Lawrenceville

Lawrenceville was founded in 1821 and retains much of the 50-block street grid of its historic downtown. However, the town’s viability and vitality as an activity center experienced decline in recent years. Prior to its decline, as the county seat of Gwinnett County, Lawrenceville, 30 miles to the northeast of Atlanta, was the hub of a prosperous agricultural economy. This economy gave way to rampant and uncontrolled suburban growth, with Gwinnett becoming the fastest-growing county in the U.S. and the de facto sprawl capital of the Atlanta region during the last half of the twentieth century.1

Other, smaller Gwinnett towns such as Duluth and Suwanee had previously recognized the opportunity to demonstrate that urban revitalization and in-town living were attainable goals even in this sprawl-centric setting.2

In 2003, a master plan for the downtown was commissioned by the Lawrenceville Downtown Development Authority to create a consensus-based vision for the town’s future, coupled with an economically viable implementation plan defining specific improvements and incentives to stimulate private sector revitalization and development. Momentum for the Lawrenceville initiative finally came from a local visionary developer, who assembled many of the underperforming properties around the courthouse square and was able to engender a broader base of support for the plan among other owners and merchants.3

The community-driven planning effort resulted in a progressive design-based zoning code, which encourages mixed-use, high-quality development and employs traditional town building principles. Two historic neighborhood overlay districts were adopted, along with specific guidelines for the commercial core around the courthouse square. The plan identified and prioritized locations to build municipal parking structures to accommodate more intensive infill development, and recommended reinstituting pedestrian- friendly two-way traffic on arterial streets (which had been converted by the state DOT to one-way pairs some decades earlier). These improvements have since been implemented, and the first mixed-use infill project has been built. Cornerstone on the Square, consisting of 33 townhomes and condominiums and over 9,000 square feet of sidewalk retail space, was brought to market in February 2009 and suffered during the economic downturn. However, the downtown retail environment has been transformed into a vibrant shopping and dining destination and Lawrenceville is poised (especially with the likely prospect of future commuter rail) to reap the benefits of a reinvigorating economy in the years to come. Visit the Lawrenceville municipal website here. 4

• 1. Building Metropolitan Atlanta: Past, Present & Future. Jonathan Lerner, ed. Atlanta Chapter of the Congress for the New Urbanism, 2010.
• 2. Ibid.
• 3. Ibid.
• 4. Ibid.