Just south of Ponce City Market, at the southeast corner of Fortune Street and Ralph McGill Boulevard, three standalone homes have topped out at four stories apiece. The corner had held a boarded-up house for years; construction on the replacements began last fall.
The homes come from Sunny Etc., the design-build firm led by Senya Zaitsev. Each will total roughly 2,700 square feet of heated space, with four bedrooms, a study, three and a half bathrooms, and a rooftop deck rated for a hot tub with city views. Other features include lock-off suites, elevator infrastructure, small yards, decks off the living areas, and two-car garages reached from the rear. Zaitsev has said he expects them to price around $1.4 million each; none have listed yet.
The more interesting part of the story is what the corner was originally going to be. Zaitsev has said his firm first planned a "missing middle" approach: a three-story, 12-unit multifamily building with an affordability component, permissible under the MR-MU zoning typology the City of Atlanta adopted in 2019 for exactly this kind of infill. The intent was to echo the apartments and townhomes already standing on nearby blocks.
Area homeowners opposed the proposal in 2021, and Sunny Etc. changed course. Twelve units with an affordability component became three houses at $1.4 million.
That trade is a fairly precise illustration of what the missing-middle debate looks like at the parcel level in Old Fourth Ward, a neighborhood where proximity to Historic Fourth Ward Park and the BeltLine's Eastside Trail has been driving prices for 15 years.
Sunny Etc. has built in the category before. The firm completed Winton Flats in 2023, described at the time as Atlanta's original missing-middle housing concept, and its portfolio includes the Metro Ville modern townhomes in Mechanicsville, which sold out in the late 2010s.
For what it is worth, the location scores well on the metrics buyers check: a Walk Score of 83 and a Bike Score of 83, both rated very walkable and very bikeable. The Transit Score of 53 rates as merely good transit - though it has improved two points in the past year.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published May 2026.
