Building The Stitch — a 17-acre platform over the Downtown Connector between Ted Turner Drive and Piedmont Avenue — requires hundreds of millions of dollars. Maintaining it afterward requires a permanent funding source. On April 23, 2025, Atlanta City Council approved one: a special property tax levied within a half-mile radius of the project site, dedicating the revenue to park management and infrastructure maintenance for the cap once it is built.
The tax district is a signal of institutional commitment. It means the city is not just planning to build The Stitch — it is building the financial structure to sustain it for decades after construction ends.
From Master Plan to Construction Documents
Jennifer Ball of Central Atlanta Progress, the nonprofit leading the project, described the current phase as a transition from vision to engineering. "We now transition into the hard-core design and engineering," she said. "The consultant teams are hard at work, translating those renderings into construction documentation that will allow us to go out and bid the project."
The master plan was expected to receive approval by June 2025. Construction is targeted to begin in late 2026, following the FIFA World Cup — a timeline that positions the first shovels in the ground during a period when downtown Atlanta's international visibility will be at its peak.
What The Stitch Will Include
The project's scope extends beyond green space. The approved plans call for approximately 17 acres of urban park land, transportation enhancements, affordable housing components, and low-cost transit options — all built on a three-quarter-mile platform spanning Interstate 75 and 85.
The affordable housing and transit elements distinguish The Stitch from simpler highway cap projects in other cities. This is not just a park on top of a highway. It is an attempt to build a complete urban neighborhood on land that currently exists as exhaust and noise — reconnecting the communities that the interstate severed when it was constructed through downtown Atlanta in the 1950s and 1960s.
The special tax district ensures that when the park opens, the question of "who pays to keep it clean, safe, and functional" has already been answered.
Original reporting by Amanda Andrews, Georgia Public Broadcasting, April 23, 2025.