Tom Reed considers himself a "start-up guy" not a politician, in fact he's been on the Inc. 500/5000 List 3x for different startups, but moving to Serenbe offered a unique opportunity to lead "start-up city" of Chattahoochee Hills as mayor. Ask yourself, How do you thrive financially while mindfully preserving? How many developers live in the city they've built? Imagine creating such an amazing quality of life that you're willing to stay, and your children and grandchildren live there too. That's the message Tom has taken forward in developing Chattahoochee Hills, and working with other mayors to revitalize and preserve the beauty of south-Metro Atlanta.
People + Organizations Mentioned
The Blue Eyed Daisy
The Inn at Serenbe
Capri Blue Candles
Inc 500/5000
John Graham
Congress for the New Urbanism
Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance
City of Palmetto
Bob Simpson
CH2M Hill
Bouckaert Farm
Aerotropolis Alliance
Deana Holiday Ingraham
MARTA
Tom Reed considers himself a "start-up guy" not a politician, in fact he's been on the Inc. 500/5000 List 3x for different startups, but moving to Serenbe offered a unique opportunity to lead "start-up city" of Chattahoochee Hills as mayor. Ask yourself, How do you thrive financially while mindfully preserving? How many developers live in the city they've built? Imagine creating such an amazing quality of life that you're willing to stay, and your children and grandchildren live there too. That's the message Tom has taken forward in developing Chattahoochee Hills, and working with other mayors to revitalize and preserve the beauty of south-Metro Atlanta.
People + Organizations Mentioned
The Blue Eyed Daisy
The Inn at Serenbe
Capri Blue Candles
Inc 500/5000
John Graham
Congress for the New Urbanism
Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance
City of Palmetto
Bob Simpson
CH2M Hill
Bouckaert Farm
Aerotropolis Alliance
Deana Holiday Ingraham
MARTA
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 the 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. All right, now let's get back to Serenbe Stories.
Monica Olsen (43s):
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 23s):
Tom Reed is more of a startup guy than a politician. In fact, he's been on the Inc 500/5,000 list over three times for different startups. But moving to Serenbe offered a unique opportunity to lead a startup city, Chattahoochee Hills, as their mayor. He talks about how to thrive financially while mindfully preserving a city's culture and discusses how the city provides an amazing quality of life to the forward-thinking zoning of Chattahoochee Hills. We round out the episode, sharing how he works with other south side mayors to revitalize and preserve rural land on the edge of Atlanta.
Monica Olsen (1m 54s):
But first, Serenbe Stories is brought to you by The Inn at Serenbe. The Inn is nestled in the rolling countryside of bucolic Serenbe, where guests can walk on the 15 miles of trails through preserved forest land, the wildflower meadow, and the animal village.
Monica Olsen (2m 8s):
You can relax by the pool, hot tub, or in rocking chairs on the wraparound porch, play on the croquet lawn, swings, and in-ground trampolines. Connect with nature and each other all while staying in luxurious rooms on The Inn grounds or within the community of Serenbe. Book your stay today at serenbeinn.com.
Monica Olsen (2m 24s):
All right, well, I want to welcome everybody back to Serenbe Stories today. Hi, Steve. How are you?
Steve Nygren (2m 29s):
Hello, Monica.
Monica Olsen (2m 30s):
We have a very special guest today. We have Tom Reed here. Hi Tom.
Tom Reed (2m 34s):
Hi Monica.
Steve Nygren (2m 35s):
Welcome Tom.
Monica Olsen (2m 35s):
Tom Reed is our current mayor of the city of Chattahoochee Hills, which Serenbe sits within. He's also a very long time resident. In fact, one of the early residents, which we're going to hear about, as well as a serial entrepreneur, he has been on the Inc 500/5,000 list multiple times for multiple ventures, including what you may know him or his product well is in Anthropology if you pop on in and see the candles, Capri Blue, those are all Tom's. So Tom we want to welcome you here, and want to say welcome to Serenbe Stories.
Tom Reed (3m 10s):
Thanks for having me.
Monica Olsen (3m 12s):
So the, one of the first things that we always ask all of our guests is how did you find out about Serenbe?
Tom Reed (3m 15s):
100% through my wife. That was, it's interesting actually. I was right in the middle of starting up the company that is the Capri Blue candle company. And it was very deep in that. And we had had a company up in Indiana that we had sold and, you know, I had been casting around for new things to do and started the candle business up there actually. And we found this little company in Mississippi that was going through bankruptcy and I bought the company to get some of the assets that they had. And in going down there to try to shut it down and bring the things back up to Indiana where we lived, realized that there was a better workforce down there for what we were doing than what we had.
Tom Reed (3m 57s):
And it was just a better place to be for the business that we had and ended up moving the business, all of the business down to Mississippi. And we were living in South Bend, Indiana at the time, and that's a heck of a commute. And we had family here in Atlanta and we decided to move back to Atlanta. It took a couple of years to do that, but we were back here in Atlanta and, you know, living up in Roswell, which is where I'd gone to high school. Very different Roswell than when I went to high school. And, you know, I loved it for the first couple of minutes. We'd been living in rural Indiana and, and, you know, being around all the amenities was just a really exciting thing. And then the traffic just drove us nuts and we had some issues too. Our, our kids had been, you know, free ranging in Indiana, big corn field behind the house and all of that.
Tom Reed (4m 40s):
And we, we got fined by the HOA at the little subdivision we were living in because our kids had built a tree Fort in the shrubs behind the pool. Yeah. And we just realized that it wasn't good for our kids and the traffic was driving us nuts. And we started looking for someplace else to go. And you know, if you're living on the north side of Atlanta, you look north and for us, we were ending up in Dahlonega, you know, looking at places. And we were actually at a Hedgewood development called Vickery up there and looking at some houses cause they had really cute houses. And one of the builders representatives up there said we were talking to her, Karen, you know, I guess knew her actually was somebody that Karen had known from grade school, even. Anyway, she was saying, oh, we just went on this bus tour last week to this crazy place down on the south side, we got on the bus and we drove past the airport, drove and drove and drove and, and it was amazing, it sounds like exactly what you guys are looking for.
Tom Reed (5m 36s):
Now, I'm in the middle of starting up a business, kind of humoring my wife, right, my wife was wanting to move again. I didn't have any time to think about it. But we, at one point, you know, March of that year, 2006, I think it was, maybe 2005, I don't remember, got in the minivan, you know, piled the kids in. We're going to go look at, we're going to go look at this place. And to me it was just a field trip on a Saturday you know, kids are complaining cause they knew mom wanted to move. And we just moved. We don't wanna move again. And we came down here and piled out of the minivan and it was the weekend that the Daisy opened. And so
Monica Olsen (6m 10s):
So '05.
Steve Nygren (6m 10s):
'05.
Tom Reed (6m 11s):
Yeah, okay. So we got out and walked on the trails and you know, Annabel fell in the little waterfall down here, slid down and fell in it.
Tom Reed (6m 19s):
And somebody who was at the Daisy with their kids lent her some dry pants. You know, the kids had this day, that was like a day that they used to have up in Indiana. And by the end of the day, the whole family had decided we had to be here. And you know, this is, I'll admit this on air because the statute of limitations is probably out on this. But you know, I'm in the middle of starting up a business, there was absolutely no way we could afford to move here. I hadn't had an income for a couple of years, you know, was that, that phase of my life. But that was back in the declared income days for loans. And you know, we, we kind of made it work. I knew I could cashflow it. So we, we put a reservation in on a lot. I met with the builders a couple of times and realized we weren't going to be able to get here in time for school and bought the one house that was being built that could be ready in time for school and moved in.
