Want to live in the same neighborhood as Rick and the gang? Well, you can know live in Alexandria!
According to EW, you don’t have to get recruited by Aaron to live in ‘The Walking Dead’ community of Alexandria. You can actually live there in real life. The community deciding whether to kill or save Rick Grimes is an actual subdivision known as the Gin Property in Senoia, GA., and, yes, people do live in some of the houses.
From EW:
When I was on set for last week’s episode and the big fight scene between Rick and Pete, filming was momentarily halted while a mail truck drove through to deliver catalogs and bills to residents of the community.
But, it begs the question, how was a hit TV show able to film in a community subdivision? Well, the community was specifically built to be used as a live set:
Because it was actually developed by Scott Tigchelaar, the president of Raleigh Studios Atlanta, the home base for The Walking Dead in Senoia. (The famous prison from season 3 and 4 was built onto the back of Raleigh.) And as Walking Dead exec-producer Gale Anne Hurd explains, Gin Property was specifically built to also be used as a live set.
“It’s called the Gin Property development outside of Senoia where our studios are,” Hurd tells EW. “And luckily the community was developed by the same people who own the studios. Part of the covenant in the CC&Rs of that community is that it is designed to be a haven and a draw for filming, so that’s something that all the residents there were aware of—[though they] may have forgotten. But I have a feeling the blasting lights at three in the morning probably reminded them.”
But, living their comes with a price. All residents are forced to live around a giant 15-foot wall around a majority of the property.
CC&Rs stands for Covenants, Conditions & Restrictions, which basically are rules placed on homes by—in this case—a developer. So if you want to buy a house and live there, you agree to the conditions. And now one of those conditions has become a giant 15-foot wall around the majority of the property to simulate the wall around Alexandria in the comic books on which the show is based.
But, it is important to note in a potential spoiler, ‘The Walking Dead’ producers have the option to renew their agreement until 2019 which means the cast and crew will probably not leave the community of Alexandria any time soon.
According to the Newnan Times-Herald, the studio has a wall permit that extends to Nov. 30, 2015, with the option for annual renewals through 2019. That’s a lot of wall. (It should also be noted that Alexandria is still an active community in the comic books, so folks could be there for a while.)
Not too many residents seem to happy about ‘The Walking Dead’ filming there. “Kathleen Sullivan, who lives on Plyant Street in the community did not sound particularly enthused about the enclosure when she spoke to the Times-Herald. “I said that the wall would be ugly. None of us had seen it yet. But, OMG, it is uglier than I could ever imagine.”
Would you live in the Alexandria community?
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