Longtime Atlanta developer Brock Built Homes’ decision to build townhouses along the former Bankhead Highway with prices more commonly found on the eastside has been attracting media attention—and raising eyebrows—since the Oliver Street Townhomes launched in 2019.

But buyers’ appetites continue to suggest Brock Built was onto something when forecasting what the Westside market can handle.

With most prices in the $400,000s, the Oliver Street venture has sold out all 30 townhomes in English Avenue. Since breaking ground in summer 2019, that project attracted headlines as Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway’s first significant residential investment in ages—but also a source of displacement fears in a neighborhood with median household incomes of about $35,000.

Now, Brock Built’s next big Westside bet is off to a roaring start about five blocks away in Bankhead.

The 61-home site plan in Bankhead, with available townhouses under contract right now marked in orange. Courtesy of Brock Built Homes/Ten29 West

Originally named The Finley, the 61-unit townhouse project is now called Ten29 West. Listing services indicate that every home available is under contract, priced from $517,700 to just shy of $586,000.

Brock Built’s website shows that 19 homes, or almost 1/3 of the community, have pending sales, and that more will be listed soon, now starting in the high $500,000s.  

Those numbers are taking prices in Bankhead—where no single dwelling has sold for even $350,000 in recent years—to another level.

So what gives? A flurry of private and public investment in the area is certainly helping the homebuilder's cause. 

How living rooms would be situated in units of about 2,300 square feet.Courtesy of Brock Built Homes/Ten29 West

Ten29 West is rising on about 4 acres along Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway, west of Midtown, between what Brock Built describes as “two tech giants”—Georgia Tech, and Microsoft’s forthcoming 90-acre campus near MARTA’s Bankhead Station.

The townhomes back up to a new BeltLine connecting trail and stand roughly three blocks from Microsoft’s property. Beyond that is Westside Park, which is being built at the former Bellwood Quarry. The Maddox Park greenspace and MARTA’s Bankhead Station are nearby, too.

Atlanta Mayor Kiesha Lance Bottoms’ one-year moratorium on new building permits and rezoning in the area—a product of “rapid gentrification” concerns around the quarry park—ended in March.

More recently, the Ten29 West project was the focus of a column by the AJC’s Bill Torpy titled, “$500K homes: Going for broke in once-broken swath of Atlanta,” which chronicled local vantage points ranging from fears of “massive, intractable gentrification” to a Bankhead landowner saying “change is a good thing.”

A glimpse at the community's planned rooftop patios. Each home will have three bedrooms and three and ½ bathrooms, with a standard size of 2,300 square feet. Brock Built Homes/Ten29 West; designs, Goode Van Slyke Architecture

Steve Brock, head of Brock Built Homes, told Torpy his Westside strategy has boiled down to: “You want a few successes early on and you price them aggressively; then you can raise prices” to break the ice in formerly undesirable areas in west and northwest Atlanta, where Brock has built around 2,000 houses and townhomes since the late 1990s.

"You could call him Atlanta’s Gentrification King or The Prince of Renaissance," Torpy wrote, "once again, depending on your vantage point." 

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