Exclusive: Beside Beltline, affordable housing communities under contract

Weeks before a highly anticipated new section of the Atlanta Beltline is scheduled to open, an active intown developer placed two large nodes of affordable housing beside the trail under contract, with expectations of closing this year, Urbanize Atlanta has learned. 

Officials with Wingate Companies, best known as longtime property owners and developers along Boulevard in Old Fourth Ward, confirm they are under contract to buy Trestletree Village Apartments commnities in southeast Atlanta. What may become of the existing rentals remains to be seen. 

A pending deal was reached between Wingate and Trestletree Village’s out-of-state ownership group just before Christmas. No residents are expected to be displaced in the short-term, or permanently as site plans come together, per Wingate. 

Developed between the early 1940s and 1950s, Trestletree Village consists of garden-style, two-story residential buildings spread across two Section 8 communities on opposite sides of the Beltline’s Southside Trail corridor, totaling about 21 acres. 

As Beltline-adjacent properties go on Atlanta's eastern flank, that's a colossal amount of acreage.  

The Trestletree North section is in Grant Park, and Trestletree South in Ormewood Park, counting a total of 188 units. According to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, current rents at Trestletree Village range between $479 and $812 monthly for qualified renters required to pay no more than 30 percent of their income. All units have two bedrooms.  

John Tatum, senior vice president of affordable housing at Wingate, said his company expects to remain in a due diligence phase for at least the next month, with hopes of closing on Trestletree Village by the middle of this year. Several redevelopment or preservation scenarios for the Beltline-neighboring properties could be viable, he said. 

“[We’ll] explore options that range from preservation in its current form to potentially some sort of renovation that would involve preservation of the [property’s] HUD contract and no displacement, similar to what we’ve worked on with City Lights in the Fourth Ward,” Tatum tells Urbanize Atlanta. With the latter project, “we essentially built new construction and moved the HUD subsidy around and were able to deliver much higher-quality housing than you can achieve on a renovation.”

Wingate has worked to redevelop its holdings and new acquisitions near Boulevard for more than a decade, with potentially more public-private development on additional sites to come, Tatum said. The company expects to deliver 733 total units across the first six phases of City Lights. The success of that model led Wingate to pursue buying Trestletree Village, Tatum said. 

Beltline construction next door wasn’t the only enticing aspects of the sites, he said. 

“We like to work on projects that provide affordable housing in high-opportunity areas, and so I think for me seeing the investment on the Beltline certainly was interesting, but we’re also interested in preserving affordable housing in a high-opportunity, intown community like Grant Park.

“Any redevelopment [of Trestletree Village] is probably a four-year-away process, between allocations in housing, credits, and all these other things,” Tatum continued. “We’re very much at the schematic stage.” 

Officials with current Trestletree Village ownership group Steele Properties and Monroe Group didn’t return a request for comment this week. Trestletree Village owners listed in Fulton County property records are an LLC called CHC Trestletree, based in Denver. 

Tatum said Wingate’s near-term plan, should the sale close, is to deploy a management team to Trestletree Village to remedy issues with units that residents have faced. “There’s not a number of glaring things we have to address that are significant, but trying to bring the property up to our standard is our goal,” he said. “That can be a lot of small things.” 

Next door to both apartment coves, the Beltline’s 1.2-mile Southside Trail Segments 4 and 5 are scheduled to be open for public use early this year, though work on ancillary trail components such as ramps will continue. Final concrete pours for the mainline trail are underway now. 

The Trestletree Village properties have various regulatory agreements attached beyond a Section 8 contract that protect their uses as affordable housing. But Tatum says a path could exist to redevelopment of some kind that would offer a type of commercial use onsite, in addition to new residential, as Beltline patrons consistently ask for. 

“It’s still very early. We’re still very much in the exploratory phase,” said Tatum. “It’s a community process—it will take time. I encourage people to be patient as we go through the steps to see what’s possible.” 

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• Ormewood Park news, discussion (Urbanize Atlanta)