For Atlantans who've stared at the still-empty, grassy lot across the street from Atlanta City Hall and wondered what's going on, there was good news in early 2024: the 200-plus workforce apartments long planned there were not dead on arrival.
The Trinity Central Flats project scored 4 percent low-income housing tax credits expected to generate roughly $50 million in funding through the Georgia Department of Community Affairs -- the bulk of the project's expected $72 million cost. The 1.3-acre downtown lot had been the subject of affordable-housing talks for years by that point; it had been more than two years since city leaders picked Radiant Development Partners and the Capitol Hill Neighborhood Development Corporation, a booster group established in the early 1990s, to lead the project.
Plans call for 218 units across 10 stories, mixing affordable and market-rate rentals, rising just south of Atlanta City Hall, with 7,500 square feet of retail fronting Central Avenue. The city's Department of City Planning has described the site as among the city's "most convenient" for transportation and walkability. Most units are set aside for households earning 50 to 80 percent of the area median income. Invest Atlanta approved $3 million in Eastside Tax Allocation District funding for the project the previous fall, and construction was expected to take about 18 months once it broke ground.
The funding news arrived alongside a related transit milestone a short walk east: MARTA had compiled a preliminary land-acquisition blueprint for extending the Atlanta Streetcar from downtown to the BeltLine's Eastside Trail and Ponce City Market. The two-mile extension, estimated at $230 million, would run along Edgewood Avenue, Randolph Street, Auburn Avenue, and Irwin Street, adding five new stops before reaching Ponce City Market's doorstep -- with MARTA at the time eyeing a groundbreaking the following year and first fares by 2028.
By mid-2026, the project would clear its next major milestone, breaking ground on vertical construction.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published March 2024.
