Revitalizing DeKalb: How Strategic Redevelopment is Transforming Communities
At Decide DeKalb Development Authority, a newly expanded team is revolutionizing how redevelopment happens. Led by Tiffany Wills, Vice President of Redevelopment and Strategic Initiatives, and Diana Pitcher-Williams, Manager of Redevelopment & Strategic Initiatives, this duo brings fresh perspectives and innovative approaches to addressing the county’s economic development challenges.
The Power of Diverse Experience
Wills brings a rich background spanning real estate, law, and affordable housing development. “I started a real estate consulting firm, primarily doing feasibility analysis and market studies for a variety of uses,” she explains, tracing her journey from the 2008 market crash through law school to her current position. Her experience includes managing a 200-acre portfolio of former public housing sites at the Atlanta Housing Authority, where she developed a passion for “mixed income, mixed use development” that avoids creating “pockets of poverty.”
Pitcher-Williams complements this expertise with her interdisciplinary background in education, health and city planning. “My goal across all of them is to improve quality of life each and every time,” she notes. Because she’s also a DeKalb resident, Pitcher-Williams brings unique insights to the table. “I live in a part of the county that’s a focus of our redevelopment efforts. I recognize my neighbors who have lived here for longer than me, who have maybe spent decades of their life on this street and in this region, have felt like they’ve been forgotten and left behind and not prioritized.”
Unlocking Potential Through TADs
The new team is leveraging powerful financial tools available through Decide DeKalb to transform areas of DeKalb County. Tax Allocation Districts (TADs) represent one of their most effective strategies.
“Our tax allocation districts really help us to lock in investment. We can provide funding to incentivize both our commercial developers and our residential developers to come into an area that they typically would not be able to make work financially,” explains Wills. She emphasizes that TADs don’t increase taxes for current residents: “Only your commercial properties will contribute towards the tax allocation district fund.” She adds TADs are funded through property values going up after the investment and redevelopment occurs.
The team ensures that TAD funding comes with strings attached: requirements for affordable housing, community gardens, trail connections, and even commercial affordability. “In our new TAD guidelines, we also now have a commercial, retail and office affordability requirement that requires multi-tenant spaces to reserve at least 10% of their space for tenants that will pay 60% of the market rent rates for a minimum of 5 years,” Wills explains, ensuring small businesses can access new retail spaces.
The redevelopment of North DeKalb Mall is a great case study. According to Wills, working through the TAD to get funding also gave the community more say in design and uses. “The developers that were acquiring the mall and redeveloping it into retail, office and residential” also agreed to include “making improvements to an existing community garden” and “provide funding for the trail that would then ultimately connect to the rest of the trailways that are planned for the county.”
Improving DeKalb’s Brownfields
Brownfield redevelopment represents another focus area. Through the Federal Environmental Protection Agency’s brownfield revolving loan fund program, Decide DeKalb can help remediate contaminated sites. “Our funds cover 80% of those remediation costs,” Wills explains, noting that these funds are particularly useful for properties like former dry cleaners and gas stations with soil contamination.
Pitcher-Williams highlights the sustainability aspect of brownfield development: “Of the remaining land that is undeveloped in our county, it’s important to develop and grow and change, if that’s what’s needed. But it’s also important to preserve spaces that shouldn’t be developed.” She’s particularly interested in adaptive reuse projects that transform abandoned spaces while addressing environmental and public health concerns.
Beyond Financial Metrics: Creating Community Benefits
What sets Decide DeKalb’s approach apart is its focus on community benefits beyond pure financial returns. “The public sector runs on tax revenues, and residents and businesses in our community create those revenues. So, we have a very strong focus to ensure they reap the benefits of redevelopment,” says Wills.
For Pitcher-Williams, creating equitable opportunity drives her work. “The way that I think about it and define it is that if people don’t know that things are there, if they don’t know how to access them even if they are aware of them, those tools aren’t really doing their job,” she says, emphasizing the importance of making programs accessible and understandable to all community members.
Building Balanced Communities Through Mixed-Income Housing
Both team members understand that housing is foundational to successful communities. Wills brings extensive experience in mixed-income development, emphasizing flexibility in her approach. “Our goal is to be flexible, and also to ensure that we’re not recreating the old model of affordable housing,” she explains.
Their vision includes housing that serves residents across the income spectrum: “What we envision is that our properties that we’ll be investing in will have a mix of incomes, so you would be able to provide a portion of the units for households that earn 60% of the area median income or the AMI, you’d have a portion of the units set aside for 80% AMI, and then what’s typically considered, from HUD’s standpoint, to be workforce housing would be 120% AMI.”
This balanced approach ensures that development benefits existing residents while attracting new investment.
Collaborative Solutions for Complex Challenges
Collaboration forms the cornerstone of Decide DeKalb’s strategy. Wills describes several key initiatives already underway, including “supporting the County’s creation of a comprehensive strategic housing plan” and developing “a publicly owned property database” to identify underutilized land for potential redevelopment.
Pitcher-Williams emphasizes breaking down silos: “In getting started on the Decide DeKalb Redevelopment team, we were intentional about setting meetings with partners: both those existing partners or new partnership opportunities that we said, you know, we should all be working together on this.”
This collaborative spirit extends to their engagement with community members. The team is committed to reaching people where they are and ensuring that information about opportunities is accessible to everyone, not just those who already know where to look.
Looking Ahead: A Vision for DeKalb’s Future
As they look to the future, Wills and Pitcher-Williams have ambitious goals for DeKalb County. Wills hopes to “stand up some new creative financing mechanisms, incentivizing and investing in redevelopment, and those projects coming to fruition.“
Several exciting initiatives are already in the pipeline, including a revamped Down Payment Assistance Program for homebuyers, a potential Development Technical Assistance Program to help property owners navigate the development process, and supporting DeKalb County’s creation of an Affordable Housing Trust Fund, and collaborating with the County to create a housing opportunity bond program to provide gap financing for affordable housing development.
The ultimate goal? “Seeing job growth increase and unemployment decrease and income levels start to come back up, and poverty starts to go down,” says Wills. “We need to create new housing, attract new businesses, and create new jobs.”
Learn more about our redevelopment initiatives and how you can get involved.