Tom Reed (7m 5s):
And then that was the first house we had here. And yeah, that, that was it. You know, and, and like the kids were just so thrilled to be here in a place again where they could be outside. And that was, that was the initial draw. And it was a hundred percent Karen's, you know, research and finding the place and, and frankly dragging us all down here because nobody wanted to come look and it just struck a chord with the entire family. It was amazing.
Steve Nygren (7m 31s):
Now little did you realize how that was going to change your life.
Tom Reed (7m 33s):
Oh my gosh. Transformative in so many ways.
Monica Olsen (7m 33s):
Yeah. And I think that that road was still a dirt road at the time, right? When the Daisy had opened right? Coming this way?
Tom Reed (7m 40s):
The road that we moved on to was dirt at the time,
Monica Olsen (7m 43s):
Which is the first phase of Serenbe.
Tom Reed (7m 44s):
It got paved right when we moved in.
Monica Olsen (7m 46s):
Which is super cool. And that's a great leap of faith, you know, beyond your kids having a great time.
Tom Reed (7m 52s):
No, and we lived in construction for the first few years. I mean, it was the first house done on that side, you know, but it didn't matter. It was, it was, is an amazing place. Was and is.
Monica Olsen (8m 3s):
Tell us a little bit about, I mean, I know Steve's talked about it, but those early days and sort of the time around the Daisy, I know, I think, was chef Nic around at that point? I don't remember.
Steve Nygren (8m 11s):
Yes.
Tom Reed (8m 12s):
And that was, well,
Monica Olsen (8m 13s):
It was maybe less than a hundred people here. Right?
Tom Reed (8m 16s):
Sure. Sure, right. It was Angie and, and you know, those guys were here at that point and, you know, cute little bake shop. And that was the only thing, right. The only place for anybody to go. And there, I don't know, there may be 30 or 40 people living here and everybody was everybody's best friend. And that was the most amazing thing stepping into that community. And, you know, I mean, it changes it's changed as it's gotten bigger, but in that moment, there, there are several things that I think about like, you know, the fact that Max's best friend, because we were really the only people that kids,
Monica Olsen (8m 48s):
And this is your oldest son? Max?
Tom Reed (8m 50s):
My oldest, who was like 15 at the time, maybe 14, 15, his best friend for the first couple of years, we lived here was John Graham who ran the Institute and who had been a sailor in the Navy.
Tom Reed (9m 0s):
And they love to sit in the Daisy and talk about airplanes and things like that. And I mean, how cool is that, you know, it's, it's Steve talks about this a lot, this kind of going back to the kind of communities that, that humans evolved in, right? These small communities where everybody knew everybody and you were with all the generations in the same room. And, you know, I mean, in those days there was a real feeling of that kind of community barn raising, going on all the time. You know, I think about how we used scraps from all the houses that were being built and built that first tree house out there. And you know, it wasn't just the people from Serenbe. There were some people from SurroundBe at the time, like the Moseby's and, you know, we, we were all out there building that tree house and, you know, Steve, at some point had a couple of loads of boulders delivered out there and we spent a whole weekend lining all the trails down there with the boulders.
Tom Reed (9m 49s):
And I mean, those pictures of that, you know, my kids at 10 and 12 and 15 or whatever they were at the time, you know, in the middle of that. And, and John Graham there directing traffic and it was just the coolest thing. It was really special.
Monica Olsen (10m 2s):
Yeah. I remember moving here and hearing about that or seeing the tree house and they're like, oh, that's the tree house that the parents built or the community built. And just, couldn't quite wrap my head around that. Like, what do you mean? They all went out, you know, how do they decide to do that? But it was that, that was in it, stuff like that still happens. But that was sort of an early example of sort of everybody coming together and seeing a need and just making it happen.
Steve Nygren (10m 23s):
The interesting thing is the things still happen like that. But in those days, because there were 30 or 40 people here, we took roll call if you will, sort of everyone was there. You would say, where's so-and-so, are they okay? I wonder where they are and somebody would go call him and see.
Monica Olsen (10m 39s):
Get out here.
Steve Nygren (10m 40s):
Concern more than just, you know, you're there that we've missed you. So we were enough people that, that, that isn't happening and these things are happening in small pockets.
Tom Reed (10m 48s):
Well it's, it's where a lot of the kind of community traditions started, you know, when, when somebody is sick or somebody dies or whatever the entire community comes out and, you know, pretty soon people are begging, like, I don't have more room in my refrigerator. Thank you. You know? And, and those sorts of things, which again, you know, if you live in a small rural community, those things don't seem unusual at all, right. Because that's how everybody used to live. But, you know, where most of us are coming from, from in town or from the suburbs that's just really unusual.
Monica Olsen (11m 17s):
Right.
Tom Reed (11m 17s):
We, you know, one of the things actually, I think about one of the things that kind of was the last straw for us, right before we decided to move, you know, in the, in the suburbs, you drive home to the cul-de-sac, the garage door goes up, you drive in garage door closes, and you don't see anybody.
Tom Reed (11m 34s):
Maybe the kids are playing, maybe say hi to the neighbor, but like, you don't talk to people. And we found out once that the, the neighbors across the street, they had a 16 or 17 year old daughter who had died. And we found out three weeks after it happened. And I mean like how, you know, what kind of world is that? I mean here if somebody stubs their toe, the community comes running. And I mean, think about actual examples of that. You know, once when Mary Preiditsch she cut her finger chopping and let out the scream and Karen comes running down from our house for, you know, I mean, like everybody came running and, you know, the fireman that lives in town came and bandaged her up. And, and one of the doctors put a stitch in and like, it's just amazing.
Tom Reed (12m 16s):
And again, it's not unusual if you go back 50 years or a hundred years, it's how a lot of us were raised, but it's really unusual now. And I think it's really powerfully important for our children. I feel like it's really been impactful for my kids, so.
Monica Olsen (12m 31s):
To see that, definitely.
Tom Reed (12m 32s):
And to be in it, to be a part of it, they feel ownership of this stuff too.
Monica Olsen (12m 36s):
No, I totally agree.
Steve Nygren (12m 37s):
And those kids who had formative years here, where are they now?
Tom Reed (12m 39s):
Yeah. Max is living up in, in Smyrna and he's about to get married this fall. My daughter Emeline, the middle one, is living in Brooklyn, working for a startup in Manhattan. She's about to get married this fall as well. Annabel is about to finish up at school at UGA. Everybody's doing well. And they're remarkably wonderful and well adjusted adults that I love to hang out with. So, you know, I mean that part too. I think kids spending all of their time with other kids is overrated. I think adult socialization from a young age is super important. And you know, our kids were always precocious, little adults running around with a bunch of little adults here.
Tom Reed (13m 19s):
And, you know, you think about the stories, you know, when chef Nic was down, working at the Daisy, Emmeline didn't have enough to do, you know, she would go down there and just help out. She was 13 years old. And, and they loved each other. And she, she loved working in the kitchen. She loves to cook. And, you know, at one point she said, you know, it's not fair that I'm working here and I'm not getting paid. And Nic was like, I can't pay you. You're thirteen years old. So she wrote a letter to the governor of Georgia who wrote back and gave her permission to get paid. And she was getting paid at the Blue Eyed Daisy at 13, moved when Nick went up to the farmhouse, moved up there and was working there.
Monica Olsen (13m 54s):
Oh, that's fantastic.
Tom Reed (13m 55s):
And like, that kind of thing just doesn't happen in other places, right? And, and, you know, you think about where your kids develop their entrepreneurial bent or their leadership skills or whatever, it's from doing things like that.
Tom Reed (14m 5s):
It's being exposed to things like that. And so, you know, it's, it's been an amazing list of those sorts of things here.
Monica Olsen (14m 11s):
Yeah, no, it's good because you do see a lot of the kids working in the different stores or Camp Serenbe is a great example. You know, that's sort of like a coveted spot to be a junior counselor, you know? And so I think it's good for the kids to see that. And then a lot of them can walk themselves or bike themselves there to their quote, you know, jobs or volunteer work over the summer and weekends. So, I love it.
