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(Wasn't saying anything wrong with any of those areas...I was just making a point regarding the use of directionals when talking about desirable areas of certain counties)
So why do the residents say "North" Fulton? Or "East" Cobb? Why should they be ashamed to just say Fulton county or Cobb county? Or is it pretentious? Who really cares?
When someone asks where I live I don't say "Northeast Gwinnett," I just say "Gwinnett" county or Dacula. I'm not ashamed to live in Gwinnett, in fact, we love it here.
You hit it right on the head with the bold part- it's the snob factor more than anything.
I'm for incorporation too...does anyone know if its been tried? I was thinking about that not to long ago and was thinking maybe the cities don't want to incorporate the unincorporated areas just because those places tend to be less desirable, have high crime, lot more apts and low-rent places, etc.
If you were the city of Duluth, would you want to incorporate Gwinnett Place Mall/ Pleasent Hill area? Same with Lawrenceville, Lilburn, etc
I came here from Mississippi, and you'd have incorporated areas which were more suburban type, then you have the rural incorporated areas. I imagine once upon a time GC was like that. But it certainly isn't anymore.
Of course there's a variety of conditions in the different areas of Gwinnett. Despite the recent efforts to ameliorate those conditions in certain areas through CIDs, etc., the fact that those CIDs and such have been created is itself evidence that at least in those areas, there's a perception that quality of life has declined (else why make a particular effort to improve it?). As someone who worked in western Gwinnett County (Oakbrook Parkway area) from 1991 to 1999 and who lived there (barely inside Gwinnett along the DeKalb County line) from 1996 to 2005, I had a front-row seat for the changes that occurred during the last couple of decades.
Several factors contributed to the decline. First, the county commission pursued a policy of "any growth is good" and lived in the pockets of developers and others with a stake in being allowed to build whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted. A lot of that development took the form of huge apartment complexes and cheap strip shopping centers. That led to overcrowding of schools and a serious imbalance between owner-occupied and rental housing in the older, closer-in areas of Gwinnett (along the border with DeKalb, mainly, and farther out along the main traffic corridors -- Peachtree Industrial, I-85, Lawrenceville Hwy, Hwy 78). Apartment dwellers, statistically, have lower incomes and are more transient than homeowners. Crime rates tend to be higher, and areas with a large proportion of lower-cost apartments tend to attract businesses that cater to a more downmarket customer base. Renters, on the whole, are less concerned with long-term stability and quality of the area they live in than homeowners -- they treat their neighborhoods like they treat their living quarters, as someplace to be for the moment, but they're unlikely to invest money or energy in building up the community, as they don't expect to be around to reap the benefits. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what the overall effect of that is. Homeowners do, literally, have an investment in the long-term quality of an area, but when they make up only a fraction of the population, there's only so much they can do, and eventually they reach the rational decision that their investment would be more likely to be safe and pay some kind of return, and that their quality of life would be better, elsewhere. So they move on, selling out to new homeowners who either don't care as much about their surroundings (which again exacerbates the problems), or who haven't yet figured out that there's a problem (and who will move on in time themselves).
Second, in such areas, the schools quickly become overwhelmed (Nesbit Elementary, the district we were in, was built in the late 1980s -- by the time it opened, it was already way over capacity, and had trailer classrooms surrounding it still when we moved away in 2005). The population is increasingly made up of lower-income students who move in and out almost daily, wreaking havoc with test scores and hence with the reputation and desirability of the schools. Parents who value their kids' education either pull up stakes and move someplace with "better" schools, or put them in private schools. Either way, the base of parents who are long-term stakeholders in the success of the schools is eroded, leaving only the apathetic and transient, which means that such schools never get to benefit from the investments of time and money that involved parents make in schools they believe in.
These two factors feed on each other in a vicious feedback cycle, obviously. But the 1990s and early 2000s poured more fuel on that fire in the form of historically low interest rates and highly aggressive mortgage lending practices. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when many of the older neighborhoods in western Gwinnett County were being built, interest rates were high -- well over 10%, and as much as 18% at times . Lending was much more restricted also. In order to buy one of those houses, you had to be solidly in the middle class, earning considerably more than average, and have a demonstrated history of financial responsibility -- the sheer cost of borrowing and the constraints on it meant that homeownership was out of reach for lower income families.
