The meeting room was filled with people interested in hearing about the redevelopment.

TIFTON — More than 60 people attended a community meeting about redevelopment in the historic Phillipsburg and Unionville areas of Tifton on Sept. 21.

Attendees from the two neighborhoods stayed well after the meeting was officially over to continue discussing ideas for redeveloping the areas. There were so many people that the organizers had to keep finding and bringing out chairs as interested people poured in to hear what the organizers had to say.

“I am thrilled,” Tifton Mayor Julie Smith said. “Standing room only, what better result could you ask for? And this is the first of many, many meetings.”

Bruce Green, of Bruce Green and Associates Consulting, has been involved in community development and heritage and cultural tourism for over 30 years, was brought in to do a survey of the area.

He said that when redeveloping any area, there is a four point approach: organization and policy, promotion, design and economic restructuring.

Green feels there is a lot of historic value in the Unionville and Phillipsburg areas that has been ignored.

“I think we need to look at design guidelines, to go in and see historically and architecturally, how this neighborhood looked,” he said.

The entire area needs to be economically restructured, according to Green, who wants to not only look at the area chronologically, but wants to compare different areas of the same street to see why some areas rose in value while others declined.

The idea for redeveloping the area began with a letter from the Tift County school system expressing concerns about the areas surrounding several schools, Matt Wilson in particular.

Smith said that when they began to look at the area around the school, they realized that while there used to be a plethora of businesses in the area, many of them have left, leading to blighted properties and what the mayor called “disinvestment.”

“We have property owners who don’t take very good care of their properties,” Smith said. “They may be rental or investment properties. There’s crime in the area. The infrastructure has deteriorated and unfortunately we as a city have sort of ignored that area and that was not the right thing to do. We’re here to say, ‘what do we need to do as a city to address infrastructure, to address crime?’”

“What is it we can provide so that we can be the foundation to start building a tax base so that people will want to put a business, build a house, want to move back into the area?”

She added that if the neighborhood is secure and stable, the school system benefits.

Smith cautioned that this is a project that is going to take years.

“It didn’t happen overnight and it’s not going to be fixed overnight,” she said.

The eventual end goal of the redevelopment project is a “revitalized, culturally significant and historically significant African American neighborhood,” said Green

Everyone who came out was given a list of questions about the area and were asked to list what they thought the issues were and what they would like to see happen in the community.

The next step will be going through all of the contributions and parsing out the common themes and priorities and then figure out a plan based on those priorities.

She said that there were going to be other meetings, which would be announced to the public, to garner even more interest and participation from within the neighborhoods.

Green feels that the priorities list needs to come from the community, from the people who live and work in these neighborhoods.

“It’s important for people to be involved because it’s our community,” Smith agreed. “It’s not just mine, it’s not just the responsibility of the government.”

“When you get all the ideas together you represent the diversity of the community, you represent all of the ideas and the dreams and hopes and vision for the future of what the community can be,” Smith said. “That’s why we want these folks at the table tonight, to share their vision with us.”