When Shaneel Lalani paid $31 million for Underground Atlanta in November 2020, the storied district was mostly mothballed and the city was in the middle of a pandemic. Four years later, the CEO of Lalani Ventures has something to point at: roughly one million visitors came through the complex last year, drawn largely by a nightlife and arts scene that has grown up in Kenny's Alley and the surrounding blocks.
What has not arrived on schedule is the rest of it. In a wide-ranging interview, Lalani and David Tracht, who joined Lalani Ventures two years ago as senior vice president of development after a long commercial real estate career, laid out where the district stands heading into the most consequential year in downtown Atlanta's recent history.
The Upper Alabama bet
The clearest near-term move is food. Tracht said a restaurant row along Upper Alabama Street is very much top-of-mind, though he stopped short of promising it: he put the odds at better than 50 percent that the strategy ends up feeling like a true restaurant row.
The logic is about day parts. Underground's nightlife program works; the hours before dark are the gap. Tracht pointed to a run of recent additions that start to close it, including a food window Masquerade added in Kenny's Alley, Dancin' Crepe, and Utopia, a restaurant and lounge planned for the intersection of Pryor and Wall streets. Lalani Ventures is also negotiating a new lease with Masquerade for a different Kenny's Alley location that would carry a food component of its own.
The demographics support it. The blocks immediately around Upper Alabama are dense with government buildings, and that daytime workforce has historically sustained restaurants in the area.
Housing is still the unlock
Both executives returned to the same point Underground's leadership has been making for years: a genuine resurgence in this part of downtown depends on residents, not just visitors. That belief is now showing up in filings rather than just interviews, with proposals moving on adjacent parcels north of the district.
Large-scale development, Lalani acknowledged, has proven harder and slower than anticipated. Assembling financing, navigating city process, and stabilizing a property of Underground's size and complexity have consumed more of the four years than the buzz-building has.
The 2026 clock
Everything now runs against the 2026 FIFA World Cup, when downtown expects a month of international visitors and spending concentrated within walking distance of Underground's front door. For a district whose central problem has been getting people to show up, a built-in global audience is the kind of forcing function money cannot buy.
Whether Underground converts that month into permanent tenants and permanent residents is the question the next two years will answer.
Original reporting by Josh Green for Urbanize Atlanta, published January 2025.
