Embracing Transformation: The Gwinnett County 2045 Unified Plan

[00:02] - Roberta Rewers

The National Planning Awards have honored the work of planners for more than 60 years, celebrating the innovation and impact of the profession, creating stronger, safer, and more just communities. Join us as we take a closer look at the 2025 National Planning Award recipients.

On today's episode of the APA podcast, we're heading to Gwinnett County, Georgia, to explore the 2045 Unified Plan, recipient of the Daniel Burnham Award for a Comprehensive Plan. In a suburban setting, planners embrace the idea of a 15-minute city. Unlike traditional urban models focused on walkability, Gwinnett’s mode-agnostic approach prioritizes accessibility for everyone, no matter how they travel. Joining us to discuss the plan are Yang Chen, planning division director at Gwinnett County, and Allison Stewart-Harris, lead consultant with TSW. I'm Roberta Rewers, APA's senior communications manager.

Allison and Yang, thank you so much for joining us today. Would one of you provide a little bit of an overview about the Gwinnett County 2045 Unified Plan? What is it? What was its goal?

[01:09] - Yang Chen

The Gwinnett County Unified Plan, just like most unified plans or comp plans, depending on where you are in the country, they have a different name for it. It's like a 3,000-feet bird's-eye view to set the vision for the county for the next 10 to 20 years. As you know, for most comp plans, depending on where you are in the United States, they have different requirements per state. In Georgia, we have certain elements we have to include. This plan is to land use, housing, economic development, transportation, sustainable infrastructure. It's a comprehensive roadmap for the county, for elected officials, for staff and for developers, and also the residents, which is the most important for the next 10 to 20 years.

[01:52] –Allison Stewart-Harris

I would also add, when we started the plan as part of the consultant team, the county said, hey, look, our previous unified plan was too broad, it was too vague. We need to go from this child-size 10-piece puzzle to more of the 100-piece or 1,000-piece puzzle. We need to get a lot more detailed. So not only did we need to factor in all the requirements for George, but really take into account, how do we get our arms around this giant, diverse, interesting county and distill it into a high-level plan that makes sense for everybody?

[02:29] - Roberta Rewers

To your point, Allison, the scale of this project and the ground it covers is still massive. I mean, 300,000 parcels of land. How do you go about navigating that many pieces of the puzzle? It's a lot.

[02:42] -  Allison Stewart-Harris

Yeah. So I think part of it was really about making sure we had enough time to get through it. And I think Yang might talk about this, too, but really making sure that we understand from a high level where we want to get to. We knew we wanted to try to break the county down into smaller pieces, and not necessarily, oh, this is the Commissioner district, but pieces that made sense to people, that made sense to people's daily lives. So we started by looking at, Where are these communities already in existence? Where are these centers? Can we start fiddling around with those and seeing if we play with these enough, can we start to figure out what this 100-piece puzzle looks like?

[03:27] - Yang Chen

If I may add, to be specific, in the county, we have about 306,000 parcels. But however, if you think about removing the city, we have 11 cities at the time when the plan was in place. Excluding the city, we have about 214,000 parcels, which makes it easier. But again, to add some point, it's still pretty daunting.

I think there's a few things we got right. The first one is you don't start at a parcel level. You have to get a bigger picture right before you get down to each of the individual parcels. We normally do a region, then area, then key sites. Again, when that is different, since we are recording the APA podcast, I think it depends on the city, the county, how you identify the bigger picture can be different. It could be, again, community-driven. It could be also you might have existing policy and strategy for the city or the county, or you have some transit or transportation key area. I think there's different ways you can figure out the bigger picture first.

Then once you have the bigger picture, to Allison's point, she did a great job finding the sites. The sites can be determined, again, a few different ways, depending on your methodology. What we look at is vacant sites. If we have a large commercial, you know the land use is no longer in demand, we go with those sites first. Plus the size matters for the parcel given, if you have 5 acres, but you have 10 parcels, you have to go deal with the ownership, we normally just say, okay, maybe we will skip this one and do an easy one, which is one owner. Then we had to find the high intensity first. Then you had to find the edge first. You have to know where the highest intensity, where the lowest. You have to know how many layers you have to buffer from the high to low. Plus the edge might be different. For the unified plan, some edge can be single family detached, which needs additional protection regarding buffers and stuff. But sometimes the edge can be industrial, which can totally be different regarding the stepping down. I think having the order right is the biggest win.

