): So people referred to it many times, it's the north end and the south of the county. And most of the development pressure has been in the north end. And so he said, you know, a few months ago, he said, all those people up north had a great idea that sounds a lot like what you're suggesting. And by the time they got to the county commission chambers for a vote on their ideas, there were 200 people with ball caps for and 200 with t-shirts against. Please don't set me up to where I have to vote against of my constituents. So I thought about that a minute. And I said, well, commissioner, if you'll give me your full support, I won't bring it before you, if we have a perceived more than 30% opposition.

Steve Nygren (19m 28s): Now, where I got that number, I don't know but it came out to get his, his support. We shook hands on that. And so to to secure, what our support was we created the Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance. It was $2 an acre to belong. And this was, would be the organization that would then fund some of the ideas that the, this was the organization that the grants came through. And it was the, the various property owners came. It was an actual organization. I was the founding chair there.

Steve Nygren (20m 9s): And with that agreement, the commissioner gave me the complete support of the planning department.

Monica Olsen (20m 14s): Okay. Oh, that's great.

Steve Nygren (20m 16s): And his personal support is as we move through this. So we then started our meetings that were meetings, and there's a wonderful story in absolutely every one of those stories. For the first meeting, we sent out a postcard to invite people to the first public discussion. And at that time Carlton Road on the edge of Palmetto, which had been a forest that we all drove through, had just been cleared. And there was one house being framed at that point in this scraped earth. And so I took a of that subdivision coming up and I took a picture of a green pasture with the cows on it, over on Ricco Road.

Steve Nygren (21m 3s): And I just had those two panoramic views on the posts on the front of the postcard with the title, "Who do you want as your neighbor?" and the, the, any public meetings down here had been held in the old gym to the, what had been an elementary school and had been decommissioned was kind of a community center. And it had always held the 20, 30 people that showed up. Well, that night on a January 9th. So many people showed up that they couldn't get in. And we opened all the windows and people were leaning into the windows and it was just jam packed.

Steve Nygren (21m 42s): So we had, had really touched a nerve with the community and empowered a community to show up and enter the discussion. And this was not suggesting there was any solution just saying that we wanted to be different than the rest of the Metro Atlanta, where the landowners had sat by, until it was too late to do anything about it. That meeting then proceeded on to other meetings to were primarily the purpose was to educate them on the threat of what could happen and the various options that might be out there that as a community, we could choose one of my absolute favorite that I so wished we'd had cell phones with cameras or videos at the time as I look back was we had we'd move to the community room at, in Palmetto, one of the churches.

Steve Nygren (22m 35s): And for this particular meeting, I'm thinking about, we had 14 round tables and ECOS had base maps for each of the tables, exact maps. And now we had been having these educational meetings. And so we told everyone that, that we were going to spend 45 minutes now deciding on what they wanted to save, whether it was historic structures, v sheds, stream buffers. We wanted to identify with the markers, everything that everyone felt was important to preserve. And they did that in the forty-five minutes without a problem.

Steve Nygren (23m 15s): And then we said, all right, now we want to decide how we can develop the area. ECOS had, did a study to see what Atlanta had been doing. The Metro area. That's 17 counties over the last two decades and determined that if, if we did no regional planning and simply allow this area to be rezoned 500 acres, a thousand acres at a time as Metro Atlanta had done over the last two decades, we would most likely disturb 80% of the land for 30,000 houses.

Steve Nygren (23m 55s): And so we to the community said, it's our responsibility now in the greater Metro Atlanta, but we have pro development people here. So where are we going to put the 30,000 houses? And then they did these little clear templates that showed four houses to an acre, 10 houses to an acre, it was various density options or density options that we had. But the goal is you had, they had numbers at the bottom of each job. You had to put this puzzle together, so that added up to 30,000.

Steve Nygren (24m 37s): Squeeze it in amongst everything you had just decided you wanted to save. So we turned an entire community into planners to where they could understand the issues and the challenges of this. Now that 45 minute exercise took two hours and no one was ready to leave, but we called them into it. And then the next meeting, they brought three maps back on the, this, they had distilled 14 into three general themes, and then everyone went around and voted and discussed. And that's how we came up with, with, with a map that the community said they wanted. For the large land owners, after we had brought some consensus that we could do something, we brought Phil Tabb in to have a charrette with the large landowners.

Steve Nygren (25m 26s): Now, again, for this two days charrette, we brought in the Urban Land Institute, the Nature Conservancy, the Georgia Conservancy, so we had the preservation and the development crowd at this meeting too. And this group came together with a plan that we thought made sense to where we could put all the development in 30% of the land and preserve the rest. When we brought the 500 landowners together in the smaller, we did not show them the map from the large landowners, nor did we share it with ECOS, who was leading the effort. So the map and the ideas of the larger land owners were never shared in the public process meeting, because we realized that there would be opposition no matter what somebody says.