Tom Reed (14m 32s):
And the fact that they get the free range here is like super important. I mean, I, I talk about this a lot when I'm out, trying to describe this place to other people, you know, those times where you go down to the general store to pick up some milk or whatever, and there's 30 kids running around on that quad out in front of there, and there's one or two dads reading their paper in the pavilion, kind of half paying attention. And nobody, you know, it's fine. Like everybody knows it's fine. And everybody's looking out for each other and like, you know, Hey, would your mom want you to doing that? You know, you hear that kind of stuff said, and you know, the kids kind of shrink back to what they should be doing. And it's, it's, again, it's the way things should be. And it just happens here naturally. And I'd argue, I mean, part of it is intentionality around, you know, the things that we say, places like the Institute, where we sit together and talk about what we want this place to be when it grows up, just the conversations that we have about it.
Tom Reed (15m 22s):
And part of it is the physical form. You know, you design a community where people have to be together, they have to bump into each other, you get more of that engagement just by, by the fact of the design. And the inspired thing here, that is not the case in most new urbanist communities, and I've spent a lot of time researching this and going to them and going to CNU conferences and all that, is the connectivity to nature here. Right? I mean, traditional neighborhood design is fantastic and it creates social connection and all of that, but here you also have the ability to go out and be in nature, and everybody has that opportunity and everybody here takes it. And that's another just amazing aspect that makes this, that much better.
Steve Nygren (16m 5s):
After moving here, you've really become a student of, of urban planning, I would say. And it, was there any interest in that before did that all spark from being here?
Tom Reed (16m 14s):
I had, you know, the fantasy in high school, maybe of being an architect at one point, right. So I liked that kind of design kind of thing. And, and in my, in my work career, you know, oddly, because I had been planning on going off and being a lawyer, right. And then kind of took a turn and had a summer job that turned into a career and I've worked around machinery and things like that. I kind of liked the whole mechanical, how things work thing. Right? And, and when you do startups or at least the way that I do it, you know, a lot of the thing is a deep dive that you do in the beginning into the industry, right? How does this work? How do you maximize things? I've come to find that I'm not an inventor. I'm really not. I'm a maximizer.
Tom Reed (16m 54s):
I'm like, I'm really good at taking an idea and maximizing it. And so, yeah, we came here and literally the first day, I mean, we moved in on like a Thursday and Friday, and Friday afternoon Garnie comes to me and Garnie's what, like 18 or 19 at the time and says, Hey, we're doing a petition drive. We're trying to annex into Palmetto and we need help getting signatures. You want to come?
Monica Olsen (17m 20s):
Oh, that's so great.
Tom Reed (17m 20s):
And I was like, I was like, yeah, sure. Sounds fun. You know, and was out on Petersburg road and, you know, walking around the community outside of, of Serenbe and, you know, it was an, a very quick lesson. I'm sure I was saying things that weren't right, right? But a very quick lesson in the why of the design here. I mean, we knew that something had drawn us here, right. The appeal of this place, I love maps. Right. And looking at the drawings of what Serenbe was going to be was always so amazing to me because it wasn't that when we moved here yeah. It was this muddy construction site, frankly, but the, you could see the bones of this amazing vision. Right. And yeah, I mean, so my, my practice is to dive into things that I'm interested in. And it was, you know, CNU, I think happens every spring, which is the Congress for the New Urbanism, which is where people that do kind of traditional neighborhood design all live.
Tom Reed (18m 7s):
And, and it's an amazing organization too. It is a Congress in the true sense. It's not a convention where everybody's there selling each other. It's a place where people go and argue about how to make things better. This is one of these very transparent and obnoxious kind of groups. And, and no, but I mean, you get better outcomes because nobody's satisfied with good enough, right? And, and anyway, so I started going to that and started making friends. And, you know, I've got hundreds of books now on this subject matter, right, trying to learn how and why it works and, you know, just diving into it. And, and yeah. Then, you know, at the beginning, I'm, I'm out getting petition signatures and, you know, a deep dive into the background of, of how the idea came to be and who was behind it.
Tom Reed (18m 54s):
And, you know, Steve spent a lot of time with me to kind of walking me through the history and who the players were and all of that. I just liked that kind of stuff anyway.
Monica Olsen (19m 4s):
And the petition was, just if you want to clarify that petition, wasn't for the city yet, but it was
Steve Nygren (19m 8s):
Yeah. For clarity, what had happened, our initial overlay in 2002 was in unincorporated Fulton county. And then there was an effort of city hood, and there were some things that happened there. Initially we were going for city hood and then there was some property that got annexed into Palmetto. And so we analyzed why not just be one big city and go in with Palmetto. And so there was an effort to do that. And then there was a realization that we would have, we would double the population and we would have an incredible voting force. And so some of the political leaders in Palmetto decided that wasn't a good idea.
Monica Olsen (19m 48s):
Okay.
Steve Nygren (19m 48s):
So that's, that is the, the period of time that Tom arrived. And then the step next step back was to go ahead. We had already been approved by the state legislature to form our own city. And so then the step back was to move forward with that. And, and then Tom, you became very involved in that effort then to establish our own city.
Tom Reed (20m 9s):
Yeah, it was, it was interesting, right? Because there was this maelstrom going on of all of these politics and, you know, it was all happening very quickly, a lot of players. And, and as often happens in those cases, you know, there were people taking sides and positions and whatever, and it had gotten kind of tense and, and Palmetto not accepting the annexation, even after everybody here, you know, in two weeks, got all the signatures needed. I mean, nobody thought it was even possible and we pulled it off. Right? And I met all these amazing people in the context of that. Cause there, you know, there was this group called the Chattahoochee hill country Alliance that was up of the landowners in the area, small landowners, large, large landowners, everybody that was important in the community.
Tom Reed (20m 49s):
And they had done this thing and it hadn't worked out, right, like it didn't get done. And there was pushback then they're like that failed and anytime something doesn't happen, people are trying to figure out who was at fault and all, right. And, and what came out of that was this new group that was not just the landowners, but the landowners and just everybody who lived here, called the Chattahoochee hill country organizing committee, because we love big, long acronyms here. And basically that group came together to do the research to see if the idea of city hood was economically viable. Like everybody knew that that would be a good route for controlling the zoning, but could you actually make it work as a city because you know, you look around, there's no city here.
Tom Reed (21m 38s):
And, and the end of that process, you know, I, I joined that team, was on the finance committee, was the chair of the finance committee, ended up being the president of the organization. And we did all that research and then had a big meeting where five or 600 people from the community came to the Baptist children's home. And, you know, we talked through all the stuff and show of hands and you know, everybody raised their hand, we wanted to become a city. And then we rolled forward with that process and, you know
Monica Olsen (22m 8s):
And because the legislature had already approved that, you didn't need a vote in unincorporated, you just needed sort of,
Steve Nygren (22m 15s):
We already had, already had it approved from the state legislature.
Tom Reed (22m 20s):
We did have a vote here in the city then.
Steve Nygren (22m 22s):
Yeah. We had, and we then had a Kasim Reed who at that time was our state legislator. And I really wrote the, the charter. So the charter was sitting there, but the state required then a local vote. You had to have 60% of your, I think it was,
Tom Reed (22m 45s):
I think it was 50%, actually for, for.
Steve Nygren (22m 47s):
51%. And so
Tom Reed (22m 49s):
We got 90, so it wasn't any,
Steve Nygren (22m 51s):
So this was the vote then coming forward to, to become the city. So this was the key vote, which was the last step in city hood.
Monica Olsen (22m 58s):
And for people in Atlanta, this is at the same time when Sandy Springs was going, is that correct?