Also, I like the unified plan in the sense where it's very flexible. If you look at some other unified plan or comp plan, some of the land use are very specific, even too specific. Sometimes when they say commercial, they even say commercial retail versus commercial service. In this plan, we actually provide a different land use to choose from. If you are urban high, you can choose from these 20 different users. So potentially, again, I think we have to acknowledge we will make mistakes. There's no way you can deal with over 200,000 parcels and make no mistakes. How to mitigate the potential consequence of inevitable mistakes is you have to build in some flexibility in your land use to make sure you can potentially handle the inconsistencies.

[06:26] - Allison Stewart-Harris

I would add one more thing, too. Ultimately, once we did have that framework in place, that was great. But at some point, we did have to get down and designate 220,000 parcels. It was a lot of work. It was a lot of weekends in GIS. It was a lot of GIS crashes. I remember during this period, it was like when you play Tetris a lot, your brain plays Tetris when you go to bed. I was seeing these GIS parcels swirling in my head. It was a bit of a moment like, oh, my gosh, what is my life coming to that on a Saturday night, I'm having these like, Tetris GIS Gwinnett dreams.

So having that framework was really essential, but ultimately, it was a huge amount of very detailed work, just because as a best practice, you want to be parcel-specific. And there's really no way to get around that other than getting in there and making those designations parcel by parcel and doing the best you can with the information you have. But like Yang said, building in that flexibility to know that we're not going to get everything right, but can we start on the right track, at least? And over time, can we allow ourselves the grace to have a few iterations to get it right eventually?

[07:42] - Roberta Rewers

Sort of a work-in-progress approach.

[07:45] - Allison Stewart-Harris

Yes.

[07:46] - Roberta Rewers

And a part of the plan talks about the concept of creating a 15-minute city in a suburban setting. And that really, when you hear it, makes it feel like, how is that even possible? How did you go about applying that 15-minute city concept to a suburban setting in such a large suburban setting?

[08:06] - Allison Stewart-Harris

I think that the 15-minute city is such a great ideal, but it's frankly just impossible to do in a lot of our communities, whether you're urban or not. I think with planning, you don't get the benefit of that empty slate. You have to work with what's there. I think in order to really look at Gwinnett and say, okay, how can we create these smaller pieces, these smaller communities in a way that's meaningful?

We had to just be realistic and say, you know what? In most of these places, you're not going to be walking down the street to get your baguette. You're going to get in your car. And that's okay. Millions of people love living in suburban areas and rural areas. And I think something that we sometimes do as planners is we push this principle of urban living on a lot of folks that say, hey, you know what? That's great, but it's not for me.

So I think in this process, it was really important to just really recognize the constraints that we had physically, and also recognize that folks live in a lot of these communities because they don't mind driving. And that is a perfectly reasonable way to get around. And let's embrace that and say, okay, what does your 15-minute community look like when you're driving? And it doesn't have to be a mile, right? Maybe that distance is a little bit bigger, and let's just be okay with that.

[09:30] - Yang Chen

I would say I like to quote one of my favorite persons, Charlie Munger. He once said something which impacted me both personally and professionally. What he said is, the secret to happiness is to lower expectations. I would say, the secret to a good comp plan is to set your expectation.

As planners, when we say... even with planners, when you say city or urban, everyone has a different perspective. I have to say, I grew up in China and I did my bachelor's degree and also I worked in Shanghai for their comp plan. For their scale and densities, I was planning for 25 million people. It's almost over 2,000 square miles. Then I was playing with different transit lines and also at the time, in my comp plan, we have over 500 transit stops, which is great for TOD. For me, with my experience, the vision for me for urban, for city, maybe it's 100-story — a 100-story might be exaggerating, 40-story buildings. But if you come to the U.S., thinking about even New York City, what urban is to planners is different. So setting an expectation internally is, I think, the key.

Also, if you ask, based on my engagement with the community, if you ask anyone, What is urban? What is the city? Trust me, everyone will tell you a different version of urban and city. So, Gwinnett County, just to provide some basic information, Gwinnett County, from west to east, it's about 25 miles. So the west is more the older portion, near land, it's more vertical. East, it's just farmland. It's like you see cows, you see like sheep driving across. So if you ask someone from the east, what's urban for them? Like two stories is urban. But if you ask someone from the west, maybe it's going to be 5 to 10.

