A Developer Filled a Georgia Subdivision in 2005 With Houses That Were Never Built

Off a quiet road near the Dawson–Forsyth county line in Georgia, there are streets with names, driveways, and cul-de-sacs that lead nowhere. The houses that were supposed to line them were never finished. Some were never real at all. In 2005, a developer broke ground on a luxury subdivision called Greenleaf — around 60 lots of it. Investors from as far as California put up millions for finished homes. The homes didn't exist. An appraiser had signed papers swearing they did. By 2006 the whole thing collapsed into one of Georgia's uglier mortgage fraud cases, the developer was sentenced to more than 15 years, and the half-built shells were left to rot. For nearly twenty years the county couldn't even give the land away. We looked at how an entire neighborhood got sold before it was built, and why it took two decades to clean up. SOURCES Forsyth News, contemporary reporting Appen Media / Forsyth Herald Gainesville Times U.S. Attorney's Office, Northern District of Georgia Weathered Ground covers the roads, towns, and places America walked away from, and what is left of them. #greenleaf #forsythcounty #georgia #abandoned