Tom Reed (23m 4s):
This was right after Sandy Springs. So Sandy Springs set the model.
Monica Olsen (23m 6s):
And John Creek I think was another one.
Tom Reed (23m 9s):
Milton's, John's Creek, and us were in the same cycle.
Monica Olsen (23m 12s):
I know I remember, you know, I wasn't here at the time, but hearing this, you know, controversy on the north side of was this good or bad for things. So talk a little bit about the economic feasibility of it and you know, why it's a benefit to go from an unincorporated swath of land part of Fulton county, to being, you know, with no city hood, to being a city. What are the benefits?
Tom Reed (23m 34s):
Well, I mean, so
Monica Olsen (23m 35s):
For anyone.
Tom Reed (24m 36s):
The economic piece of this is a, that's a big conversation and we were, I will say overly optimistic at the time. We did a study with the Egger's group up at Georgia state, Robert Eggers, I think. And you know, he's a scientist up there that does analysis on city finances and whatnot. And, you know, they looked at the area, they looked at what was going on here. And they created a draft budget that showed that it would work, right. That was wildly optimistic, unfortunately, but we were using that budget. And, and that was the, you know, that was the information, the that we had, the best data that we had.
Tom Reed (24m 15s):
And we went out to the community and said, look, you know, we can control our own zoning and we can take control of our destiny here. Fulton county hadn't been really protecting the zonings. And, you know, we were afraid that annexation would eat up little pieces of it bits at a time, and you'd be left with the zoning not being followed, right. This, this amazing zoning. And like, I could talk about it for days.
Steve Nygren (24m 35s):
And the other thing early on we suspected is, is Fulton county was headed to be a municipal county. And today now that's happened. There is no more unincorporated.
Monica Olsen (24m 46s):
Can you define that for me?
Tom Reed (24m 47s):
So we would have become part of another city anyway, they got out of the municipal services.
Monica Olsen (24m 51s):
This land that we're on potentially had, we would have gotten annexed into Union City or,
Steve Nygren (24m 56s):
Because what has happened is, is all of the unincorporated land has ended up becoming a city or annex. So the county could no longer have all the independent services such as planning and all for a small area, this small of unincorporated. So eventually, we would have been forced into annexation.
Monica Olsen (25m 18s):
And so you had that awareness?
Tom Reed (25m 19s):
Right. And the fear was that when that happened, we would be a small part of a bigger entity without a lot of political pull and they wouldn't protect the zoning. And so, yeah, that's why we became our own city to control our own fate.
Monica Olsen (25m 30s):
But then the economic benefits are, are really the social services also. Right?
Tom Reed (25m 33s):
That's the biggest one. I mean, when you think about how that works, you know, the tax money that we get all goes towards services here that we decide how to administrate. So we have our own little local police department. We have our own fire department, you know, the, the people that work here know the people that live here. And when you're a small part of a huge county, I mean, you think about it, when we were unincorporated Fulton county, I hit a deer once and after waiting for two hours for a police officer to come, finally, the dispatcher told me, just go home and call them in the morning. And you know, I got, actually got in trouble the next morning for leaving the scene of an accident. And they had to replay the 911 tape to hear the dispatcher telling me this, cause this was the reality here. You could not get service here.
Tom Reed (26m 16s):
Because we were such a small sparsely populated part of the county. And now we've got amazing service levels here because
Steve Nygren (26m 23s):
And these are all full time, paid employees. This isn't a volunteer fire department by any means.
Tom Reed (26m 29s):
No, that's right.
Monica Olsen (26m 30s):
How many people are on staff right now at the city?
Tom Reed (26m 32s):
We have about 60 people all together. You know, you, you have rotating shifts on fire and all of that. You've got people that aren't full-time, but, but we have a full time service, you know, four firefighters on and they're all paramedics. It's not just that we have local service that is more responsive. It's also more qualified. We only have paramedics. We only, you know what I mean? Like we have a much higher level of service. We've done things like, you know, we're not licensed to have an ambulance, but we have a vehicle that looks just like an ambulance and is kitted out just like an ambulance that goes to every accident, just like an ambulance would in the case where somebody would die without being transported right away, we can transport.
Tom Reed (27m 16s):
And you know, that is a level of service that is just higher than could have ever happened before. The other thing too is Chattahoochee Hills, and, and again, you know, we could go on for a long time about this conversation, but Chattahoochee Hills lays out a, a more optimistic vision of what development on the south side of Atlanta could look like. And I, and Atlanta has a long, long history of racial division, right? It was the city that was too busy to hate. So there weren't riots and things like that here, but we definitely had white flight and all of those sorts of things. And there has been a history of disinvestment south of 20, because it's the other side of town. You know, you come into Chattahoochee Hills and you would never consider it being anything other than beautiful horse country, farm country, and all of that, but there's still this kind of mentality.
Tom Reed (28m 7s):
And that mentality has hurt the cities between us and Atlanta, the Union Cities and East Points and all of that. And the fact that we have a development in Chattahoochee Hills, in Fulton county, in south Fulton county, that's as high quality as Serenbe is, right? And the vision that we have for Chattahoochee Hills and the zoning that we have that, you know, basically is going to preserve most of the land forever as forest and field and farm. And it's going to have these amazing walkable high value communities scattered around to fund that preservation, is something that I think a lot of people down here would have never thought was possible and we're proving that it is. And so it gives us a lot of, a lot of weight as we talk about how to help the other cities around us do better and be better because we can hold out for better down here.
Tom Reed (28m 59s):
And we've got this economic driver of the airport 20 minutes away. And, you know, there's all this undeveloped land that is not spoiled. There's nothing down here that you have to apologize for, right? Nothing down here that needs to be redeveloped and all of this opportunity. And, and we're helping set the standard for that in a way that serves everybody around us. So it's, it's become this really good thing right. Now, sorry go ahead.
Monica Olsen (29m 24s):
Oh, I was going to just step you back and sort of talk about, you know, so once you guys, you had, you know, or, you know, everybody, the five, 600 people voted yes. Became a city.
Tom Reed (29m 36s):
Well then we went out and did a campaign in the community. Right? And then the 2,500 that are voters here voted, 90% of them voted for the city. We had the highest turnout and the highest percentage vote of any of the new cities.
Monica Olsen (29m 48s):
That's incredible.
Tom Reed (29m 49s):
Right? It was an amazing campaign. Yeah, and then you have a couple of months to get ready to be a city. And, and, you know, it's, it's daunting. One of the things people don't realize and, and like, we hadn't, I'm not sure that we really realized this either. You don't get your tax money till October. You become a city in January, right? Yes. So there's this thing called a tax anticipation note.
Tom Reed (30m 13s):
And like, you can get a loan
Monica Olsen (30m 14s):
So you're like, we'll sit here for nine months doing nothing.
Tom Reed (30m 20s):
It's hard, so like we were in a few months really scrambling to get city services set up. We made a deal for example, with the Fulton county Sheriff's department to provide police coverage until we could stand up our own police department. We did a lot of things like that. We were lucky to have a Fulton county firehouse already in the city. And as a part of city hood, there's an arrangement by which that transfers for what is a nominal sum of money. You know, it was the oldest truck they had, it was the whatever, but we had a starting point. Right. And we had amazing volunteers that stepped up until we could afford to pay people. A lot of people did things for free. Our first city manager, Bob Simpson worked for the first couple of years for free, you know, just amazing people stepping up to do this stuff.
Tom Reed (31m 3s):
And, and that team kind of came together to put all this together. And as the president of the organizing committee, I was running that effort. Right? And so, you know, we're working with companies like CH2M Hill to provide services and, and, you know, got it all ready to go. And then, you know, you get to this point where it was like, so who's going to be the mayor? Who's going to be
Monica Olsen (31m 22s):
Right. Or city council? Is that, is that a requirement to have that?