Plus, Gwinnett County is very special given the demographic here. 27 percent of people living in Gwinnett are born overseas. And we have about 180 countries represented in the school. Just keep in mind, we only have 195 countries in the world. So it's very diverse. Depending on where they come from, they also have a different version for the city. So that's why I think when we talk about city living or like 15- minute city, we definitely in the plan, we build a lot of stepping down. If you look at the plan, we have four different levels for intensity in our village. You have village high all the way to village rural. The FAR, which is floor area ratio, the lowest is 0.3, the highest is 3.5. The reason I really like the plan is the plan is very flexible. No matter where you are in the county, we gave you a version of what you want to see at the city life.

[12:14] - Roberta Rewers

Sort of what you want to find, you can find in that plan. And Yang, picking up on that, the plan covers 87 different communities, right? And can you talk a little bit about the community atlas that was created in conjunction with the plan?

[12:30] - Yang Chen

Of course, I think, let's go back to community engagement. I work for a city and I work for a county. I think one of the biggest differences is about my backyard. If you ever live in a city, a smaller city in Georgia, anything happening in the city, it's about you and you want to be involved. Versus in the... good or bad. Versus in the county, I think sometimes, as I said, from west to east, it's 25 miles. Someone living in the west will have, they want nothing to do with what happened in the east.

So part of this 87 daily community scope is how do I make sure we have a framework where people care, so they know, okay, this is my backyard. We are cutting Gwinnett into different pieces where people feel like it's part of their branding, it's part of their back yard. They care about what's happening within the specific daily community. After the unified plan was adopted, we actually started a different engagement. Now we have monthly and quarterly check-ins with different daily communities because now people see, okay, I belong here. I want to make it better.

I think that's definitely a huge win for us by cutting the county into a bitable size. Again, different parts of a county have different problems. Maybe the west portion might be something regarding older infrastructure, maybe regarding all their, again, something minor as the entrance that needs to be replaced, but it already got dissolved. Versus the east part of the county, maybe it's about sewer connections. So we are providing, after the daily community adoption, we are providing tailored outreach methods, plus different talking points and engagement for different communities.

[14:15] - Roberta Rewers

In talking about the community engagement aspect, I think what I found was really fascinating as part of the plan was your daily community cafe. I thought that was a really fun idea. Can you talk a little bit about what the cafe was and the options that you, again, as Yang, as you mentioned, giving people the opportunity to customize what they wanted?

[14:39] - Allison Stewart-Harris

This is a really great example of designing an engagement based off of your constraints, right? So we had five workshops where we had to basically do all the land use engagement for the county. So in our minds, we have these proto-daily communities, and we wanted input on them. But knowing, like Yang said, someone in the west doesn't care about what's going on in east Gwinnett. We knew we needed to find a way for people to be able to choose their own adventure. And so how do we frame up a meeting where people can come and pick exactly what they want to engage on without us dragging everybody through 87 different communities' worth of engagement?

And so we're like, oh, we need... it'd be like a sushi menu. We're like, oh, it's a little too specific. And then we thought, well, what if we did a restaurant menu? So we started riffing on that, and we talked to the county. We floated the idea. We're like, this is a little weird, but what do you think? And the county director told us, well, it's very corny, but go ahead and do it. So we said, okay, we're going to give it a shot.

So we created a menu. So we organized it into different courses. The appetizer was a lighter activity where we talked about, you could pick from transportation, or economic development, or housing. Then when you got to the entree portion of the menu, you had basically a menu of all the different daily communities in that area, so that fifth of the county. And people could choose as many as they wanted or as few as they wanted. Then for dessert, we had an open space exercise.

We really leaned way into it. When people would come to the meeting, they would be greeted at a host stand. We had little aprons, we had branded mints. We would take people to a table, we would sit them down. They had a server, so they had the same person leading them through every exercise, taking the orders. And it was really great. I think it turned out pretty well.

And it was very intensive. It had a lot of different discussion. And people at first were a little puzzled by it. Wait, what is this? Why are you giving me a menu? And it's like, this is like the Cheesecake Factory menu. There's like 20 pages. But ultimately, it turned out to be really fun. And we found that we were having much more in-depth conversations with people. And because we sat people at tables with other residents and other stakeholders that they may not know, they were having more interactions.