By the 1990s, however, the cost of money had dropped to the point that those same houses were now affordable to people making far less money than the original buyers. Indeed, lenders began aggressively marketing mortgages to people who only a few years before would have never been able to consider anything other than renting, with pitches that pointed out that owning a home could be comparable in cost to renting, particularly with the related tax benefits. So those folks began buying houses in those areas, as the original owners moved on to the bigger, nicer homes that they could now afford.
But the new ownership class didn't really leave behind the renter mentality. Because buying a house was easier and cheaper for them than for previous groups, they still tended, as a whole, to be less invested in maintaining the quality of the community -- many still expected to move on in a few years, just as they'd have done had they continued to rent. Because buying a home cost them less both financially and in terms of the effort and sacrifice they had to make to achieve it, they in turn valued it less. Neighborhoods that had once been attractive and full of evident pride became essentially new outposts of the apartments their owners had previously lived in, just with a different form of ownership.
So, over the course of time, western Gwinnett County was increasingly dominated by residents who were apartment dwellers, with the associated lack of concern for the long-term quality of the area, or by homeowners who shared much of the renter mind-set. The middle-class homeowners who'd been the first wave of residents picked up stakes and moved on to newer, nicer, bigger houses farther out, since the lower cost of borrowing and the ongoing economic boom times enabled them to do so.
That economic boom, of course, had another effect, one that's often cited as a cause of the decline in western Gwinnett -- immigration. Personally, I believe that the factors above were sufficient in themselves to ensure that things would play out more or less as they did -- the skin colors and languages might have been different, but the story would have been much the same. However, there's no question that an influx of new residents who all looked and sounded like the existing residents would have been less scary, and less fraught with problems for establishing and maintaining solid communities, than the rush of Hispanic and Asian newcomers that occurred. People who'd lived in Gwinnett for decades essentially woke up one morning and felt like they were living in Oaxaca or Seoul, and didn't like it much. So, in many cases, they moved on also. The core of the existing community emptied out, and no viable mechanism existed for creating new community from a cultural and linguistically fragmented population with no sense of long-term obligation to or investment in the neighborhoods.
The result was the western Gwinnett you see today. And as long as the mix of housing is skewed toward rental instead of owner-occupied, all the CIDs in the world aren't going to bring about any fundamental change.
Ditto to what rackensack said - too much new, cheap housing that immigrants gobbled up, accelerating after the 1996 Olympics, but also after Atlanta was announced as the city in 1990. My mom was a real estate agent specializing in Gwinnett and she said the increase in immigrants in Gwinnett was definitely noticeable after 1996.
Exactly. The problem with Metro Atlanta is that we don't have many incorporated areas...so people lump Gwinnett all together...unfortunately.
For those of you who know Massachusetts...
it's like saying what's wrong with/what happened to Middlesex County? ...If one examines Lowell, Framingham, Waltham, etc...!
But Middlesex County includes Weston (the richest city in Mass), Cambridge (Harvard, MIT), Newton (very rich), Wellesley, etc.
Nothing happened/went wrong with Gwinnett...it is a very large area. Another problem is that people have always just said "Gwinnett" instead of East Gwinnett, North Gwinnett, etc. Gwinnett has so many nice parts: Peachtree Corners, Duluth, Sugarloaf, Suwanee, Buford, North Gwinnett, Mill Creek, Hamilton Mill, Dacula, Mountain Park, Five Forks, Brookwood, etc..
The only "questionable" parts of Gwinnett stretch from the Meadowcreek district inortheast in a line through the Berkmar area and then on to the Central Gwinnett district area.
Some might even try to throw the South Gwinnett and Shiloh areas in there, but these areas actually nice (especially the Shiloh area!)...the areas just have large black populations (and you know how many, many people view that...gasp!).
So, if Metro Atlanta was largely incorporated like it should be, we wouldn't be talking about Gwinnett as a whole...we'd say
"Wow, the towns of Lilburn and Lawrenceville have changed a lot and they are having some problems. But they border some really nice towns--Webb Gin Corners, North Stone Mountain, Five Forks, Collins Hill, etc..."
Sigh.
I'm so glad you said this. I love Gwinnett. My area of Gwinnett is awesome and I have friends that live in areas of Cobb that would jump at the idea of moving to my area of Gwinnett IF they could sell their homes in Austell, Mableton, West Cobb (yep, those are in Cobb too, aren't they?).
