The first of the three proposed villages involved in the Chattahoochee Hill Country concept is a proposal no longer. Fulton County Board of Commissioners May 2 approved the rezoning for the 2,000-acre Friendship Village, located along South Fulton Parkway between Cascade-Palmetto Road and Cochran Mill Road.

“Today we have crossed the biggest hurdle to bring true economic development and quality development to south Fulton County in a true work/play environment,” Commissioner Bill Edwards said after the vote Wednesday.

A project of Minvera Properties, Friendship Village will feature approximately 6,000 housing units and one million square feet of retail and civic space, said project manager Stacy Patton. Unlike traditional small and large-scale residential and commercial developments, a key feature of Friendship Village will be the areas within the community where development does not occur. Plans for the 2,000 acres call for high density development offset by 60 percent greenspace.

“We’re excited to be the first village and we’re excited about moving forward with first sustainable community,” Patton said.

Friendship Village will offer a diversity of housing, neighborhood parks, an amphitheater, walking trails, a charter school and a variety of businesses. Patton said the charter school, conceived to be part of the Fulton County Schools system, is expected to open in September 2010.

Friendship Village is situated in the Chattahoochee Hill Country (CHC) Overlay District, an area overseen by the county commission-appointed CHC Design Review Board (DRB). With the exception of several variance requests, the project was approved earlier by the Chatt Hills DRB and Fulton County’s Community Zoning Board.

“The rezoning of Friendship Village is the next step in realizing the Chattahoochee Hill Country’s innovative land use plan,” said Chattahoochee Hill Country Conservancy Director Chris McCauley. “Unlike developments in the rest of the state, this development will actively support the preservation of the environmental quality and rural character of the rest of the Hill Country. Friendship Village will bring the preservation of approximately 4,000 acres through the CHC Transfer of Development Rights (TDR) program. CHC is the only place in the state where developers can choose to engage in this type of ‘density mitigation’ that results in preservation.”

Initially included in the 40,000-acre Chattahoochee Hill Country area and within the city limits of the proposed City of Chattahoochee Hills, approximately 75 percent of the Friendship Village area is now situated in the proposed City of South Fulton. Approximately 7,000 acres of the Chatt Hills area, formerly comprising the area west of Cascade-Palmetto Road, was removed by legislators during the 2006 session of the General Assembly and included in the City of South Fulton area. That move notwithstanding, the 7,000 acres, including the Friendship Village acreage, remains in the Chatt Hills Overlay District. Unlike any other large land mass areas in the urbanized portions of Georgia, the Chatt Hills vision calls for preserving approximately 80 of the entire acreage as undeveloped land. Plans calls for establishing three high-density villages and a number of hamlets, with each maintaining a majority of the area within the developments as greenspace. The first hamlet, Serenbe, has approximately 70 percent greenspace within the development.

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