[17:20] - Yang Chen

I have to give a big kudos to Allison and her group. First, Allison, she's super creative. I knew a few of her outreach in other jurisdictions and it's amazing. I have to say, not all engagements are the same. As planners, there are different engagements, and I have to say, comp plan, unified plan is one of the hardest ones to do. The reason being unified plans, there's so many elements in there.

First is, what's a unified plan? Most people will just get confused right there. Second is unified plans, no matter where you are in the states, they have some requirements regarding elements. We have to talk about land use, transportation, water, sewer, even, in Georgia we even have a section for broadband. Even on transportation, you can talk about transit, you can talk about vehicles, sidewalks for bikes. There's just so many elements. 

I think the way to cut them into biteable size is the right way to do because some people might care about land use, but they don't care about transportation. I think for the people to choose what they're interested in talking to you about is very important versus giving them, you have to go through all different 10 items. Again, we don't have the time and people don't have the patience with us to go through everything. That's why I think this "choose whatever you're interested in and give us feedback" is great for the quality of the engagement. 

[18:38] - Roberta Rewers

Yeah, we talked a little bit about community engagement, and you created what I think is a really fascinating idea called the daily community cafe. Can you tell me a little bit about what that premise was about? Yang, you mentioned earlier that the creation and the work you did with the unified plan created more interest in planning. You mentioned that there's quarterly updates. How else have you seen a difference in the community and their interest or engagement in planning activities since then?

[19:06] - Yang Chen

I want to provide more general... for me as a planner, I don't know if I'm the minority, I might be. I have been planning for a long time. The one thing I hate the most — I'm sorry, hate is a strong word, but I do hate it — is sometimes you have a plan adopted and it's like 500 pages. You paid a substantial amount of money for it. Then it's just sitting there collecting dust. As a planner, I'm like, no, I want to do a plan where it's actually making a difference in real life.

The whole point of how we set up the Gwinnett County plan is we have a pipeline project coming out of the plan. I think, I want to share a few, including the community engagement. The first one is unified development ordinance amendment. Again, in other places, they call it zoning ordinance. Sometimes, I work one time in a jurisdiction where the long-range planners absolutely don't like the current planners. They think they are just like, oh, they just do permitting. It's so boring. For me, I oversee both planning and zoning. For me, one thing, first thing we did is we made a huge, a very progressive amendment.

In the unified plan, we talk about missing middle housing. We're talking about accessory dwelling units. If you don't make it allowable in the code, nothing will happen. The first thing we did is we cleaned up our code to make sure it matches the unified plan. I think one of the progressive things I would share is, for instance, we know based on the Unified Plan, office is no longer truly a viable land use in many parts of a country, but it's really hard to go through the zoning process. We actually now allow multifamily by rights in the OI zoning district, which is a huge win for the county.

Also, as Allison shared, the Unified Plan, it's a very high-level planning tool. It doesn't really dive into each site. We don't know — for instance, a site might be urban high for mixed use, but we don't know if they have watershed, floodplain, different things. Plus, we don't have a more detailed view of what will happen for the site. We actually initiated 11 small area plans. I don't know how do I have time to sleep, but after the plan, my director is saying, okay, now you have to do small area plans. We have six adopted after the plan, and now we have five ongoing. All the small area plans actually provide a much more nuanced view and vision for each, for key sites in the county.

Another progressive thing we do as part of planning is, how many times do you see a plan for land use, but the infrastructure absolutely is disconnected. You have a high rise there for amazing placemaking, but then you have no sewer demand or there's no sewer supporting it. Each of the plans we do now, we have infrastructure development plans to go with it to make sure transportation, transit, and water, sewer, everything aligns with the land use plan.

Two more things we are doing now, which is again, very progressive, is we are doing a county-wide sewer demand modeling. Normally, when we talk about population projection, you think about U.S. census tract. Sure, they can be a very great way to have a looking back of what happened, but you don't have more what's happening in the future. After the Unified Plan, since as Allison said, we did a parcel-by-parcel land use for over 200,000 parcels, we did a detailed methodology based on land use. Now we have a detailed parcel-by-parcel sewer demand modeling.

