Atlanta Mission has canceled its contract to buy 15.5 acres at 1060 Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway NW in Bankhead, ending a six-month push to build a 900-bed shelter and consolidated services campus on Beltline-fronting land just west of downtown. The agency, the city's largest and oldest homeless services provider, made the decision after meeting with neighbors and finding that most of them opposed concentrating its shelters and programs at a single Westside location, according to Atlanta News First.
The plan Atlanta Mission outlined in February carried an estimated $200 million cost and a tentative 2030 opening. It called for developing roughly seven acres of the site and selling the remaining eight acres to a housing developer. Atlanta Mission, which began as a soup kitchen in the early 1990s, says it serves more than 1,000 men, women and children daily across Atlanta and North Georgia, and it reportedly still intends to build a purpose-built campus with wraparound services somewhere in the city. It has not said where.
Opposition organized under banners including "Westside for Economic Justice," with a March meeting among the flashpoints. Taryn Bell, a Westside resident and founder of Bell Liberty Group who served as a spokesperson for the opposition, told Urbanize Atlanta the fight was never about the Mission's work. She framed it as advocacy for economic mobility and against what she described as the systemic concentration of poverty the neighborhoods have long endured, adding that residents welcome catalytic, transit-oriented development at 1060 Donald Lee Hollowell.
That leaves the property back with The Allen Morris Company, the Florida-based developer that paid $31 million for it in 2022, when Beltline proximity and an expected wave of tech jobs were pulling investors toward the Westside. Allen Morris had planned the Star Metals District here: 1,600 residential units and 700,000 square feet of commercial space, including the adaptive reuse of a 60,000-square-foot warehouse into a town center fronting the Westside Trail, plus tiered seating along Segment 4. Neighborhood groups had asked city leaders to back that market-driven, multi-use plan instead, hoping it would draw a grocery store and other retail.
In a statement issued the afternoon of July 28, Allen Morris said it respects the community's input and appreciates the complexity of finding the right use for the site, and that it remains committed to Bankhead and the Westside Trail and will keep working with community stakeholders and the city. The company had previously declined to comment on the site and the Atlanta Mission deal.
For downtown readers, both halves of the story matter. The Mission's search for a new consolidated campus means the question of where Atlanta concentrates its shelter capacity is still open, and downtown has carried much of that load for decades. Meanwhile the Bankhead parcel sits about a half mile from the 90-acre Westside campus Microsoft shelved indefinitely in early 2023, leaving two of the largest development sites on this stretch of the Beltline waiting on someone's next move.
Original reporting: Urbanize Atlanta (2026-07-28)