By Jonathan Copsey / STAFF

What does it take to revitalize Roswell? Apparently many, many meetings, political willpower, community activism and not a small amount of luck.

On Wednesday, the second meeting to revitalize what has been termed the “Grove Way” community – the area from Norcross St in the north, along Hwy 9 to the west and Oxbo Rd to the south - was held for a group of stakeholders in the area.

“This is what has traditionally been the black community in Roswell,” said Mayor Jere Wood. But it is also aging and becoming increasingly inconsistent with how Roswell wishes itself to look.

Thus the desire to change the area to add some new life to it. This is where the ARC comes in. The Atlanta Regional Commission is a facilitating group that helps communities in metro Atlanta find acceptable compromises between the needs of developers, citizens and municipalities. So they hold charrettes.

A charrette is a meeting with all the stakeholders in a project – this includes developers and citizens and city officials as well as designers and architects – to spend several days in intense collaboration to hash out an idea that everyone likes. Concepts such as overall design ideas, themes, pedestrian-friendliness, building size, etc. at all covered. In the end is an idea for a community that everyone can get behind.

“We want to work together so that the end result is something the city can implement,” said Kelli Brownlow, of the ARC. “If we don’t have everyone supporting this, we will have some difficult decisions to make.” 

 
The meeting on Wednesday was to organize the major stakeholders in the area with some basic ideas, as well as pros and cons of the area.

The largest stakeholders are the city, who has their municipal complex in the area as well as a large amount of parkland; they make up about half the affected area. The Housing Authority operates over 120 units of subsidized housing, for which Federal regulations prohibit certain actions (such as tearing the aging buildings down to build new ones). Two churches in the area – Zion Baptist and Pleasant Hill – own much land and are firmly entrenched in the area. The Child Development Agency (CDA), one of Roswell’s oldest non-profits, has it’s building in the area. The SoCo shops – South of Canton Street – occupy a prominent corner. All of these property owners and their tenants – as well as other, smaller property owners – will have to get along and come up with one unified plan that suits them all or nothing will get done.

“The biggest challenge we have is a resistance to change,” said Wood. “I believe we can create a vision that the entire community accepts.”

The Grove Way Village charrette is planned for two days in mid-September. Before that will be two further meetings of the stakeholders in August.