Tom Reed (31m 24s):
Yeah, you have to have those. And we had the first elections that November. And you know, I, I got drafted to run, you know, you need to be the mayor.
Monica Olsen (31m 32s):
Right, because of all the work you've done.
Tom Reed (31m 34s):
And then other people in the community saying, Hey, you just moved here. He can't be the mayor.
Steve Nygren (31m 38s):
And how many people ran for mayor? This was the amazing thing,
Tom Reed (31m 41s):
We had three people that ran for mayor.
Steve Nygren (31m 42s):
Oh was it just three, I thought it was 10-12.
Tom Reed (31m 42s):
Three for mayor. But we had, we had like 30 people run for office, right, for these six positions, we have like some districts where there are five or six people running for council. So there was a lot of energy. A lot of people wanted to be involved and help.
Monica Olsen (31m 55s):
That's really exciting.
Tom Reed (31m 57s):
And, and, you know, it's interesting how this stuff works. So, I mean, again, people that have known me my whole life find it so hugely ironic that I'm a politician. Cause I'm super cynical about that kind of thing. And, and like, you know, that's a whole other podcast, but you know, we had spent so much time and energy on this thing and I do startups for a living and it was a startup city. And like bootstrapping is something I'm good at. So it just felt like a good fit.
Monica Olsen (32m 22s):
Right. So you're probably passionate, excited.
Tom Reed (32m 26s):
All of that. But also, you know, there are people that had lived in this community for 40 or 50 years that just felt like, look, the new people are taking over and we don't want that. And I totally get that.
Monica Olsen (32m 34s):
Exactly. Yeah.
Tom Reed (32m 36s):
So two of those ran against me and we had the first vote and I came within like 20 votes of winning outright, right. I had the most, but not over 50%, right? And then the two guys that had been running against me kind of threw in together and then the one supported the other. And in the runoff, he beat me. And fine, you know, cause it was never an ambition of mine, right? I just wanted to make the thing happen. So I went in the day after the vote and said, Don, I want to help you anyway, let me know how I can help and ended up getting very involved in the zoning rewrites and all of that.
Tom Reed (33m 10s):
And, you know, ran the comp plan update as a citizen volunteer. And I mean, I kept engaged. Now, you know, we were talking about the finances, startup finances are tough. You have to apply for the local option sales tax. You don't get it for the first few months. You don't, you have to apply for a lot of these things. There's a time cycle to them. And so money that the city had kind of budgeted having right at the beginning, didn't come in for months. Some of it, we also got a lot of freebies. We had the Sheriff's department, you know, giving us free service and all of that. But that was something too that the politics, the local politics, you know, when the local county commissioners realized that we were getting free Sheriff's service, I mean, the Sheriff's office looked at it like this is a public service.
Tom Reed (33m 55s):
They're paying their taxes, we're going to protect them. But then the county commission said, Nope, that's going to stop. And so we had to stand up police department the next day and, and they got into debt. And, and it's difficult too, because you know, you, you, when you look at what a city has, you think, okay, we need all of these positions. And so they hired people for all of those positions. Now, you know, as, as a startup guy, you, you say how much money do we have and then who can we hire? And again, CH2M Hill, awesome company had great people, but they were very corporate. And, and there was kind of a corporate mindset that was driving some of the processes at the time. Long story short, by the end of the first cycle, the end of the first term, the city was right on the edge of bankruptcy, about 30 days from running out of cash actually, when I took over.
Tom Reed (34m 48s):
And it was interesting. I had a conversation with the guy who had beaten me for mayor. We have a weak mayor system in Chattahoochee Hills, which means that the mayor doesn't vote. The mayor runs the meeting. He is the head elected official, make sure that everybody's following the rules and all of that, but I don't vote. And so this previous mayor had realized that he didn't have that much control actually. And you know, he wasn't able to change some of the spending things that were going on and all of that. And he didn't want to be the mayor anymore. He said, I think you should be the mayor. And he supported me running for mayor and he ran for council and we worked together, he just retired, but we worked together for 10 years.
Tom Reed (35m 24s):
And then I came on as mayor. And again, I do this for a living. So we quickly cut back to, you know, the actual necessary services. And, you know, we, just as a, an interesting data point, we had a police chief, a Lieutenant, two sergeants, a detective, you know, we had all these people and like patrol officers, you know? And so I took the Sergeant, made him chief, everybody else got to go. And we built up a department built around, you know, young, aggressive folks going out and doing their thing. And it took a couple of years, but we were able to turn the financial situation around to the point that now we're making profits of a few hundred thousand dollars a year that we're rolling back into road paving.
Tom Reed (36m 9s):
So all of the city functions are working. We have a great fire department, great police department, great planning, all of the things that you would expect, you could be able to go into a city and get an answer for you can get here. And we have a structural deficit that I talk about all the time. We have a hundred over 107 miles of roads in the city. Right? We have no commercial tax base other than what's in Serenbe. We have no industry. We have no, you know, there's no factory pumping out huge profits somewhere. And, and we do not have enough money coming in to keep our roads up.
Monica Olsen (36m 45s):
Interesting.
Tom Reed (36m 46s):
Right? The long-term, our roads are slowly deteriorating. And this has been a part of the narrative from the very beginning. Our, our zoning is predicated on the idea that by developing 25, 30% of the land intensely in these walkable high value communities, you create two things. You create the money that does the preservation that funds the preservation of the remaining land. And you create the tax base that provides the services and keeps that preserved land and the roads going through it and all of that in, in good shape. You know, the difficulty has been that we became a city right in the downturn, right? And a lot of the people that were planning on doing developments down here didn't and the development landscape has kind of changed a little bit since then, people aren't doing these huge projects as much anymore.
Tom Reed (37m 31s):
So it's been difficult for us. And that is our biggest issue as a city right now is trying to get more of the kind of development that will fund both the preservation, create the preservation, and fund the things like the infrastructure work that we are falling behind on.
Steve Nygren (37m 48s):
And so a good example is Serenbe has about 80 acres that have been disturbed as as tax revenue land. And those 80 acres represent what percent of the budget for 40,000 acres?
Tom Reed (38m 0s):
That's the thing. No, it's an interesting statistic I use all the time, less than 1% of our land that's been disturbed, actually about a half a percent of our land that's been disturbed, creates almost 50% of our tax base here. It creates the hotel motel, the bulk of our hotel motel money. It creates half of our property tax revenues. It it's, it's a huge, huge benefit to the city. Now, you know, the city gets a lot of other tax money in other places, local option sales tax and things like that that are done on a population basis county-wide. You know, if we were surviving our own sales taxes, it'd be even harder. You know, we get sales taxes from outside.
Monica Olsen (38m 40s):
Right.
Steve Nygren (38m 40s):
And so, as we move from a half a percent of the land to 30% of the land is going to be a very different picture.
Tom Reed (38m 50s):
Yeah. Right. Eventually this will be one of the richest cities in the state of Georgia, because two things, when you develop this way, the service costs are actually lower. You need fewer police stations, you need fewer fire stations. People are concentrated. And the places that you have to provide service are more concentrated and the road networks are concentrated. So there are fewer roads to maintain. And the other coincidental benefit is that we're going to end up, we've already got in Cochran mill park, the busiest park south of 20 in Atlanta, the best park. And that has all been done with volunteer money, volunteer fund, volunteer effort. And you know, you look at a Strava heatmap of the parks in the county, it is the busiest one.
Monica Olsen (39m 33s):
Oh, that's a cool way to think about it. Yeah.
Tom Reed (39m 36s):
Yeah. You, you don't even have to guess, right, you can just see. What we're going to end up with, hopefully, I mean, where, with, Steve and I've been working on some really, and Steve knows about a lot of this stuff. And, and some of it is stuff that you can't really talk about until it happens, but you know, there's the possibility of thousands of acres of parks, public parks.