Monica Olsen (26m 17s): Yeah. So that's really interesting. So the two day charette that you did with the large landowners and the preservationists sort of did it pleased with it, possibly set it on a shelf over here, and then went out to talk to all of the landowners, which included the 500 small with this planning group ECOS or strategic planning group?

Steve Nygren (26m 37s): That's correct. Yes.

Monica Olsen (26m 39s) :Do you have pictures of those maps? You have?

Steve Nygren (26m 42s): I do. It's fascinating because then there's one more process. Once we had on the small landowners to what they would accept through the public process with the county planning department, I thought, man, we're, you know, we're really forward. But while we had the planning department with us the whole way, there were many other departments. And so this now had to go to the Fulton County departments to approve. So biggest issue was public works.

Monica Olsen (27m 11s): I was about to say, I want to stop you there and say like, okay, so you're talking about Fulton County

Steve Nygren (27m 17s): As a whole. And so you've got the planning department...

Monica Olsen (27m 20s): But that's one department of about eight. Okay that's what I want to know, because I don't know anything about planning departments.

Steve Nygren (27m 27s): So just imagine your planners talk about what's going to happen and how it's going to happen. Then you have all the people that deal with every day. And so your, your, your, so your public works deal with your sewers, your roads, and they have to approve then anything that the planning group says, "Oh, this is okay with us. And we think this is good."

Monica Olsen (27m 50s): Okay. And do they all sort of work in silos?

Steve Nygren (27m 57s): They all work in silos.

Monica Olsen (27m 58s): Okay.

Steve Nygren (27m 58s): And then you have stormwater, which is federal really regulated. So there's a lot of, there's a lot of pieces that really have to fit together. But for Fulton county to move this forward to the board of commissioners, all these departments had to kind of sign off on this land use plan that was being proposed.

Monica Olsen (28m 19s): And when you go to sign off this county commissioner that spoke with you is just one of them that has to vote on it, does the whole county? And so the whole county, all seven have to vote on this plan, even though it affects this one commissioner area?

Steve Nygren (28m 35s): That's right.

Monica Olsen (28m 35s): Okay. So you've got the planning department on board and with storm water, the next one you had to go talk to, or what was the process?

Steve Nygren (28m 40s): Well storm water is more federal. And that really is down down the road issue, but it dovetails into public works. Public works really was not in favor. And what we found out that the public did not know at the time is they had actually planned sewer for this entire area at a scale of one house per acre. And the recent bonds that had been passed for the expansion of the wastewater treatment plant included servicing this area and some 30,000 new users.

Steve Nygren (29m 24s): And, and so why our clustering and what working with the legal department at the University of Georgia, we realized that if you ran or allowed this sewer, that actually they were proposing at the time we had this advice, we didn't know that it was already planned. You could not block sprawl development. Because If there's a sewer line, someone can sue to connect to it. And so part of our land use regulation required clustered a wastewater treatment centers.

Monica Olsen (30m 1s): The land use that you guys had set up that, that, that the consensus had come from the, all the land owners on the 40,000 acres down here all wanted clustered high density development. But because this public works bond and planned, not even implemented, but planned, they were going to block it?

Steve Nygren (30m 22s): That's correct because suddenly they couldn't promise the users because we, because it's clustered would have independent. We could have an independent sewer system. In fact, we required it because even if we had a land plant, if the sewer line ran down the road, you could sue to, to connect to it and then sprawl what happened. So this was the advice from the law department that we should have these clustered developments from UGA. And, and we were also then working with engineers recommended by John Todd, who was one of the living machine person. So we had all this advice coming in.

Steve Nygren (31m 5s): So that, that caused several more meetings to really bring a consensus around, to have public work, stand down. And that's literally what had to happen. So this was quite a task to get all though. And now those, those maps are, are, are, are great maps because you can look at the one map done by the large landowners in isolation led by Phil Tabb, who did his doctorate on the English village system. And it shows the clustered with 70% preservation and where the development is scheduled to occur is mostly on those large land owners land.

Steve Nygren (31m 50s): Natural, of course, then when you look at the smaller landowners, the map is very similar.

Monica Olsen (31m 55s): Oh, that's really interesting.

Steve Nygren (31m 57s): Because they said, well, if there is going to be development, not in my backyard.

Monica Olsen (32m 1s): So they pushed it onto the large land owners?

