Well Goes the Neighborhood

Mercer University Senior Vice Provost Peter Brown knew a major hurdle had been overcome the day he saw three coeds jogging from the main campus across the railroad tracks into Beall’s Hill — the former site of the 1940s-era Oglethorpe Homes public housing project. Freshmen were once told during orientation to never turn right from the campus.

Today, the neighborhoods adjacent to Mercer’s Macon campus are safe, desirable, racially diverse locations filled with Mercer faculty and staff, employees at the nearby Medical Center of Central Georgia, and a variety of other young professionals, families and older residents.

Beall’s Hill, which is the largest neighborhood adjacent to campus, is considered the most significant community redevelopment in Macon in the past 50 years. In 1998, Mercer and the City of Macon agreed to partner to spark the revitalization of the Victorian-era neighborhood, which had been in serious decline for 30 years. In 2001, Mercer, the City of Macon and the Knight Program in Community Building at the University of Miami School of Architecture sponsored a pubic design process for the neighborhood, which became the basis for an ambitious revitalization plan. Two years later, Mercer, the City of Macon and the Macon Housing Authority formed the Beall’s Hill Development Corporation to implement the plan and were joined by the Land Bank Authority and the Historic Macon Foundation.

More than $50 million has been invested in the project to date by the partnership in the Beall’s Hill/Central South Neighborhood, leveraging $70.2 million in economic development. Included in the investment is Beall’s Hill; new home construction in Tindall Heights, immediately south of the Mercer campus; the rebuilt Alexander II Elementary School; Mercer physical improvements such as Mercer Village and Coleman Avenue; and other infrastructure improvements in the Central South area including sewer systems, roads, lighting and landscaping.
Specific outcomes of the redevelopment include:

• 45 severely dilapidated structures have been demolished, removing the worst of the blight in the neighborhood
• 22 new historically compatible homes have been constructed
• 8 historic homes have been rehabilitated for sale
• 12 owner-occupied, low-income homes have received extensive façade improvements
• 188 units of obsolete public housing have been demolished and replaced with 97 mixed-income units of new, historically compatible townhouses
• The historic, award-winning magnet Alexander II Elementary School has been rebuilt and expanded
• A new bridge connecting Tattnall Square Park, Alexander II and the Beall’s Hill neighborhood has been added

In 2002, Mercer and its neighborhood partners won the Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter Campus-Community Collaboration Award for the work performed in Beall’s Hill. Three years later, the Beall’s Hill Design Guidelines won the prestigious international Charter Award from the Congress for New Urbanism, one of the nation’s leading organizations in promoting sound urban design and walkable, mixed-use cities and towns.