Monica Olsen (39m 56s):
How many acres are there now?
Tom Reed (39m 57s):
Right now, we've got about 1200 acres of public parks,
Monica Olsen (40m 0s):
Which is pretty significant I think.
Tom Reed (40m 2s):
It's huge, but there'll be far more. And you know, you're going to end up with 30,000 acres of preserved land in this city, which is just amazing.
Steve Nygren (40m 11s):
This is an amazing recreation corridor for Metro Atlanta, as well as the preserved trees that our city is doing is helping the air quality of Atlanta due to the wind blowing Northeast.
Tom Reed (40m 24s):
There's another piece of this too. There, there is an equity piece of this that people don't think about often. You know, I went to high school in Roswell. I dated a girl up in Alpharetta back in the day when driving to Alpharetta from Roswell meant driving through farmland, right? And every single person who lived in a little farmhouse and went to one of those little country churches in that area has been displaced in the last 30 or 40 years, every single one. And that is the tradition of Atlanta sprawl development, right? The sprawling subdivisions come out, they eat up all the land. They push out everybody that lived there and now you've got this gross sprawling suburban Grech right?
Tom Reed (41m 5s):
Here, I like to think about planning on a hundred year horizon. If you think about what Chattahoochee Hills looks like a hundred years from now, the little family farms, the, the parcels of land that people in this community have been living on for six, seven, eight generations, right? And we know some of these eighth generation people, they're friends.
Monica Olsen (41m 22s):
We had the Peeks in the interview with them.
Tom Reed (41m 24s):
The Peeks are a good example. You know, their eight generations from now, great, great, great, great, great grandchildren can be living on that family farm. They get to participate in the upside of the development, through the transfer of development rights program. So like, this is one of the things that doesn't happen anywhere. Right? The farmer, the farmer's kid always sells the land to some developer at a low value,
Tom Reed (41m 46s):
They don't get any of the value out of the development, and then it happens. Here they get to sell those development rights to developer, they get a piece of the upside to pay for the upkeep of the property, and they get to keep the property. Right? And, and that doesn't happen anywhere.
Steve Nygren (42m 0s):
Well and I believe Jett who's on the city planning commission, they're expecting their child who will be, I believe the 10th generation.
Tom Reed (42m 7s):
It's amazing.
Monica Olsen (42m 8s):
Oh yeah, the Hattaway's, right?
Steve Nygren (42m 10s):
And so that's the interesting kind of thing that's happening here.
Monica Olsen (42m 12s):
So tell me, as you're looking forward, I know Steve has a lot of visions for Serenbe that I know you're very aware of and I am, we've talked a little bit about it, but talk about what the city plans are, besides obviously the preservation, more parks, like what would be that sort of three ideal economic development projects that would come in and really start to move the needle to support those 107 miles of road?
Tom Reed (42m 38s):
Yeah. You know, it's interesting. So we were just involved in a charrette a few weeks ago on the Bouckaert property, you know Carl Bouckaert owns over 8,000 acres in our city, which is another amazing thing that we have these landowners that own huge parcels
Monica Olsen (42m 55s):
It has beautiful eventing space.
Tom Reed (42m 56s):
And who are aligned too, with this vision. They, they, they agree with the idea of doing the preservation and, and, you know, so the idea that there may be some of these larger developments of the type that we were hoping for at the beginning, that, you know, are the mixed use communities where it's live, work, play, and, and, you know, dense and walkable and all of that and create the tax revenue and do the preservation. You know, there's hope now that some of those may actually be starting sometime soon.
Tom Reed (43m 21s):
So that's one piece of it. The other piece of it is we're doing some things as a city to kind of seed some of that. There's an area at the north side of the city called Campbellton. It was the old county seat of Campbell county that still has a couple of the old roads and a few of the old buildings of a town that actually at one point had over 2000 people living in it. And then, because the railroad went to the other side of the county, everybody moved over there and the town kind of died. And we're working with the city of south Fulton right now to do a planning exercise up there to create a village in our idiom that crosses over into the city of south Fulton because there's, and I'll come back to that.
Tom Reed (44m 3s):
But you know, that's a place where the city is going to rezone an area and create the ability for the small parcel holders up there to participate in village development. Because the idea is okay, if you can't find as many developers to do the big projects, maybe developers will come in and do small pieces of the big project that the city has zoned. And, and the other piece of this is, you know, I've, I've come to realize more and more that our outcome is very dependent on what happens around us. You know, there's this trend right now for, for distribution warehouses everywhere. And I mean, I could do a whole nother podcast on that, but the problem with them is that they're just so far away from being the best and highest use of that land.
Tom Reed (44m 43s):
Right? It's not that they're not economically beneficial. They're just much less beneficial than almost anything else that you could do.
Monica Olsen (44m 50s):
Yes, well and you're hearing my sadness at the look of them, although, you know, I'm the one who's also ordering my Amazon prime, so I can't totally complain, you know.
Tom Reed (44m 58s):
So this is the thing, right? So, you know, we have examples in the community where a city has built one of these right next to the boundary of another city, right next to a residential development and it's, it's really impacting the quality of life negatively for the residents there.
Monica Olsen (45m 12s):
For the community, yeah.
Tom Reed (45m 13s):
And it's because they're not working together, right? Like if you were working together, you would never do it that way. And it's hard to work together because frankly you're responsible to your own constituents first. Right? And, and because of kind of, you know, the, the tyranny of low expectations on the south side of Atlanta, people kind of accept what they can get rather than holding out for what they could get if they hold out.
Tom Reed (45m 38s):
And so part of what I've been trying to do with the other mayors down here is create this kind of higher order narrative. And we should be working together to attract the better businesses that are more in line with this higher value view. And so this project with the city of south Fulton is one word, the mayor of south Fulton and I have gotten together and our staffs have gotten together and said, look, maybe we can make an example of working together to do exactly that. To create a high value development that is good for both of the cities. It's right on the border between two of us. It's a place where there's a lot of traffic already so the demand is kind of already there. And let's just show an example of doing it better. Right? And this is how you get people to understand that you can do things better by showing them examples.
Tom Reed (46m 22s):
Right? And, and that's one of the things that we're doing. And then the other thing is, you know, we're looking at, at ways that we can do these things in bites, right? So like, you know, one of the things I've talked with Steve about a lot, and we're in the process of updating our zoning, you know, places like Serenbe should be able to buy development rights and be more dense. If they want to build a new phase that's more dense, they should be able to. Because that creates two things: Tax base, and it creates preservation externally. Those development rights that they're buying will permanently protect something outside. And so we need to be more flexible I think, about concentrating development where it's already happening. Right? You know, the idea of other projects around Serenbe makes sense, because this is where development is happening.
Tom Reed (47m 6s):
And like, we want to concentrate. And, you know, we, we joke about it sometimes. If somebody were to come and build the a hundred story skyscraper and buy all the development rights right in the middle, we could protect all of the rest of the city. Right? That's not realistic. But like, you know, trying to find those places where something is happening and doubling down on it, that makes a lot of sense. And, and we've got a lot of that going on. And then we've also got things like the river lands project. Where, you know, I'm a big believer in branding, and the idea of the branding of a place, right? I mean, if you don't put your own brand out there, other people will give you the one you don't want. And so this place where it's not just about, you know, high quality development, it's also proximity to nature.
Tom Reed (47m 49s):
It's also about kind of rural lifestyle. It's about, you know, Milton, it's a beautiful little town, love the mayor, good friend. And they have five acre zoning because they want to be an equestrian community. And five acre zoning means that there's a house on every five acres and you have these big houses on every five acres. And it just looks like huge suburban sprawl. Right? And the thing that they've found that happens up there, this equestrian community, you know, a bunch of people build their big million dollar houses next to the horse farm. And all of a sudden they're calling in and complaining about what horse poop smells like. Right? And the horse farmer's being shut down because it's a public nuisance, right? So, I mean, my view of this place is so different from that, right?
