Mill Creek.

Huntsville leaders want you to remember that name.

It doesn’t exist now, but it’s the name they’ve chosen for what they plan to build in an old and struggling part of the city’s west side.

Mill Creek.

It lies south and west of Memorial Parkway and includes newer attractions like Lowe Mill Arts and Entertainment and Campus 805. It has 371 businesses in total, and it also includes 254-unit Butler Terrace, one of the city’s oldest public housing projects started in 1952, and it has a high percentage of low-income residents.

The boom in downtown Huntsville just east across Memorial Parkway is putting development pressure on the area, city leaders say. If they don’t act, they won’t be able to guide widespread, fair changes in the development that is coming.

This year, the city won a hard-to-win $1.3 million planning grant from the U.S. Housing and Urban Development Department (HUD). Planners and public officials discussed what that means and doesn’t mean Friday with leaders of Huntsville non-profit, civic and arts organizations. Those organizations wrote HUD to support the city’s application, and their letters and promise of support are a key reason Huntsville won the grant. They were told they are critical to the area’s long-term success.

There’s more federal money out there, nearly $30 million for big improvements if the city and its partners build a strong-enough blueprint for change and make a good start in the three years of planning.

Three years. Nothing major will happen for the next three years, the audience was told. There will be pilot projects such as improved lighting on Governors Drive west of Memorial Parkway, a piece of substantial public art and a new park.

The plan will not eliminate public housing in the area. It could rebuild it, and it could remodel it. But 254 units of low-income housing will be there in three years just as they are there now, officials promised. They will have better access roads, be more handicapped accessible and have modern heating and air-conditioning. “Make sure everyone benefits,” city manager of urban and long-range planning Dennis Madsen said of HUD’s rules. “As development and improvement happen, it happens for everyone.”

But there will also be new stores, new restaurants and new “market rate” housing in a new 28-acre “master planned neighborhood,” city leaders said. And there will be private investment in the area.

In the three years of planning ahead, no one will be forced to move. Any residents who want to leave during the rebuild will be given re-location vouchers and invited back when the work is done. A key measure of success is the “happiness, health and success of the people living there,” Madsen said.

“Huntsville should feel like home for everyone,” City Council President Devyn Keith said, “but success is not being felt by everyone.”

This new kind of planned neighborhood – the first one like it in Alabama, but existing already in cities like New Orleans – will be “just as important as Mazda-Toyota,” Keith said. “This goes beyond housing. This is building a lasting legacy.”