This is a huge win for the county. The reason being, we have Department of Water Resources, so they are in charge of capital improvement of all the sewer pipes, pump stations. If they don't know what's happening in the county in the next two decades, they don't know how to size up pipes. This might sound like a minor issue, but it's actually very expensive. I learned so much about sewer after the unified plan, which I'm like, I know too much now. [laughs] It's really expensive to dig out the pipe and then resize the pipe. We did a parcel-by-parcel sewer demand modeling county-wide, which is a great way to make the plan actually driving capital improvement.

Plus another issue I think a lot of our jurisdictions face nationwide is regarding fiscal analysis. How do you make sure your land use is generating revenue? How do you make sure you are proving land use where it generates some revenue for you versus all the cost? What we are doing now is since we have parcel-by-parcel land use, we are doing a detailed revenue projection for the county to make sure in the long term, we want to be fiscally conservative. We don't want to... anything can happen to the county. If you have, let's say, sales revenues go down, eventually, maybe we wouldn't be able to provide the quality of life we are providing now. This unified plan actually leads to our fiscal analysis modeling county-wide. Again, we are still building that out right now, but once it's finished, it's going to be definitely a huge help in informed decision-making. 

And also, as I said before, it's community engagement. Now we have our branding for the 87 daily communities. We definitely have much more engaged communities. And also we have the monthly and quarterly check-ins with members just to make sure we keep them engaged. I don't know if you know, in Georgia, we do have sometimes the tension between county and city because sometimes people, if they feel their voices are not heard, they just say, okay, I'm going to become a city. So we are trying to make sure the county residents are truly engaged through the process. That's a few of the implementations we're doing after the Unified Plan. [laughs]

[24:53] - Roberta Rewers

Just a few, right? [laughs]

[24:54] - Yang Chen

Just a few, yes. [laughs]

[24:57] - Roberta Rewers

Perfect. What are your perspectives? What did you learn or discover that was unexpected during the whole Unified Plan process for you?

[25:09] - Allison Stewart-Harris

I think for me, there were a few things. One is just — Yang alludes to this a little bit — so Gwinnett has all these different cities, and a lot of these cities have done a really great job with their own branding and their downtown revitalization. So they have a lot of "there" there. And then there's this perception of like, oh, and then just everything else that's unincorporated county. So I think what was really neat to see was how this process gave people a platform to put their "there," right? And really make sure that we were really acknowledging that, yeah, there's a sense of place in a lot of these communities that hasn't really been elevated and acknowledged fully. People really liked that they had that recognition that, yeah, my neighborhood is a unique place. We're not just mile after mile of suburbia.

I was also pretty surprised, too, at how the idea of the daily community... people really seemed to really like that. I think it was done at a time when there were some rumors about the 15-minute city, and you won't be allowed to leave, and people are tracking you. So we had to be very careful about that, which is why we rebranded it, essentially, to talk about the daily community and say, hey, look, this isn't about putting an electronic boundary around where you can go, but it's about meeting your daily needs within 15 minutes of your home. And I think the core of that idea really resonates with people. In the Atlanta region, everyone complains about driving and how long it takes to get everywhere, so I think there's just that idea like, hey, I can meet most of my needs within 15 minutes. Yeah, I'm on board with that. I want that sense of community. I want to be able to do an errand easily. I think I was delighted by how receptive people were to this idea and how they could really immediately connect with that.

[27:15] - Yang Chen

I agree with Allison. I think it's interesting where people want to have fun. The happening place, right? Even if they're in a rural part of the county, they still want some kind of commercial, entertainment, retail near them. It's interesting, they don't want it directly next to them. If they have a preference, they say, don't put it next to me. But you can put it three parts of the way or 10 parts of the way, which is very interesting.

Also one thing, surprise to me — in life, there's good surprise and bad surprise, this is a good surprise — I'm surprised how much our elected officials love the plan. I work in places where, I'm not going to name names, but I worked in a jurisdiction where when I was hired, I had to go fire the consultant for the unified plan due to the vision of the elected official was not consistent with the plan, and I had to rewrite it from scratch. But for this plan, we did a briefing. I just remember, they didn't change a word of the plan. Sometimes you have an elected official who is like, I don't like this one, I don't like that one. They like to do some wordsmithing or they like to change a land use last minute, even before the adoption. For this one, Gwinnett County, I think we have a very visionary board of commissioners, and they love the plan so much. They always talk about the plan everywhere they go. Plus, when this is going from draft to adoption, they didn't propose any changes. I think they love everything about the plan, which is great for me.

