When Steve Nygren looks at commercially deserted towns and the languishing farmland around rural Georgia, he sees potential.
A decade ago, Nygren, an Atlantan restaurateur, began developing Serenbe, a planned community south of Atlanta that helped high-density residential planning get in touch with nature. On 1,000 acres in the Chattahoochee hill country, homes built in a New Urbanist fashion abut verdant farm and woodlands.
To Nygren, the empty storefronts and fallow land that dot rural America are prime opportunities for Serenbe-like developments, communities where people and plants live close together. Serenbe-style development is the direct opposite of the growth he left behind in Atlanta, he said.
Nygren sees Serenbe as a model of development nationwide, and he’ll be discussing the community, sustainable development and the power and future of local agriculture in a lecture today at 6:30 p.m. in the University of Georgia’s Miller Learning Center, Room 102.
Serenbe’s zoning model is built on the English countryside, Nygren said. Homes are clustered into villages and hamlets, every home on a lot from one-fifth to a half-acre.
“It’s about restraint,” he said. “(The transition of farm land to residential space) happens so gracefully that you don’t know there’s been a transition.”
Although idyllic, Serenbe was not an idealist experiment. Nygren set out to show that farms and lush greenspaces, not golf courses, could draw top dollar on the real estate market.
Affordable housing was not Serenbe’s goal, Nygren said. The starting home price is $265,000 — not affordable, but not crazy, he said. But “the principles that really matter have nothing to do with price point,” he said.
Serenbe’s focus isn’t a par five but a 25-acre farmland where 8 cultivated acres produce enough food to fill more than 100 weekly boxes of produce to Serenbe households, a weekly farmers market and three restaurants.
Organic agriculture in the South can scale up, Nygren said, through new projects he’s spearheading from Serenbe.
A farmers cooperative that shares equipment is the first step to bypassing the barriers young farmers face when first planting. Another would be partnering farmers with landowners willing to calve off a few acres for sale or lease.
Promoting and supporting local agriculture like this will provide an economic boon to Georgia, Nygren said.
“People have started to understand what we are doing (at Serenbe),” Nygren said. “It’s common sense.”
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