Tom Reed (48m 34s):
Like I want to know that seven or eight generations from now, the kids will know what cow poop smells like, because there will be cows out there somewhere. Right? And so we're working a lot on those sorts of things where, where we're protecting and, and creating parks and protecting farmland, you know, the Rodale Institute coming down
Monica Olsen (48m 52s):
Incredible partnership.
Tom Reed (48m 53s):
A whole nother podcast, right. About all of that. And how you economically engaged that protected land in a way that makes people want to keep protecting it and how you, you know, do the farm to table stuff and all of that in place. And that's all a part of our brand narrative. So we're trying to sew that all together into something that is that, you know, something for everybody, amazing, like who wouldn't want to live there place.
Tom Reed (49m 18s):
Right? And, and again, for me, you know, we're halfway there in Chattahoochee Hills, we don't have a lot of money to go out and like, put that out into the world. But like people that find us hear it and the people that we talk to hear it and they know it and they're starting to internalize it. And they're like, oh, Chattahoochee Hills. That's that place where the horse eventing thing is, like you said, Serenbe, and be, oh yeah, I've been there. That place is amazing that's in Chattahoochee Hills? Or Cochran Mill Park. Oh my gosh. Yeah. We go down there and ride our bikes or ride our horses, you know, so you're starting to develop that brand. And we've got this airport that we're 20 minutes from and the potential of an economic driver that not only makes this vision happen in Chattahoochee Hills, but also creates that rising tide that lifts the quality of life for all of the other cities between us and there.
Tom Reed (50m 3s):
And it's cool to be able to be because, you know, I get to have a seat at the table as the mayor, even of the smallest little city here, fifth, largest city in Georgia, but you know, smallest population in our side of Fulton county. Anyway, you can, you can start articulating that higher vision and people pick it up. And I just love how much of that now has become incorporated into the kind of overall vision. And I mean, you know, I'm, I'm on the board of the aerotropolis now we we've tried so many ways to get the mayors of south Fulton together to work together toward higher order economic development. And it's hard to do because you know, how do you get the business community involved and how do you get all the other players involved?
Tom Reed (50m 43s):
We've all now become board members of the aerotropolis Alliance. And the aerotropolis Alliance also includes people like Delta and Chick-fil-A is there. And so the bigger players,
Monica Olsen (50m 53s):
Parrish and Hapeville, right, that whole area is sort of part of that.
Tom Reed (50m 56s):
And they're articulating that vision on a grand scale, right? Like, yeah, nothing good can happen on the south side, you're never going to have class A office, except Porsche came in and said, we need to be close to the airport and built this amazing facility there. And they've proven the point. Right? And so this message of aiming higher is something that has really become a part of the narrative of things like the aerotropolis Alliance. And you know, when, now when people say, oh, we need to do some really, you know, these quick in and out warehouses, right by the warehouse. Everybody's like, yeah, we need to have some of those, but let's not put them everywhere. Let's be thoughtful about where they go.
Tom Reed (51m 36s):
Right? There are places that we need redevelopment. Let's maybe put those there. There are places where we can do high quality Greenfield. Why don't we aim for some class A office buildings, right? Why don't we aim for the Midtown of the south side?
Monica Olsen (51m 49s):
Oh, I love that. That's a great one.
Tom Reed (51m 50s):
And yeah, I've got a lot of those by the way. But I mean like, you know, you think about other things that are going on down here, you think about things like Fort McPherson, right? You have these opportunities, these data points already, where better things are happening on the south side.
Monica Olsen (52m 2s):
Well and we were just talking before the podcast that the AJC put out a great article recently before the holidays, all about the arts and how the arts is sort of migrating to the south side. And I think that's a huge opportunity to really take ownership of that dialogue or narrative.
Tom Reed (52m 18s):
For sure. And I mean, you think about the way this stuff plays out. I've got a good friend from CNU who moved to East Point, Georgia from Chico, California, and he does infill development, right? He'd been doing it in California for years, decided he wanted to move to the Atlanta area and, you know, asked all of his friends in Atlanta where should he live and everybody's throwing out, you know, Old Fourth Ward and all the cool places in town. And he was like, no, I wanna go someplace where I can do something. And he picked East Point. And he's doing a really cool redevelopment project in downtown East Point in this neighborhood where all these beautiful little bungalows are
Monica Olsen (52m 53s):
And our team here, just so you can see, is nodding cause some of them are moving to East Point there. I mean, you know, so it is it's this up and coming,
Tom Reed (52m 59s):
I'll introduce you to John Anderson who is this amazing guy who is doing this amazing, amazing project there, but it's an example, it's a touchpoint, right? And Deana Holiday Ingraham, who's the mayor there who's also a great friend, we talk about this stuff a lot, you know, in the context of not wanting to create displacement, right? You don't want to push the people out that are living in a place, but you also want to create better quality of life for them and everybody else. And how do you do that? Access to arts, access to nature, access to transit, all of those sorts of things and weaving that into this conversation. Right? And so we're doing that on so many levels. Another example I like to give is College Park. You know, they have the Georgia international convention center, the hotels around that are the highest performing hotels for the Marriott system in the country, right?
Monica Olsen (53m 46s):
That is really interesting.
Tom Reed (53m 46s):
Right here on the south side of Atlanta, there was a piece of land across the road from that, for years people were coming in wanting to do warehouses there and the mayor at the time, he's been replaced and that's a different subject, but he held out for quality. And they've now got a development there that they're calling airport city that's going to be a mixed use development, a huge new addition to the downtown of College Park, right there by the transit station that will have huge positive impacts on the quality of life for everybody around that area. Right? Where the warehouses do just the opposite. And so again, not saying, cause I shop from Amazon too, no we need them, but we don't need them in places where something better could happen.
Tom Reed (54m 26s):
Right. And, and that's the kind of overarching narrative that again, this beautiful vision is Chattahoochee Hills is helping to demonstrate, right? Like we can hold out for better. We're proving that you can hold out for better.
Steve Nygren (54m 40s):
And the beauty is, because this area was saved from the sprawl development that the last several decades, we've been able to see some of the ills that's happened with the north side and we're able to be more thoughtful. And for instance, the city and the entire area, you're saving the right of way for some sort of transit, well, whatever form that is in the future, how whenever it happens. And it's, it's thoughtful thinking like that, that's going to make a difference.
Tom Reed (55m 7s):
There's also a piece of this that is about changing the narrative around how we work on that kind of planning. Everybody recognizes that the north side had amazing economic growth, but because they didn't do things like save transit alignments, now to go back and retrofit that stuff is incredibly expensive. Right? And, and we're making an argument on the south side that if you do that planning ahead of time and spend the money when the land is cheap and when you don't have to bulldoze the McDonald's to put it in and all of that, you get a much higher return on investment. And if you look at our national competitors, places like Charlotte or Salt Lake City or Denver, Dallas, they're all doing that. They're all doing infrastructure development on the common,
Tom Reed (55m 47s):
To attract the kind of development they want. Right? And, and what's amazing to me, when I first started talking to Marta about this idea of transit on the south side, they said, well, we can't map things that we can't see a path to funding. I'm like, yeah, but if you map them, the development comes around them that creates the funding to make them happen. So map them.
Monica Olsen (56m 11s):
Look at the BeltLine.
Tom Reed (56m 13s):
And they've done it. So we've got now mapping down south Fulton Parkway for bus rapid transit with dedicated lanes and all of that. We've got the right of way as Steve pointed out for eventual transit. And what's interesting is in the way that the politics
Monica Olsen (56m 26s):
And when you say eventual transit you mean train?
