Downtown's most ambitious office-to-residential conversion is off. Georgia-Pacific has discontinued its plan to remake the upper floors of Georgia-Pacific Center, its 51-story headquarters on Peachtree Street, into more than 400 apartments, along with new retail and a public plaza at its base.
Suzanne Maynard, Georgia-Pacific's head of real estate development in Atlanta, announced the decision on Sept. 4. In a statement, she said the company had put significant time, capital and resources into the effort, but higher construction costs and broader market headwinds changed the economics of a project at this scale.
What was planned
The proposal surfaced two years ago as a mixed-use makeover billed as one of the largest adaptive-reuse projects of its kind in the country. Offices on the tower's uppermost floors would have become some of the highest apartments in the Southeast. The design cleared the city's permit hurdle in early 2025, and by this spring the team had laid out a detailed scope: 30 percent of the apartments priced for households earning 50 to 80 percent of area median income, with teachers, nurses, hospitality workers and families in mind, and a groundbreaking targeted for late 2026.
The first phase also called for 80,000 square feet of restaurants, shops and entertainment, a landscaped plaza of about an acre facing Peachtree Street and the Atlanta Streetcar with a MARTA connection, and 600,000 square feet of Class A offices anchored by Georgia-Pacific and Koch. Later phases floated a hotel and more homes and retail.
Why it stalled
Even in March, Maynard cautioned that the project hinged on a strong public-private partnership, including city-approved financing tools, aligning land the company already controls and landing the right capital partners. Georgia-Pacific had also held out its adjacent six-acre block as a redevelopment bargaining chip. Those pieces did not come together.
The cancellation follows a pattern in downtown Atlanta, where large new residential projects have proven hard to finance outside of student housing and the towers rising at Centennial Yards. Smaller historic conversions have fared better, including the 26 apartments that opened this year inside Eighty Five Peachtree.
The tower stays put
The building itself is not going anywhere. Opened in 1982 and designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, the 697-foot tower is clad in pink granite quarried in Marble Falls, Texas, and is known for its stair-stepped eastern face and changeable lighting. At 1.3 million square feet, it remains Georgia-Pacific's world headquarters and one of the most recognizable shapes on the skyline, now ranked as the city's seventh-tallest.
What the decision removes is a near-term path to hundreds of new downtown residents on one of Peachtree Street's busiest corridors. Whether the company revisits a smaller version, or the six-acre block finds another use, is the next thing to watch.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta.
