GWINNETT COUNTY, Ga. — Roughly 400 people have signed a petition asking Gwinnett County to oppose rezonings in one of its last largely undeveloped areas, where a new land use plan is being drawn around the Rowen research campus.
The county is holding a public input meeting Saturday at Dacula High School.
[DOWNLOAD: Free WSB-TV News app for alerts as news breaks]
Ryan Hitchcock and her husband, Henry, keep horses on their property in the study area and signed the petition.
“We moved out here to have a farm,” Ryan Hitchcock said. “We moved from Norcross, which was also in Gwinnett, to avoid the development that they were doing there.”
The Harbins-Alcovy Small Area Plan will cover the land surrounding Rowen, a 2,000-acre research and technology campus the county began assembling in 2020 along Highway 316. Rowen announced its first tenant in March, a $2 billion UCB manufacturing plant on 79 acres.
TRENDING STORIES:
- Fight between teams cancels high school football game
- Georgia high school football schedule, scores
- Measles outbreak linked to metro Atlanta daycare
On its website, the county says the plan will balance residential and commercial growth with preservation of the area’s rural character and agricultural heritage, and that it will define conservation areas.
Commissioners would adopt it as an amendment to the county’s 2045 Unified Plan.
Display boards at a July meeting showed nine kinds of housing the county is weighing for the area. They run from farmsteads at about one home per 10 acres up to mid-rise apartments at 25 to 40 units an acre.
The boards said the biggest lots would go on farmland and conservation land, and the apartments would go where the county thinks the roads and pipes can handle them.
Henry Hitchcock said the county already has a policy on the books.
“The 2045 Unified Plan currently says protect the remaining rural area of Gwinnett County,” he said.
The petition argues that each rezoning of rural land does more than change one parcel, and that once the pattern is set, the character cannot be restored.
“I don’t want to move,” Ryan Hitchcock said. “I have a community here of friends and family and I ask them to preserve the area for what it is currently.”
[SIGN UP: WSB-TV Daily Headlines Newsletter]
©2026 Cox Media Group
