For twenty years, The Conservation Fund (TCF) has been buying up land across Atlanta, one parcel at a time, to protect it as permanent greenspace. One of those parcels took more than a year of negotiation with a company that had no real reason to sell. That single deal says a lot about what this whole effort actually takes.
This year, The Conservation Fund marked a huge milestone: over 1,000 acres of parks and greenspace protected across the City of Atlanta and roughly $100 million invested. In a video released to mark the occasion, TCF Regional Vice President Stacy Funderburke doesn’t sound like someone wrapping up a project. “We are just getting started,” he says.
Calloway Title and Escrow didn’t handle every one of those 1,000 acres. But our team has closed a meaningful share of the deals behind this effort, working with TCF repeatedly over the years. To show what that kind of work actually involves, it’s worth walking through one property from the program: Lake Charlotte Nature Preserve.
A Forest That Almost Wasn’t
Lake Charlotte Nature Preserve consists of 216 acres of oak-hickory forest a few miles east of Hartsfield-Jackson, with roughly 60,000 trees and 98% canopy cover. It’s one of the last
old-growth forests left inside Atlanta’s city limits, meaning it’s never been cleared or logged, unlike most of the tree cover left in the city today.
It almost didn’t survive. The City of Atlanta owned this land back in the 1970s, with plans for a public park and campground. That plan fell through. By the 1980s, the city had sold it to a housing developer, who sold it again to Waste Management, whose own former landfill sits right next door. For most of forty years, the forest sat forgotten in an industrial corridor near Moreland Avenue and I-285, surrounded by shipping companies and truck repair shops.
By the late 2010s, that ownership was already a problem. A Georgia Tech tree canopy study had flagged the site as a top conservation priority, but priority status doesn’t buy land. The forest remained under serious threat of industrial development, and convincing the owner to sell was an uphill battle. Atlanta Magazine reported that it took TCF more than a year of negotiations to convince Waste Management to sell to a nonprofit instead of an industrial buyer who almost certainly would have paid top dollar.
What It Actually Took to Close
The Conservation Fund bought the land from Waste Management in December 2019 for roughly
$4.5 million, the largest single greenspace purchase it had made in Atlanta up to that point. That purchase happened fast because of the revolving fund structure TCF uses across this program: acquisition support from the Arthur M. Blank Family Foundation and the Robert W. Woodruff Foundation allowed it to buy the land outright, well before any city vote or budget cycle.
The city didn’t take ownership until months later, using tree ordinance recompense funds — penalty dollars developers pay elsewhere in Atlanta for cutting down trees. City Council approved the acquisition two days before Earth Day 2020. The preserve opened to the public in 2021, closing out a chain of title that ran from city to developer, to waste company, and back to the city again. For good this time.
That sequence is the part of the story that never makes it into a press release. This property changed hands three times before it became a preserve, and each change of ownership meant a new title history to untangle, plus environmental questions and financing to document. It’s the same kind of work as a typical commercial closing. The only real difference is what the land becomes afterward. Most of our closings end in a building. This kind of deal ends in a forest that stays a forest.
One more surprise came up in the title work. Archaeologists confirmed the preserve sits on Native American soapstone quarries dating back to roughly 3000 B.C. This closing didn’t just save trees. It protected a record of the land that predates Atlanta by thousands of years.
Why the Timing Matters
Lake Charlotte is one win. Citywide, Atlanta is still losing ground. A Georgia Tech assessment released this month found the city lost an average of almost 150 acres of urban forest a year between 2008 and 2023. In just the last five of those years, Atlanta lost 780 acres net (about 0.43 acres a day) and canopy coverage slipped to 45.7%, down from 46.5%.
Twenty years of careful acquisitions protected 1,000 acres. Ordinary development is erasing that amount roughly every seven years. That gap is likely why City Council just approved the biggest rewrite of Atlanta’s tree ordinance in more than 25 years, with the new rules taking effect this past January.
What This Means If You’re Building Here
That ordinance rewrite is the part our clients should actually remember. If you’re developing or acquiring property anywhere in the City of Atlanta, here is what this means for you:
- Tree protection is now part of your closing timeline. It’s no longer a line item you can skip. Recompense obligations, the same kind that helped fund the Lake Charlotte purchase, can attach to your project and travel with the land long after you close.
- Land near a new preserve is worth a second look. Property near a newly protected space like Lake Charlotte doesn’t carry the profile it did five years ago. Parcels once evaluated purely through an industrial lens now sit next to permanent, protected greenspace, and that kind of neighbor tends to move values in one direction.
- Messy ownership histories won’t untangle themselves. If your target site has a layered chain of title, an old industrial tenant or a landfill next door, you have to resolve it
before you can close with confidence. Somebody has to work through it, deed by deed. That’s what we do.
Just Getting Started
Stacy Funderburke’s line at the end of that video isn’t really a sign-off. Atlanta’s tree canopy is still disappearing faster than programs like this one can replace it, which means the next 20 years of this work matter as much as the last two decades did. Our team has handled a significant piece of it so far, and we plan on being at the table for whatever comes next.
If you’re sitting on a site with a complicated history of its own, in Atlanta or any other state, connect with the team at Calloway Title and let’s get it closed.
