Above: Macon, Ga. Photo credit: Flickr user Mark Stozier.

Wednesday afternoon I was delighted to be a part of an announcement of a new initiative that the Knight and Peyton Anderson foundations are funding. The Macon-Bibb County Urban Development Authority will lead a master planning process for our city’s urban core.

Like so many communities, Macon has many plans for revitalization of its historic downtown, but most are sitting on a shelf. This time I believe it will be different. We have had so much success with a plan, led and implemented by residents, for Macon’s College Hill Corridor. That’s our roadmap of how to do this work.

We will come together—residents, business owners and operators, government and nonprofits—to embrace our shared history and architecture to create a people-centered land use plan that will reenergize our urban core. We can turn around 50 years of outmigration and disinvestment because this is a special place that offers so much to the new talent and new residents we need to attract.

Our downtown is a gem. We have beautiful old buildings lining this wonderful street grid of wide boulevards. The Ocmulgee River flows by, bordered by the Ocmulgee National Monument (which we are working to have designated as a national park). Within three square miles we have remarkable and affordable housing stock, two excellent hospitals and Mercer University, with its schools of engineering, law and medicine.

We’re just 90 miles due south of Atlanta, and as I like to say, 82 miles from anywhere in the world—because we’re just that close to Hartsfield-Jackson airport. The cost of living here is reasonable, and it’s 10 minutes to get just about anywhere in town. It’s an easy place to live. But we must take the steps to get more people to live, work and play here. It’s essential to expanding our local economy.

We know that a majority of college-educated young adults pick the city they want to live in before they look for a job. They want communities that offer a vibrant lifestyle, one that’s walkable and bikeable, with access to transit and lots of street life. Macon can be that. This master planning process, if we do it right, can be the first step. It invites everyone to dream what can be—and then to work together to make that dream a reality.