I live in a county with the nation's TOP park system and great sports teams (Georgia Force, Gladiators, Gwinnett Braves) and beautiful downtown squares with great family activities (Lawrenceville, Suwannee, Duluth, Norcross).
I find it humorous that people lump the not-so-great areas of Gwinnett as all of Gwinnett, but lump the decent areas of East Cobb as all of Cobb. I have residents of both Cobb and North Fulton that would disagree with that. Too funny!
Of course there's a variety of conditions in the different areas of Gwinnett. Despite the recent efforts to ameliorate those conditions in certain areas through CIDs, etc., the fact that those CIDs and such have been created is itself evidence that at least in those areas, there's a perception that quality of life has declined (else why make a particular effort to improve it?). As someone who worked in western Gwinnett County (Oakbrook Parkway area) from 1991 to 1999 and who lived there (barely inside Gwinnett along the DeKalb County line) from 1996 to 2005, I had a front-row seat for the changes that occurred during the last couple of decades.
Several factors contributed to the decline. First, the county commission pursued a policy of "any growth is good" and lived in the pockets of developers and others with a stake in being allowed to build whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted. A lot of that development took the form of huge apartment complexes and cheap strip shopping centers. That led to overcrowding of schools and a serious imbalance between owner-occupied and rental housing in the older, closer-in areas of Gwinnett (along the border with DeKalb, mainly, and farther out along the main traffic corridors -- Peachtree Industrial, I-85, Lawrenceville Hwy, Hwy 78). Apartment dwellers, statistically, have lower incomes and are more transient than homeowners. Crime rates tend to be higher, and areas with a large proportion of lower-cost apartments tend to attract businesses that cater to a more downmarket customer base. Renters, on the whole, are less concerned with long-term stability and quality of the area they live in than homeowners -- they treat their neighborhoods like they treat their living quarters, as someplace to be for the moment, but they're unlikely to invest money or energy in building up the community, as they don't expect to be around to reap the benefits. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what the overall effect of that is. Homeowners do, literally, have an investment in the long-term quality of an area, but when they make up only a fraction of the population, there's only so much they can do, and eventually they reach the rational decision that their investment would be more likely to be safe and pay some kind of return, and that their quality of life would be better, elsewhere. So they move on, selling out to new homeowners who either don't care as much about their surroundings (which again exacerbates the problems), or who haven't yet figured out that there's a problem (and who will move on in time themselves).
Second, in such areas, the schools quickly become overwhelmed (Nesbit Elementary, the district we were in, was built in the late 1980s -- by the time it opened, it was already way over capacity, and had trailer classrooms surrounding it still when we moved away in 2005). The population is increasingly made up of lower-income students who move in and out almost daily, wreaking havoc with test scores and hence with the reputation and desirability of the schools. Parents who value their kids' education either pull up stakes and move someplace with "better" schools, or put them in private schools. Either way, the base of parents who are long-term stakeholders in the success of the schools is eroded, leaving only the apathetic and transient, which means that such schools never get to benefit from the investments of time and money that involved parents make in schools they believe in.
These two factors feed on each other in a vicious feedback cycle, obviously. But the 1990s and early 2000s poured more fuel on that fire in the form of historically low interest rates and highly aggressive mortgage lending practices. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when many of the older neighborhoods in western Gwinnett County were being built, interest rates were high -- well over 10%, and as much as 18% at times . Lending was much more restricted also. In order to buy one of those houses, you had to be solidly in the middle class, earning considerably more than average, and have a demonstrated history of financial responsibility -- the sheer cost of borrowing and the constraints on it meant that homeownership was out of reach for lower income families.
By the 1990s, however, the cost of money had dropped to the point that those same houses were now affordable to people making far less money than the original buyers. Indeed, lenders began aggressively marketing mortgages to people who only a few years before would have never been able to consider anything other than renting, with pitches that pointed out that owning a home could be comparable in cost to renting, particularly with the related tax benefits. So those folks began buying houses in those areas, as the original owners moved on to the bigger, nicer homes that they could now afford.