Steve Nygren (32m 6s): And so they pushed it away from them, which ended up on the large landowner plan. And then the public works and transportation And everybody that looked at it wanted to make sure that where large development was going to happen there was access to South Fulton Parkway, which was proposed. It wasn't even in, at this point, but you had to look at some of those infrastructure issues. And so they adjusted it very minorly. And then they released the land use plan for all of South Fulton. Okay. So this is from 285 all the way down, including our 40,000 acres.

Steve Nygren (32m 50s): Now there you have three maps, three different filters that basically are saying the same thing. So that I think is a good demonstration. That if you share all of the issues with a group of people and all the options, many times they'll come around to the same decisions independently. But when we have fear that one group is going to do something that infringes on my rights, we automatically react without thinking about the options that there are. So I think that's just a great in, in, in, in community conversation as to what you do now, there's a fourth map that I'm, I'm going to have to have printed on a board because it shows, this map was 2002.

Steve Nygren (33m 43s): I have a map from 2007 when suddenly the development fever had hit South Fulton.

Monica Olsen (33m 50s): Right

Steve Nygren (33m 51s): So you realize we had laid down the land use plan just ahead of the threat. And you can see the very line of our 40,000 acres.

Monica Olsen (33m 60s): You can see it driving down south Fulton Parkway.

Steve Nygren (34m 3s): You can see it now, but from the air, from what it was approved it is just as obvious as anything. And so you can, you can really see that these land plans make a huge difference. We show it's not a sacrifice of less housing for preservation in fact, we can actually accommodate 20% more housing and infrastructure is 40% to install and to maintain versus the old sprawl division.

Monica Olsen (34m 37s): So 40% less?

Steve Nygren (34m 38s): It's 60%, less, 40% of the, of, of, of the costs.

Monica Olsen (34m 44s): So 60% less cost. And you just said, how many more houses? 20% more houses?

Steve Nygren (34m 49s): And it's mixed use. We're looking at say, you're not driving out to the services. It's not a bedroom community. It's actually, okay. Now this was all 2002. Now you project forward here to 2020, we're talking about autonomous shared vehicles. We are looking at where the market or the millennials and the baby boomers are all going to walkable communities, maybe for different reasons, but we're all wanting walkable communities, which means you have to have clustered development for those walkable communities.

Steve Nygren (35m 30s): And so what we set out with our land plan is clearly the pattern of development for the future to address market and transportation systems that are emerging.

Monica Olsen (35m 42s): So all of that took two years to do?

Steve Nygren (35m 45s): That's right. And that's just land use.

Monica Olsen (35m 45s): That's just land use! And I'm like, oh, I might need another episode. So that's just land use now. So you got it passed through the commissioner. What was the percentage? I mean, you promised him less than 30% opposition what was the final number?

Steve Nygren (35m 59s): By the time we took it to the commission, we had 80% of the landowners paying dues into the organization and the 20% who didn't join us also, didn't the oppose us. I call them the front porch critics because they never came out to educate themselves. Never came out to oppose us, but man, if you find them on their front porch, they'll tell you everything that's wrong with it.

Monica Olsen (36m 24s): So the commissioner was happy cause they didn't have him show up with the baseball cap?

Steve Nygren (36m 27s): There was not one word of opposition. And so it, it passed unanimously with one reading and there was several tutorials on it. It was a great example of public engagement.

Monica Olsen (36m 43s): That's great. So now once that happened, though, I do recall that something had to go to the Georgia assembly. Is that the same?

Steve Nygren (36m 50s): Well, we had a great pattern, but now it was the task of how, how were we going to do it?

Monica Olsen (36m 56s): Okay.

Steve Nygren (36m 56s): And we realized the, one of the tools that we were missing was transfer development rights. Because if you, if we were going to level the playing field on value and moving density from one area to another, the best way to do that was through transfer development rights,

Monica Olsen (37m 18s): Stop you right there and have you explain transfer development rights.

Steve Nygren (37m 25s): So it is, it is the transfer of the right to develop one piece of property to another.

Monica Olsen (37m 34s): Okay.

Steve Nygren (37m 34s): Growing up in Colorado, I was very accustomed to mineral rights, water rights, air rights. And so the concept of development rights was just another right that you would have that had value. In Georgia in the south and property rights states it's as one man said, "What do you mean? I either own the land or I don't, what are you talking about?" And so this is a whole new concept that we can sever some value and you still own your dirt, but that's, that's what it is. You, you, you, you will no longer have the right to develop that land.

Steve Nygren (38m 18s): And it's part of the title that any development is restricted from that land.

Monica Olsen (38m 23s): So if I have a hundred acres, I get to keep my hundred acres, but I have sold someone.

