Before/after: How Atlanta's skyline has beefed up in recent years

If Atlanta just feels like a bigger city lately, here’s proof you’re not hallucinating.

As a fun experiment with the end of 2024 approaching, we set out to contrast the skylines of Midtown and downtown today with those same places about four years ago. By way of the same vantage point used in the first photograph to ever publish on Urbanize Atlanta.

So here’s how it started:  

The Midtown/downtown/Connector photo above was taken right as pandemic-stricken 2020 flipped over to 2021. (The amount of parking lots and empty parcels in Midtown being redevelopment at the time seemed truly impressive.) This website debuted in January 2021.

Four years later, we count no less than 15 major projects that have delivered or are under construction now in just that one frame. (Some of them block each other from this angle; and yes, this is just one flank of Midtown and downtown with so many projects from Centennial Yards to north Midtown and central Buckhead not shown.)

For more context, the large-scale developments that didn’t exist four years ago are pinpointed below, spanning from Hanover Midtown to The Legacy at Centennial, a deluxe downtown student housing high-rise.

Also, highlighted in green is a rough approximation of the under-construction 1072 West Peachtree tower’s scale—the tallest building to rise in Atlanta since 1992:  

And of course, no before/after skyline comparison would be complete without a slider!

Below, see in vivid detail how Midtown’s skyline, especially, has densified with thousands of new apartments and several high-rise office buildings (plus one large, standalone parking structure) in less than four years: