Development

Will Lulah Hills and its 2.5 million-square-foot campus with 320,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space, 1,700 multifamily units, 100 townhomes, and a 150 room hotel enrich North DeKalb? Time will tell.

What Newport had toiled for seven years to accumulate took David Cummings less than two months to purchase, through deals with seven different lenders. As of this writing, Atlanta Ventures’ new LLC, SoDo Atlanta, now owns all of Newport’s former holdings, save one. Cummings isn’t disclosing yet what he paid for such a hefty chunk of downtown, but says he’s pleased with the sale price: “You never know what something’s worth, [but] it feels good right now.”

These are Atlanta's 500 most powerful leaders. We spent months consulting experts and sorting through nominations to get a list of the city's most influential people—from artists to chefs to philanthropists to sports coaches and corporate CEOs. In this section, we focus on architecture and design, commercial contractors, commercial real estate brokers, commercial real estate sponsors, residential real estate brokers, and residential real estate developers.

Wedged between Monroe Drive and Piedmont Park, Amsterdam Walk is a quirky commercial area populated by about two-dozen small businesses. The BeltLine-adjacent shopping center is slated for a major overhaul by Atlanta developer Portman Holdings. Here are renderings for the project and what we know so far.

At this point, it’s not just rundown. Not merely blighted, or even postapocalyptic. It’s like a 15-story set for one of the Saw movies—all bleak corridors, scary shadows, busted concrete, and bad graffiti. And unfortunately, the former Presidential Hotel serves as a sort of cylindrical front door for not just DeKalb County but all of ITP Atlanta, at least for anyone headed down from, say, Lilburn, Buford, or Charlotte. It’s been called one of the metro’s most visible buildings and one of its worst eyesores.

The excitement about new development obscures an awkward fact that the city and developers have to reckon with: Downtown already has more buildings than it has people who want to occupy them. It already has more road, rail, and bus capacity than any eastern U.S. downtown south of Washington, D.C. On weekdays, there are plenty of people there. The problem is that, at 5 p.m. on Fridays, the place clears out. Downtown Atlanta is often filled with a large, diverse group of people, but not many of them are residents.

Darin Givens—cofounder of ThreadATL, a nonprofit advocacy organization that aims to influence city planning and policy—explains why this cross-section of Forsyth and Poplar streets in the Fairlie-Poplar District has it all.

Eviscerating a century-old office building and refashioning it into apartments is no easy feat. Older offices are nonpliable, stubborn things, riddled with secret problems and outdated floor plans. But the hassle was worth it for Centennial Yards Company, the developer behind a 162-unit project called the Lofts at Centennial Yards South, a remake of half of the long-vacant Norfolk Southern Buildings.

These are Atlanta's 500 most powerful leaders. We spent months consulting experts and sorting through nominations to get a list of the city's most influential people—from artists to chefs to philanthropists to sports coaches and corporate CEOs. In this section, we focus on architecture and design, commercial contractors, commercial real estate brokers, commercial real estate sponsors, residential real estate brokers, and residential real estate developers.

The developers behind Atlantic Station and Colony Square are redesigning the Marietta shopping center. Here’s what it will look like.