Few American cities have added apartments at intown Atlanta's pace since the pandemic, according to a new analysis of Yardi Matrix data.
Core Atlanta subdistricts recorded more than 11,000 new rental units during a period when apartment construction slowed nationally, in projects that have reshaped the Midtown skyline and parts of downtown. The findings come from RentCafe's Downtown Construction Report, which examined the 50 largest U.S. cities to identify where new-construction and adaptive-reuse rentals are driving urban revival.
The ranking
Since the onset of COVID-19, Midtown and downtown Atlanta together completed 11,130 apartments. Only the downtowns of Washington, D.C., Chicago and Denver delivered more.
The analysis counted buildings with 50 or more units through January of this year, drawing on data stretching back to 1990. By that measure, the current wave appears to be the largest Atlanta has produced in three decades.
The pattern after a crisis
It is not the first time Atlanta has built its way out of a downturn. RentCafe's numbers show apartment construction exploded after the Great Recession as well, with nearly 16,000 units finished in the 2010s. That was twice the previous decade's total and five times what the city produced in the 1990s.
The caveat worth naming
The report groups Midtown and downtown together, and Midtown carries the larger share of those 11,130 units. Downtown's own residential population has grown, but the headline figure describes a corridor rather than the district alone.
That distinction matters because downtown's constraint has always been residents rather than visitors, and the projects that would change it, from the Georgia-Pacific Center conversion to the Centennial Yards towers, are largely still ahead. Central Atlanta Progress counts more than 5,000 additional housing units in planning or development across downtown in the next five years. If those land, the next version of this report should read differently.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published May 2025.