Steve Nygren (38m 31s): So you choose. So if you have a house on that hundred acres, you only have 99 development rights to sell it. It's assumed base of one unit to an acre.

Monica Olsen (38m 42s): Okay.

Steve Nygren (38m 42s): Now let's say you have three kids and you hope they'll come and build a home place. So you could do a master plan that shows where those three additional housing sites might be.

Monica Olsen (38m 56s): Okay.

Steve Nygren (38m 56s): So then you have 96 development rights to sell and you can sell those. The two best examples in the country then, and I believe now was Montgomery county, Maryland and Boulder county, Colorado. Now they each do it differently. And in both cases, the local government sets the value. We decided that we would allow Free market. The market to establish the value. And that's what we've done. We find that it's, generally 50% of what the going rate on the land is.

Steve Nygren (39m 40s): So if you own that a hundred acres, you can sell the 96 development rights for 50% of what the land value is. But you keep your land, you continue paying taxes on your land, but the taxes have been reduced because now they have no future value for development.

Monica Olsen (40m 5s): That's a benefit.

Steve Nygren (40m 6s): That is something that really forces a lot of farmers or land lovers off their property when they're in the path of development. Because even if they hold onto it, the taxes become so high that they can no longer do them. So this, this took care of that issue. Many times you see these properties changing hands when there's a death and the next generation is divided. They may not love the land or someone lives in the city. This allows for 50% of the value to go to those, inherited that inheritance to where you can cash out.

Steve Nygren (40m 47s): So if it's divided, let's say between two siblings, one wants the money and one wants the land. This allows that to happen without them having to sell it. So it, it just has a lot of advantages.

Monica Olsen (41m 1s): Then my 96 acres that are still there still quote, unquote, my land. I have my cows on it. I can do it farm on it. I can do anything I want on it, but it's permanently preserved?

Steve Nygren (41m 15s): It's permanently preserved from housing. So it does it. Now, any farm use can happen. You can put a new barn on it. You can have an equestrian center, you can have anything that's zoned in agricultural areas. So you can have a country inn, you can have a brewery. You could do any of the agricultural

Monica Olsen (41m 42s): So there's still a financial benefit even past the selling and the lower taxes. It's not as if that land lies dormant just to grow. You know.

Steve Nygren (41m 50s): That's right now, you can't put in industry in it. You know, you can't asphalt it over for parking or any of those things. It's it is. It's one of the great tools that's really not understood on a big level. There is no way in America that the preservation groups can raise the money to stay ahead of the development community. And the, the, the brilliance of this type program is it links development with preservation.

Steve Nygren (42m 30s): So it doesn't have to kick in until there is a development threat, but to develop it, you have to buy into the transfer development right program. So they're absolutely hand in hand. And we did a, a study back then and determined that for every dollar raised, compared to a preservation program and a TDR program, we can save seven times the land for the same dollars.

Monica Olsen (43m 2s): So go ahead and repeat that.

Steve Nygren (43m 5s): We determined that if you take the same dollar invested in a preservation plan or a TDR plan, you can save seven times the land through the TDR plan.

Monica Olsen (43m 16s): Well, and I can think about growing up in California, a ton of places, especially orange county, where I grew up in Pasadena area, but we would drive down to the beach and it just, you know, development came from the sand all the way up to the highways over those sort of 20 to 30 years that we would go down and visit my grandparents and they were ranches and they could have done the same thing. And they just were the stamped out, mostly gated communities with nothing in them, except houses and maybe a clubhouse. So

Steve Nygren (43m 52s): It's a plague across America and in many other countries as well. And as we know now, looking back, the research is coming out. Not only is it an environmental plague, it is a health plague. And today we are more depressed and sicker than we've ever been. And a lot of it comes back to the way we've been building places for people to live. Yeah, no,

Monica Olsen (44m 18s): That makes a lot of sense. So Steve, this is great. We are actually out of time. So I think for our next episode, I want to hear how you got the TDRs sort of through the Georgia legislature and sort of who was a part of that. And then I think, you know, you've sort of mentioned you had the county, the control you had because of the 70/30, you had control on a county level. But tell me how then you went to get Local.

Steve Nygren (44m 47s): So yeah, we will get into all those things and there's, there's several more layers and hopefully we can get that into the next episode. So I think what you're referring to is is, is how do we become a city?

Monica Olsen (44m 58s): Yes. Well, great. I look forward to hearing about that on our next episode.

Steve Nygren (45m 12s): Good. Thank you.

Monica Olsen (45m 13s): Thank you. Thank you for listening to Serenbe Stories, new episodes are available on Mondays. You can subscribe anywhere you listen to podcasts for more details. Visit our website, serenbestories.com.