Talk of the Town - Making a difference August 14 2002

Less than a mile from East Atlanta Village along Maynard Terrace, Kim and Reid Davis are working on building a community. They purchased their renovated three-bedroom, two-bath house two weeks after Sept. 11 ($177,000 ) and are involved in a local children’s theater. Reid works as a corporate communications editor for an Atlanta-based airline and freelances for Paste, a new national music magazine. Kim is an IT project manager for an Atlanta-based HMO. In the Davis home, there’s importance in everything, both tangible and intangible, to the Spanish footstool that has been Kim’s since childhood to what they want out of their neighborhood — especially now that they’re expecting their first child in December.

Your yard is big and your back deck provides a lot of privacy. This is a lot for your money, being so close to the city.

Reid: It’s undervalued for as close in as it is. The Northern Arc and all that stuff just makes me sad, because if the city just crawls north, and it becomes like Los Angeles north of I-285, then we’ll have missed a wonderful opportunity to become a real city.

Reid, you use public transportation even though you don’t have to.

Reid: Part of it is wanting to take my car off the road. Honestly, riding Marta to and from work is my reading time, so I really cherish the hour going and the hour coming to get caught up on reading The New Yorker or reading whatever book I’m working on. It’s just that I think, if you live in a city, you ought to treat it like a city.

Do you intend to stay here for a long time?

Kim: We would love to be able to stay and grow the house as our family grows. I would be perfectly happy to have our kids grow up here and stay for a long time.

That’s wonderful. Do you know much about the schools around here?

Kim: The public schools are not great.

Reid: But we’re actually in the district for the neighborhood charter school in Grant Park. So we have that option.

Kim: But there’s something to having your kids in the public school system, in spite of those statistics, and just being a really engaged parent and helping to make a difference.

Absolutely. If you’re involved and aware ...

Kim: Yes, and very active in protecting the kids from the things that are really going to be destructive. We know that those things are a kind of reality in our neighborhood. But we are here. And part of the reason that we’re here is because we want our family to be engaged in this community for its good things and for some of the things that might be frightening.

So you don’t want your kids to grow up in a bubble.

Reid: Right.