But the new ownership class didn't really leave behind the renter mentality. Because buying a house was easier and cheaper for them than for previous groups, they still tended, as a whole, to be less invested in maintaining the quality of the community -- many still expected to move on in a few years, just as they'd have done had they continued to rent. Because buying a home cost them less both financially and in terms of the effort and sacrifice they had to make to achieve it, they in turn valued it less. Neighborhoods that had once been attractive and full of evident pride became essentially new outposts of the apartments their owners had previously lived in, just with a different form of ownership.
So, over the course of time, western Gwinnett County was increasingly dominated by residents who were apartment dwellers, with the associated lack of concern for the long-term quality of the area, or by homeowners who shared much of the renter mind-set. The middle-class homeowners who'd been the first wave of residents picked up stakes and moved on to newer, nicer, bigger houses farther out, since the lower cost of borrowing and the ongoing economic boom times enabled them to do so.
That economic boom, of course, had another effect, one that's often cited as a cause of the decline in western Gwinnett -- immigration. Personally, I believe that the factors above were sufficient in themselves to ensure that things would play out more or less as they did -- the skin colors and languages might have been different, but the story would have been much the same. However, there's no question that an influx of new residents who all looked and sounded like the existing residents would have been less scary, and less fraught with problems for establishing and maintaining solid communities, than the rush of Hispanic and Asian newcomers that occurred. People who'd lived in Gwinnett for decades essentially woke up one morning and felt like they were living in Oaxaca or Seoul, and didn't like it much. So, in many cases, they moved on also. The core of the existing community emptied out, and no viable mechanism existed for creating new community from a cultural and linguistically fragmented population with no sense of long-term obligation to or investment in the neighborhoods.
The result was the western Gwinnett you see today. And as long as the mix of housing is skewed toward rental instead of owner-occupied, all the CIDs in the world aren't going to bring about any fundamental change.
Good post. And almost all of the aforementioned issues happened in unincorporated areas.
(Wasn't saying anything wrong with any of those areas...I was just making a point regarding the use of directionals when talking about desirable areas of certain counties)
So why do the residents say "North" Fulton? Or "East" Cobb? Why should they be ashamed to just say Fulton county or Cobb county? Or is it pretentious? Who really cares?
When someone asks where I live I don't say "Northeast Gwinnett," I just say "Gwinnett" county or Dacula. I'm not ashamed to live in Gwinnett, in fact, we love it here.
I agree.But thats Atlanta.I love it here but,Those are areas that were designated as such up through the eighties where "white flight" from the city had occurred.So to distinguish itself as not being "Atlanta" and something better,they started calling it "North Fulton".When many of those incorporated areas became cities just a few years ago,that further drove the point home.
Of course there's a variety of conditions in the different areas of Gwinnett. Despite the recent efforts to ameliorate those conditions in certain areas through CIDs, etc., the fact that those CIDs and such have been created is itself evidence that at least in those areas, there's a perception that quality of life has declined (else why make a particular effort to improve it?). As someone who worked in western Gwinnett County (Oakbrook Parkway area) from 1991 to 1999 and who lived there (barely inside Gwinnett along the DeKalb County line) from 1996 to 2005, I had a front-row seat for the changes that occurred during the last couple of decades.
Several factors contributed to the decline. First, the county commission pursued a policy of "any growth is good" and lived in the pockets of developers and others with a stake in being allowed to build whatever they wanted, wherever they wanted. A lot of that development took the form of huge apartment complexes and cheap strip shopping centers. That led to overcrowding of schools and a serious imbalance between owner-occupied and rental housing in the older, closer-in areas of Gwinnett (along the border with DeKalb, mainly, and farther out along the main traffic corridors -- Peachtree Industrial, I-85, Lawrenceville Hwy, Hwy 78). Apartment dwellers, statistically, have lower incomes and are more transient than homeowners. Crime rates tend to be higher, and areas with a large proportion of lower-cost apartments tend to attract businesses that cater to a more downmarket customer base. Renters, on the whole, are less concerned with long-term stability and quality of the area they live in than homeowners -- they treat their neighborhoods like they treat their living quarters, as someplace to be for the moment, but they're unlikely to invest money or energy in building up the community, as they don't expect to be around to reap the benefits. It doesn't take a genius to figure out what the overall effect of that is. Homeowners do, literally, have an investment in the long-term quality of an area, but when they make up only a fraction of the population, there's only so much they can do, and eventually they reach the rational decision that their investment would be more likely to be safe and pay some kind of return, and that their quality of life would be better, elsewhere. So they move on, selling out to new homeowners who either don't care as much about their surroundings (which again exacerbates the problems), or who haven't yet figured out that there's a problem (and who will move on in time themselves).
