Atlanta's Sweet Auburn Grande mixed-use development project is revitalizing a historic area with affordable housing and commercial space. Phase one includes 109 apartments and retail components, with future plans to restore additional historic structures. Gorman & Company, Butler Street CDC, and Red Rock Global are leading the project.
Rendering courtesy of Gorman & Company
According to the development team, Sweet Auburn Grande will usher in a “new era of affordable housing and community revitalization” in a historic, downtown-adjacent section of the city that has suffered from disinvestment for generations but is showing signs of a comeback.
A project years in the making that aims to bring vitality to one of Atlanta's most richly historic streets is officially under way.
Officials with Atlanta's Butler Street Community Development Corp. (CDC), Wisconsin-based affordable housing developer Gorman & Company and the national commercial firm Red Rock Global hosted a groundbreaking Dec. 11 for Sweet Auburn Grande, a mixed-use venture in the heart of Georgia's capital city.
According to the development team, Sweet Auburn Grande will usher in a "new era of affordable housing and community revitalization" in a historic, downtown-adjacent section of the city that has suffered from disinvestment for generations but is showing signs of a comeback.
The first phase of the project's finalized plans calls for building 109 multifamily residences along Auburn Avenue at the southeast corner of its intersection with Jesse Hill Jr. Drive. Roughly 8,700 sq. ft. of commercial space will be included at street level, along with structured parking, Urbanize Atlanta reported.
That retail component will be "ideally positioned to serve [Sweet Auburn Grande] residents and the influx of foot traffic from Georgia State University students and visitors to nearby Martin Luther King Jr. historical sites," Gorman officials noted in a news release.
Ninety-two of the 109 apartments will be reserved for residents earning, at most, either 30, 50 or 80 percent of the area median income, while the other 17 units will rent at market rates.
Eventually, the two-phase Sweet Auburn Grande project calls for reviving corners on both the southwest and southeast sides of where Auburn Avenue intersects with Jesse Hill Jr. Drive.
The corners in question are currently dead zones of boarded-up, historically significant buildings and surface parking lots.
"This project is about honoring our community's history while building a brighter future," Alfonza Marshall, Butler Street CDC's board chair, said in a prepared statement.
Bringing Life Back to Historically Significant Part of Town
Just three months prior to the groundbreaking of Sweet Auburn Grande, Invest Atlanta's Board of Directors approved a $28.3 million tax exempt loan that green-lighted the property's closing.
Gorman officials previously told Urbanize Atlanta that the schedule for the first phase of work calls for 23 months of construction, which would put the roughly $56 million project's opening in the fall of 2026.
The initial phase will incorporate the historic but long-vacant Atlanta Life Insurance Building at 229 Auburn Ave., a structure that once housed pioneering Black businesses during the district's heyday, including Atlanta State Savings Bank, the first Black-owned bank in the city and Georgia's first state-chartered Black bank.
First constructed in 1908, the structure more recently housed the Butler Street CDC.
Meanwhile, across the street, the Sweet Auburn project's second phase calls for restoring two more historic structures: the 1920-built former Butler Street YMCA-JD Winston Branch and the Walden Building.
An attractive and functional public greenspace also would be added at the corner at the base of the iconic and towering John Lewis HERO Mural.
Butler Street CDC, which owns the 219 Auburn Ave. property that currently serves as a parking lot, rechristened that corner "Good Trouble John Lewis Memorial Park" in 2022.
Second Phase Could Begin in Late 2025
Gorman officials have said development costs are expected to come in around $18 million for the second phase of the Sweet Auburn Grande project, but restoration work on the former YMCA building would have different funding sources.
Urbanize Atlanta noted that a timeline for construction has yet to emerge as complex financing deals are worked out, but Joel Reed, Gorman's Southeast market president, has said a late 2025 start date for moving the second phase forward is possible.
Gorman plans to oversee the Sweet Auburn project's development, design, construction, and management. For its part, Butler Street CDC will be on board to continue stewardship of the development's historic assets, officials told the online news service.
Elsewhere in Atlanta, Gorman has completed other projects, including the Hamilton Hills affordable housing development across the street from MARTA's westernmost transit station, which opened in October; and the Residences at Westview, a 60-unit affordable housing complex near Westview Cemetery.
The firm also is behind a modern-style, proposed warehouse conversion and expansion that could see nearly 200 more rentals take shape next to MARTA's West End transit hub.
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