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The City of Chattahoochee Hills Comprehensive Plan is a living document shaped by its leadership, staff, and citizens. It is a policy guide for making zoning and capital investment decisions, and it sets policies for City officials and staff concerning the future development of the City. A five-year update of the City’s Comprehensive Plan, is required by the “Minimum Standards and Procedures for Local Comprehensive Planning,” (Minimum Standards) adopted by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs (DCA). The latest version of these standards and procedures can be found in the DCA Rules at Chapter 110-12-1, effective October 1, 2018. In meeting these standards, this plan enables the City to maintain its Qualified Local Government Status, making it eligible to receive certain types of state funding. This update reassesses where the City of CHattahoochee Hills stands today and how it intends to grow in the future. Following the requirements of the Minimum Standards, it presents an updated community vision, corresponding goals, and a work program designed to make that vision a reality.

Vision-Deliberately Rural

The Chattahoochee Hills Comprehensive Plan seeks to carry out the wishes of the Chattahoochee Hills community to achieve the balance of keeping the rural character foremost and intact.  The city has adopted land control mechanisms that will encourage permanent preservation of landscapes by concentrating specific types of development in preferred areas.  This is accomplished by enabling density transfer and establishing buffer requirements and design aesthetics to ensure quality development. 
The City of Chattahoochee Hills is both city and country in a location that would ordinarily be a suburban environment anywhere else in the Atlanta metropolitan area. Our future development will take place only in dense mixed-use towns and villages, and in smaller hamlets. The remainder of our city will be deliberately and permanently rural. Not large-lot suburban claiming to be rural, but truly rural, in that all land outside of the Town, Villages, and Hamlets will be in agricultural, conservation or very low density residential use. As in the Focus Fulton Plan, the goal is to preserve 60 to 70 percent of the city as open space, including agriculture and forestry lands.

Deliberately Rural...
By maintaining the rural character of the city, the Mayor and City Council are not only following the wishes of the city’s citizens, but also creating a valuable asset that will differentiate the city, improving both property values and tax collections, as well as quality of life. Metro Atlanta is overrun with suburban sprawl. Families continually move further out from the center of the city to escape that sprawl. In Chattahoochee Hills, people will be able to enjoy the rural nature of the community in perpetuity because the city has made a deliberate choice to be rural for the time-frame of the Comprehensive Plan and beyond, rather than being temporarily rural only because the suburban sprawl hasn’t arrived yet. 
In its current rural state, the city has a very limited tax base. In order for the city to be able to continue to provide an acceptable level of services in the future without significant property tax increases, the property tax base will have to be improved. In order to keep the majority of the city rural, development will only be permitted in designated development areas (Town, Villages and Hamlets). This development will be compact traditional development which has been found to be the lowest cost for provision of city services and the highest benefit with regard to property tax revenues. Compact traditional development allows the majority of the city’s land to remain rural. Additionally, the other elements that most embody the rural nature of the city, rural roads (both paved and gravel) and rural viewscapes, will be protected. 

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