Second, in such areas, the schools quickly become overwhelmed (Nesbit Elementary, the district we were in, was built in the late 1980s -- by the time it opened, it was already way over capacity, and had trailer classrooms surrounding it still when we moved away in 2005). The population is increasingly made up of lower-income students who move in and out almost daily, wreaking havoc with test scores and hence with the reputation and desirability of the schools. Parents who value their kids' education either pull up stakes and move someplace with "better" schools, or put them in private schools. Either way, the base of parents who are long-term stakeholders in the success of the schools is eroded, leaving only the apathetic and transient, which means that such schools never get to benefit from the investments of time and money that involved parents make in schools they believe in.
These two factors feed on each other in a vicious feedback cycle, obviously. But the 1990s and early 2000s poured more fuel on that fire in the form of historically low interest rates and highly aggressive mortgage lending practices. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, when many of the older neighborhoods in western Gwinnett County were being built, interest rates were high -- well over 10%, and as much as 18% at times . Lending was much more restricted also. In order to buy one of those houses, you had to be solidly in the middle class, earning considerably more than average, and have a demonstrated history of financial responsibility -- the sheer cost of borrowing and the constraints on it meant that homeownership was out of reach for lower income families.
By the 1990s, however, the cost of money had dropped to the point that those same houses were now affordable to people making far less money than the original buyers. Indeed, lenders began aggressively marketing mortgages to people who only a few years before would have never been able to consider anything other than renting, with pitches that pointed out that owning a home could be comparable in cost to renting, particularly with the related tax benefits. So those folks began buying houses in those areas, as the original owners moved on to the bigger, nicer homes that they could now afford.
But the new ownership class didn't really leave behind the renter mentality. Because buying a house was easier and cheaper for them than for previous groups, they still tended, as a whole, to be less invested in maintaining the quality of the community -- many still expected to move on in a few years, just as they'd have done had they continued to rent. Because buying a home cost them less both financially and in terms of the effort and sacrifice they had to make to achieve it, they in turn valued it less. Neighborhoods that had once been attractive and full of evident pride became essentially new outposts of the apartments their owners had previously lived in, just with a different form of ownership.
So, over the course of time, western Gwinnett County was increasingly dominated by residents who were apartment dwellers, with the associated lack of concern for the long-term quality of the area, or by homeowners who shared much of the renter mind-set. The middle-class homeowners who'd been the first wave of residents picked up stakes and moved on to newer, nicer, bigger houses farther out, since the lower cost of borrowing and the ongoing economic boom times enabled them to do so.
That economic boom, of course, had another effect, one that's often cited as a cause of the decline in western Gwinnett -- immigration. Personally, I believe that the factors above were sufficient in themselves to ensure that things would play out more or less as they did -- the skin colors and languages might have been different, but the story would have been much the same. However, there's no question that an influx of new residents who all looked and sounded like the existing residents would have been less scary, and less fraught with problems for establishing and maintaining solid communities, than the rush of Hispanic and Asian newcomers that occurred. People who'd lived in Gwinnett for decades essentially woke up one morning and felt like they were living in Oaxaca or Seoul, and didn't like it much. So, in many cases, they moved on also. The core of the existing community emptied out, and no viable mechanism existed for creating new community from a cultural and linguistically fragmented population with no sense of long-term obligation to or investment in the neighborhoods.
The result was the western Gwinnett you see today. And as long as the mix of housing is skewed toward rental instead of owner-occupied, all the CIDs in the world aren't going to bring about any fundamental change.
I really liked your post.
I completely agree that the western edge of Gwinnett County is what really hurts our reputation. Those areas have huge immigrant and transient populations, mostly located in the larger apartment complexes. Those areas have really suffered in recent times. I do think that there is going to be a rebirth of sorts in some of the areas, it's just going to take time. The CIDs that have formed have really started to work on reducing the crime, helping the overall apperance of the area, as well as traffic. Those same CIDs are now starting to work on coming into the immediate residential areas and doing the same work. Hopefully this will have an impact on the area.
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