Decatur’s square, downtown and commercial roofs
Much of Decatur’s business life gathers around the courthouse square, where the Old Courthouse still stands. The New Georgia Encyclopedia credits transit, with MARTA’s Church Street station just off the square, for turning downtown into a lively walkable district of restaurants, galleries, shops and homes.
The Decatur Downtown Development Authority has been planning and financing projects to revive that historic business district since 1982. A separate citywide body, the Decatur Development Authority, works with neighborhood business districts and other commercial areas. State legislation created both, and the citywide authority has put money toward the façade grant described below.
Downtown also has its own building standards, in Section 5.3 of the city’s development code for the Downtown Decatur Special Pedestrian Area. They govern how buildings meet the street, cornice lines on buildings three stories or taller, how much of the ground floor is glass, and where parking goes. Gutters and downspouts aren’t mentioned, and SirGutters found no other city source setting gutter rules for downtown buildings outside the historic districts.
The roof itself shapes the job. Commercial buildings often have broad flat or low-slope roofs that steer water to a few outlets: scuppers cut through a parapet wall, collector boxes, oversized downspouts, or box gutters built into the roof edge. When one of those built-in troughs fails, the leak tends to appear indoors as a stained ceiling or damp wall. NOAA’s 1991–2020 normals give Atlanta’s airport, the closest station with a standard 30-year record, just over 50 inches of rain a year, so ask each company whether it has lined or rebuilt systems like yours.