A rare piece of mixed-use infill has officially delivered on the Westside. 880 North, a three-story project by OaksATL Community Development at 557 Lindsay Street NW, opened last week with a ribbon cutting led by Mayor Andre Dickens and Invest Atlanta CEO and President Dr. Eloisa Klementich. The address gives the building its name — a nod to its perch at Lindsay and North Avenue in the heart of English Avenue.
The site is small — roughly .13 acres — and the program is deliberately modest: six two-bedroom, one-bath apartments stacked over ground-floor commercial space. Rents will range from $1,239 to $1,614 a month, targeting households earning 50 to 80 percent of Area Median Income. In a housing market that has otherwise pushed English Avenue rents upward, the project delivers non-market-rate units in the middle of a neighborhood that has watched most new construction land elsewhere.
Project leaders have described the ground-floor storefronts as a first for the interior of English Avenue — new-construction, walkable restaurant space in a part of the neighborhood historically bypassed by developers. The bays are zoned for restaurant or mercantile use, and OaksATL has not yet named tenants. That absence is itself part of the pitch: the retail is meant to grow with the block rather than land as a fully-formed destination.
880 North took two years to build on what had been a vacant corner, and the finished project carries a roughly $3 million price tag. The math is unusual: a corner-lot, mixed-use building of six affordable units and street-level retail is exactly the typology urbanists have argued for years should be easier to build, and rarely is.
For English Avenue, the delivery matters less for its unit count than for its precedent. If OaksATL can make the numbers pencil on .13 acres with capped rents, the door opens for similar corners across the Westside — and for a version of downtown-adjacent housing growth that doesn’t start with a five-over-one.
Original reporting: Josh Green (Urbanize Atlanta)