[28:51] - Roberta Rewers

What do you think, Yang, would attribute to that? Because I know that's an issue, planners. There's sometimes conflict between planners and elected officials and visions and agreements. What do you think helped smooth your approach and get the elected officials' buy-in?

[29:07] - Yang Chen

I think, again, a few different layers. I think the first layer is definitely relationships. You have to have trust first, right? You have to earn your trust first. I think, again, it's not me. It's more it's the Department of Planning and Development. I think based on our past performance, I think we already established a baseline of trust with all the elected officials. Also, I think another thing we love doing, and I think it's well-received, is our annual retreat. I think a lot of time it's not about... it's educational. They tell us what they want. We provide more educational background about unified plan, small area plan, overly different things in planning. I think I'm trying to train my elected official to be planners. I think they are actually turning into planners, which is great.

I think it's trust, it's definitely communication and education, and also feedback loop. I think all those helps to make this plan better. Plus we have, I think, very open county leadership, too. Sometimes I work for places where the city manager will say, oh, you are not allowed to go talk to this elected official. Then it's almost like I have to be in between the city manager and elected official, versus here, it's very open communication, which definitely helps to get a message across.

[30:27] - Allison Stewart-Harris

I would add to that, too. I think that level of trust really can't be understated. On the consulting side, we work with all types of communities, and I would say the norm is more... we get a lot of directions like, oh, I think we need to play it safer. I don't think we can do that. But I think because the leadership in Planning and Development had these good relationships with the elected officials, and they trusted Planning and Development, that we were able to do things that were a little more out of the box, like the Daily Community Cafe. That's a weird idea, but we were able to do it. And I think it's really unusual to be able to do that. And a community of this size and this prominence. I think if you're a small little rogue progressive community, you can get away with that. But to do this as part of a major county in the Atlanta area, where there's a lot of eyes on this process, it was really unusual as a consultant to be able to have some of that creative freedom to try things out.

And I think any time you're trying something out, there's this acceptance, like, this might not totally work, but the fact that the county was okay with it and said, hey, look, let's try, let's be innovative, let's try something new. We know what we've been doing previously isn't what we want. So let's take another look, let's try something else. And so that openness to doing things a different way, I think was really surprising and really unusual.

[31:54] - Roberta Rewers

As we start to conclude, what would each of you like the listeners today to take away from your process in the Unified 2045 plan?

[32:03] - Yang Chen

I would say, as planners, me and Allison, specifically, we want to be perfect, right? We want to get everything right to the T. But unfortunately, I think for the unified plan, you have to set expectations. I would say, don't let being perfect get in the way of doing the right thing. When we start moving away from the character area, planning, I would say, that actually might work in some part of a country where it's all rural and farmland. Sure, it's going to be continuous rural. But I think we made the right call by moving away from that to a parcel-specific, given how much their land use can be driving better decision-making later. But if you say, oh, I need to be perfect. I need to get everything right. If I go with the land use, the parcel-by-parcel land use, I'm going to make a mistake. It's okay. Just say, okay, I'm going to make a mistake for five percent of the total parcels. As long as you set expectations, I think it's okay. Just, again, don't let being perfect get in the way of doing the right thing.

[33:04] - Allison Stewart-Harris

Yang, I didn't make a single mistake in 220,000 parcels. [laughs]

[33:07] - Yang Chen

Yes, she's perfect. She's perfect. [laughs]

[33:10] - Allison Stewart-Harris

No, I agree with Yang. I would also say, too, being willing to take risks. I think as planners, we learn how to plan a certain way. We get into our rhythm, and this is how we do this. But I think it's important to sometimes pause and say, hey, is this actually the best way to do it? Does this make sense? And be willing to play a little bit and experiment and do things a different way. And like Yang said, acknowledge it might not be perfect. It might not work well the first time. But taking some risks and being willing to turn things 90 degrees and look at it differently, I think, can really have a great result. And if nothing else, I think it sparked some good conversations, and it can really lead to an improved process and a really great product at the end.

[34:07] - Roberta Rewers

Thank you both so much. This was fantastic.

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