A year and a half after groundbreaking, the block along Auburn Avenue at the southeast corner of Jesse Hill Jr. Drive no longer reads as a gap. Sweet Auburn Grande's first phase is close enough to complete that the brick is doing its job, and the project has done the harder thing in a district this historically loaded: it has added density without erasing what was already standing.
Phase one lands at 109 apartments, with 92 reserved for households earning at most 30, 50 or 80 percent of the Area Median Income and the remaining 17 renting at market rate. Roughly 8,500 square feet of commercial space fills the street level, backed by a new parking deck. The retail is aimed at three overlapping audiences that already move through this corridor daily: the building's own residents, Georgia State students, and visitors headed to the Martin Luther King Jr. historical sites a few blocks east.
The development team is a three-way arrangement, with Wisconsin-based affordable housing developer Gorman & Company and national commercial firm Red Rock Global working alongside the Sweet Auburn-based Butler Street Community Development Corporation. That last name is the reason the project reads as restoration rather than arrival. Butler Street CDC has been holding assets on this stretch for decades.
The most consequential piece of the phase is the smallest. The long-vacant building at 229 Auburn, the 1908 Atlanta Life Insurance Building, is being restored and folded into the development. It once housed Atlanta State Savings Bank, the first Black-owned bank in the city and Georgia's first state-chartered Black bank, and more recently served as Butler Street CDC's own home. Bringing it back is the difference between a new apartment building on Auburn Avenue and a piece of Auburn Avenue continuing.
Phase one carries a roughly $56 million price tag, unlocked in 2024 when Invest Atlanta's board approved a $28.3 million tax-exempt loan that allowed the property to close. Gorman expects to deliver the first apartments later this year and will manage the property afterward, while Butler Street CDC stays on to steward the historic assets.
Phase two is the corner across the street, where the 1920 Butler Street YMCA-JD Winston Branch and the Walden Building are slated for restoration alongside a public greenspace at the base of the John Lewis HERO Mural. Butler Street CDC rechristened that parking lot at 219 Auburn Ave. as Good Trouble John Lewis Memorial Park in 2022. No construction timeline has been announced, which leaves the district's most symbolically charged corner still waiting.
Gorman has been unusually active around Atlanta, with completed projects in Westview and near MARTA's Hamilton E. Holmes station and a proposal in the pipeline near the Mall West End redevelopment. Its Folio House conversion of the old Atlanta Constitution Building sits paused across downtown for the duration of the World Cup, and a separate remake of historic church property downtown is preparing to break ground.
Original reporting: Urbanize Atlanta (July 8, 2026)