In September 2022, Newport RE unveiled the plan that was supposed to change the scale of South Downtown: two residential high-rises facing each other across Broad Street, 18 and 21 stories, more than 650 apartments between them, and ground-floor space for around a dozen retail and restaurant concepts. Up to 20 percent of the units were to be affordable, in partnership with Invest Atlanta. Both buildings were slated to deliver in 2025.
Neither was built. Four years after the renderings landed, Urbanize Atlanta went back to check what became of the plan — and the answer is that the towers were cancelled outright.
What Newport was and what it assembled
Newport RE was the American arm of Germany-based Newport Holdings, and its ambition was not modest. The company assembled holdings across roughly 10 downtown blocks, a portfolio described at the time as the largest collection of historic commercial buildings in the country. The towers were meant to be the vertical exclamation point on all that horizontal acquisition.
The portfolio has since changed hands and changed strategy. April Stammel, Newport's senior vice president, later moved to Atlanta Ventures to lead marketing for the South Downtown effort now underway.
What actually got built
The corner where the east tower was drawn is not empty. El Tesoro and Founders Green occupy it now — a restaurant and a public green rather than 21 stories of apartments. It is a smaller outcome than the rendering promised, and a real one.
Elsewhere downtown, the vertical construction Newport described did eventually arrive, just under other names. Trinity Central Flats broke ground on new housing, and Centennial Yards delivered The Mitchell. The demand thesis behind the Broad Street towers was not wrong; the vehicle was.
Why it is worth revisiting
South Downtown's recent history is a stack of announced megaprojects, and it is easy to lose track of which ones converted. The Newport towers are a useful marker precisely because they did not — a reminder that renderings are not entitlements, and that the blocks between Broad Street and Mitchell Street got their momentum from smaller, finished projects rather than the headline one.
Reported by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, July 22, 2026. Read the full retrospective at Urbanize Atlanta.
