The Summerhill neighborhood of Atlanta is about eight hours, give or take, from Sarasota by car, depending on the traffic on I-75.  Located just south of downtown Atlanta, Summerhill is one of the city’s oldest and most culturally distinct neighborhoods—established after the Civil War in 1865, the area’s first inhabitants were freed slaves and Jewish immigrants. The 80-acre district has a proud sporting heritage—it housed the Atlanta Braves and Hank Aaron from 1966 to 2016 and hosted the 1996 Summer Olympics at Turner Field—but had fallen into disarray over the years. Highways promising jobs and through traffic cut off circulation, rendering Summerhill into a fragment of the spirited, economically sustainable,neighborhood that it once was.  Summerhill, ostensibly, does not have a lot to do with Sarasota. However, the story of the neighborhood’s rebirth—from a prideful, yet neglected and deteriorating community to a vibrant civic center once again—is a case study for how an area can be renewed while retaining its cultural and historical identity.  In November, as a part of its 2025 Urban Studies Speaker Series, Hoyt Architects welcomed David Nelson, an Atlanta-based commercial real estate developer, for his talk, Preserving a Legacy: The Summerhill Case Study. Summerhill’s revitalization began in 2017—after the Atlanta Braves announced their departure from Turner Field—real estate investment and development firm, Carter and Georgia State University purchased the property around the stadium with the intention of redeveloping Summerhill into the neighborhood it once was. “Summerhill went from being a place that was effectively an empty 70-acre parking lot to an area that actually has mixed-use development on the south side of Atlanta, in a historically Black neighborhood where developers said, ‘this couldn’t be done,’” says Nelson. The process started, however, with creating a basis of trust between the developers and the residents of the neighborhood. Promises of development had been made before, and each time, the changes in infrastructure had hurt the neighborhood. “In one of the first meetings we had, before we’d even purchased the property, we had 200 people basically explaining the ill wills of why they didn’t want GSU, a state body, to build athletic facilities there,” says Nelson. “There was a lot of mistrust there—the first thing we had to do was figure out what the neighborhood was saying to us, what can we learn from its history and how can that influence what we’re trying to do?” Over the next few years, Carter worked hand in hand with community members and third-party businesses to revamp Summerhill. Georgia Avenue, long the center of commerce in the neighborhood, was entirely revitalized into a retail and residential strip. Thousands of surveillance cameras have been installed at the behest of the community.  Apartment buildings, townhouses and a student housing complex have been built into the surrounding streets and a Publix recently opened on the adjacent Hank Aaron Drive, with space for retail along the front of the building, feeding more foot traffic into the neighborhood. Even the retainment of the name—Summerhill—was essential in keeping the spirit of the neighborhood. “We wanted it to be real, we wanted it to be organic and for it to be Atlanta. The real name has all this history, the neighborhood is really strong—so we just decided we’re not going to name it,” says Nelson.