Tom Reed (56m 28s):
Train, light rail. In, in the way that the politics are working, we may actually be able to get that map sooner rather than later, that's the pitch we're making.
Tom Reed (56m 35s):
The pitch we're making is that by spending, you know, a billion or $2 billion on infrastructure on the south side now, you can see 150 to $200 billion in development.
Monica Olsen (56m 46s):
Wow.
Tom Reed (56m 47s):
You don't have that kind of ROI anywhere else in the state. And when you think about too, it was really interesting. We had a meeting at city hall last year where Marta came down to get community input on that. And, and you, you should've seen Facebook, Tom Reed's bringing Marta to Chattahoochee Hills, you know, and I mean, that was them doing it. It wasn't me doing it, whatever
Monica Olsen (57m 4s):
It's the typical, it's the typical complaint in any city, you know, BART, you know, the, the BART system in San Francisco to knock over to Marin for many reasons, but they didn't want it. Same thing with going north towards Sandy Springs. I mean, it's really unbelievable to me because it's only a benefit for everybody.
Tom Reed (57m 18s):
But what was really interesting in this meeting, right? The meeting was attended mostly by people that live in the countryside in Chattahoochee Hills who don't use transit, wouldn't want transit, are probably afraid of transit. And yet when the Marta folks started talking about the fact that you guys have this village thing planned right here, that's going to be this really intense thing. And how do you think all those people are going to get to work? They're going to drive through all of your roads, right. But if there was a train line or a bus line or something that took them straight up to the airport, into the city where the jobs were, that would keep them off of the local roads. And like, it was amazing how people's heads came around to this idea.
Monica Olsen (57m 57s):
It's a wonderful line to put it together.
Tom Reed (57m 59s):
That like, you know, it protects what's around by getting them to where they want to go, one. Two, it creates the economic development that we need to protect your land and to pave your roads and all of that. And, and it limits the impact rather than increases it. And it was just really cool how people kind of came around to that, right?
Steve Nygren (58m 16s):
Well unfortunately we have very few examples of balanced development. It's it's well, it's, what we have seen for the last four decades, its development at a detriment to the rest of the community, but balanced development is what you're talking about. And this entire area is one of the few places that shows that.
Tom Reed (58m 34s):
That's right. That's right.
Monica Olsen (58m 35s):
Well, I feel like we've covered quite a bit, but I feel like we're going to have to have you back to do a whole nother podcast.
Tom Reed (58m 41s):
Yeah that's what I was going to say, there's three or four that I wrote down just as we were talking.
Monica Olsen (58m 45s):
Yeah, well, I think this is so exciting and I really appreciate you coming in. I love that you're our neighbor. I mean, you, you live still here in Serenbe and we hope you'll be our, our mayor for another, I dunno, a couple of years, what have we got going? What's our next cycle that we're going to get to vote for you on?
Tom Reed (59m 0s):
So we just had, we have elections every two years for half of the group. And so my current term ends two years from last, from the first, right. So two more years.
Monica Olsen (59m 14s):
And we'll cross our fingers,
Steve Nygren (59m 14s):
I think of great place as Charleston comes to mind. And how long was the mayor in Charleston? 40 years?
Tom Reed (59m 22s):
I love what doing here. I love this vision.
Monica Olsen (59m 25s):
40 years you said? Okay good.
Tom Reed (59m 27s):
And we're not, we're not even close to done, right?
Monica Olsen (59m 30s):
No and it's like, I know.
Tom Reed (59m 33s):
So I don't promise anything, but right now I feel like this will be going on for a while.
Steve Nygren (59m 35s):
You know, Monica, it's, it's amazing and I said this before that you have this vision, but the reason it's all happening is the people that somehow arrive here. And, and it's just amazing to me. So the fact that, that Tom's wife, Karen decided to come here and Tom's leadership in both forming the city and holding things together. It's another example about, it's the people that for whatever reason ended up here, and then this becomes part of their vision. And as a group, all these people are bringing this forward to make this what's going to be for generations to come.
Tom Reed (1h 0m 9s):
And there are so many amazing people, right? We've got so many volunteers working for free. You know, nobody gets paid to be on our city council. Nobody gets paid to be on our commissions, you know, and, and all of the volunteer efforts that have led to so much of this inside of Serenbe too, right? I mean the number of community barn raising things, but outside it, it's absolutely amazing.
Monica Olsen (1h 0m 28s):
So if people want to get involved in the city and help or if people want to contact you to support one of your economic development ideas, how do they get ahold of you?
Tom Reed (1h 0m 36s):
tom.chatthillsga.us is my email. Okay. And yeah, I mean, you know,
Monica Olsen (1h 0m 45s):
Come to city council meetings.
Tom Reed (1h 0m 46s):
Come to city council meetings, for sure. Be careful about putting your hand up, I am notorious for grabbing anybody who says they want to volunteer and immediately putting it to work. So, yeah. And I love that. It is the thing that makes us go around. It's the thing that makes us work is the fact that so many people get involved and we've got so many amazing people. And, and, you know, honestly too, for people who might be listening to this in Atlanta, right, take a moment to think about the potential of a place like this, and maybe take off the kind of, I mean, I just know how people look at this, right?
Tom Reed (1h 1m 22s):
Like, oh, I've been on the south side before and you know, they, they missed the airport exit. They got off at old national and, you know, got panhandled at a gas station or something and that's what they think the south side is. Come down here and take a look. I've driven people around, people have come down and said, you know, like come down and show me around Chattahoochee Hills. Like how much time you got? I'll come for lunch maybe we'll drive around for an hour. So five hours later, we're still driving around. They're like, we're still in Chattahoochee Hills? This is amazing. And what's cool is, you know, you get people down here, like Dick Anderson, who's the CEO of Fulton county, county manager, I guess. He has become an amazing ally because he sees the potential, right? People like Doug Hooker, people, there are so many people in that kind of leadership in Atlanta that really get it.
Tom Reed (1h 2m 9s):
The people that are harder to get down here are people in the development community. Right? Cause like they're busy up where they are and like, you know, finding those people and getting them down here to get a peek at the vision, like you can't have returns like this anywhere else. Right? I mean land's too expensive in other places. The opportunity here is amazing. And the quality of life. Right? And how often do you have, I'm sitting across the table from a developer who lives in the development he's developing.
Monica Olsen (1h 2m 41s):
I don't know if that happens anywhere else.
Tom Reed (1h 2m 42s):
It doesn't happen. Right? It's, it's pretty amazing. And why is that? I mean, partly it's because he's carrying out his vision, but partly it's because he also has an amazing quality of life living here.
Tom Reed (1h 2m 50s):
Right? And so like, you know, I'm, I'm daring developers who are interested in doing this kind of cool mixed use stuff to come down and take a look because they're gonna want to live here too.
Monica Olsen (1h 2m 59s):
That's great.
Steve Nygren (1h 3m 0s):
<inaudible> Developers that have all their kids return and are lucky enough to have their grandchildren are being raised here.
Tom Reed (1h 3m 6s):
Because it's such an amazing quality of life.
Steve Nygren (1h 3m 10s):
But 50 years ago that wasn't unusual for someone to show up in a place.
Monica Olsen (1h 3m 15s):
Well thank you so much. Come see us. Come call Tom, bring your development dollars and we'll definitely have you back again. Thank you so much.
Steve Nygren (1h 3m 23s):
Thank you Tom.
Tom Reed (1h 3m 24s):
It's been my pleasure.
Monica Olsen (1h 3m 34s):
Thank you for listening to Serenbe Stories. New episodes are available on Mondays. Please rate and review the podcast and make sure to email your questions for Steve Nygren to stories@serenbe.com. You may even get to hear them on the podcast. More details about episodes and guests are available on our website, serenbestories.com.