Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Speculative Subdivision

For the last blog of the semester I took pictures of a partially finished subdivision across the street from my house. I've been hoping to do a blog on this site all semester so I decided to write it up for my last post. Basically this land used to be wooded with some nice walking/riding trails. Also, a farm was located behind the woods and you could go visit the cows in the pasture. My wife and I would take our dogs for a walk in the woods and she would ride her horses on the trails. About 2 years ago (maybe a little longer) they cleared the land and started to build a subdivision. Unfortunately for them the housing market crashed and the pictures you will see illustrate what a partially completed subdivision looks like after 2 years of development. The good news is that we still walk our dogs over there since it is mainly vacant land and my wife still rides her horses over there as well.


First of all the name is very interesting considering that to my knowledge a lake doesn't exist on the land. There is a small lake adjacent to the subdivision, but that is owned by a private residence.




Looks like a guard shack all ready to go. I don't think anybody has been required to man the booth. You can also see in the background the long main entrance with the lack of houses.





This was a clubhouse they started to built quite some time ago.





Here is a retention pond. Maybe this is supposed to be their lake. Our dog Little Bit sneaked into the picture on the left hand side.



This is our dog Ranger sitting in front of trash that consistently gets dumped onto the site. Fortunately there has been a major effort to clean up that trash and what you see represents a minuscule amount of what was there a few months ago. Still, we have to yell at Ranger every walk to stay away from the trash.




Wide open spaces. At least the sewer and manholes have been installed.




I like this picture where they decided to end the first phase of their development. The picture reminds me of the book of poems we all read as kids by Shel Silverstein titled "Where the Sidewalk Ends".



This last picture depicts the heavily developed portion of the subdivision. The houses are actually pretty nice.

About one month ago our house and land was bought by the Gwinnett County School Board and they plan to build a high school on it. Rumor has it that the open land not developed across the street and pictured here will also be bought by the school board and they will build a middle school on it to coincide with the high school. To no surprise we heard the development was very interested in selling off their undeveloped land for the school to be built.