Developments financed by philanthropies are rising

The Arnold Fund builds new urbanist projects in Georgia and eyes the ‘Katrina Cottage’ model.

The Arnold Fund builds new urbanist projects in Georgia and eyes the ‘Katrina Cottage’ model.
The Arnold Fund is taking the lead in developing two sizable real estate projects in Newton County, Georgia: a 90-acre traditional neighborhood development (TND) called Clark’s Grove and a 450-acre “college town” called Mt. Pleasant. Both projects are part of the fund’s attempt to transform the growth patterns of the state’s fastest-growing county.
The population of Newton County, about 35 miles southeast of downtown Atlanta, jumped 31.5 percent between 2000 and 2004, to 82,000. If the philanthropy, based in Covington, the county seat, has its way, much development in the county will reflect new urbanist and smart growth principles such as an insistence on walkable neighborhoods. The fund began promoting urbanism by constructing a mixed-use building in downtown Covington, and then established a for-profit subsidiary to build Clark’s Grove, a half-mile from Covington’s downtown.
Duany Plater-Zyberk & Co. laid out Clark’s Grove in a charrette, and about a quarter of the project has been built. When completed, the community will contain 300 dwellings: apartments, carriage houses, cottages, single-family attached and detached units, and live-work units with offices or stores on the ground floor. For-sale houses range from 1,200 to 4,000+ square feet (plus detached or attached carriage houses) and are selling from about $180,000 to over $500,000. Cottage lots face a green; other lots border parks. Live-work properties are near a school. Clark’s Grove also includes a Montessori school and an Episcopal church. The project’s planner, Randy Vinson — a principal with Frank Turner Jr. and Charles Tuller in the development — says the second phase of the project will probably start in June.
The Arnold Fund also has sought to create a model of development by purchasing 450 acres at an Interstate 20 interchange and founding a town there, which will center on a future campus of Georgia Perimeter College. Vinson planned the community, which is called Mt. Pleasant in honor of a historic plantation. (It contains a still-occupied antebellum plantation house.) The fund gave a 100-acre portion of the land to the college, whose campus has been laid out by Hughes, Good, O‘Leary & Ryan land planners. Construction of the college has begun, and it’s hoped that construction of the town will begin next spring.


affordable housing
Three  blocks from the old square in Covington, in a neighborhood called Harristown, the fund has launched an affordable housing initiative. “We purchased eleven run-down rental  homes and are proposing demolition of nine of those,” Vinson says. New houses ranging from $100,000 to $150,000 will be replacing them, “some based on the Katrina Cottage model of very small, well-built dwellings with the ability to add on when needed and when finances allow,” he says. “We want this project to become a model for our community on how to build affordable housing,” he says of the high-quality dwellings ranging from 800 to 1,430 square feet.
These projects express the hope of former Arnold Fund  board chairman Rob Fowler that as metropolitan Atlanta spreads into Newton County, the fund will influence development patterns for the better. Other Arnold-funded initiatives include the University of Georgia Metropolitan Design Studio, which in 2005 took up residence in Clark’s Grove. Top students in their final year at the College of Environment and Design occupy a live-work building and conduct charrettes in the county, learning about the challenges presented by metropolitan growth. Last winter 14 students collaborated with professionals to produce a joint master plan for the town of Oxford and Oxford College of Emory University. That work led to the tailoring of the SmartCode to Oxford’s needs.
The Arnold Fund has invested some $7 million of its approximately $25 million in assets to get the projects built. In the short run, Arnold’s investment “has put a big strain on them, with all the landholding,” Vinson acknowledged. “Their giving capacity has dropped for now.” But “it will come back,” he said, noting that the fund’s board “is expecting a minimum 5 to 7.5 percent return on that investment over the next several years.”
Arnold’s investments parallel those of the $136 million McCune Charitable Foundation in New Mexico, which has invested $7.5 million in downtown Albuquerque with the guidance of a new urbanist plan. Owen Lopez, the foundation’s executive director, says most foundations have been reluctant to follow the examples of McCune and Arnold. “I think,” Lopez says, “foundations could be more transformative than they are.”