On April 1, 2026, Governor Brian Kemp, Mayor Andre Dickens, and City Councilmember Liliana Bakhtiari gathered at a ribbon-cutting ceremony for a building that had been standing in Sweet Auburn for 114 years. The Odd Fellows building — one of the oldest structures in the neighborhood that served as the heart of Black Atlanta for a century — had been repurposed as Georgia Works Village, a transitional housing facility for approximately 160 men experiencing chronic homelessness.
Georgia Works, the organization behind the program, has been operating since 2013. More than 1,200 men have completed its yearlong residential program, which combines workforce training, employment placement, counseling services, and mandatory sobriety and job participation. Graduates can move into affordable housing units within the building starting at $500 per month — a price point that represents a genuine pathway from the street to a stable address.
The Funding
Governor Kemp approved $50 million in state budget funding for chronic homelessness programs — a figure that reflects the scale of the crisis and the political will to address it with real money rather than symbolic gestures. Mayor Dickens framed the project within his administration's broader housing goal: 20,000 affordable units by 2030, with 13,000 already created or in pipeline.
The Philosophy
Bill McGahan, who founded Georgia Works, described the program's goal with a directness that captures the tension between ambition and realism in homelessness work: "Our goal always is to put ourselves out of business." The hope is that the program will eventually be unnecessary — that the systems creating chronic homelessness will be addressed upstream. Until then, a 114-year-old building in Sweet Auburn is giving 160 men a year to rebuild.
The Odd Fellows building joins The Melody on Forsyth Street as the second major adaptive reuse housing project in the downtown core within two years — evidence that Atlanta is beginning to use its historic building stock to address its most urgent human need.
Original reporting by GPB News, Georgia Public Broadcasting, April 3, 2026.