Photos: Brick-clad redo of Auburn Avenue corner rounds into shape

A year and ½ after breaking ground, a notable example of both infill and adaptive-reuse development is rounding into shape at a richly historic district in the shadow of downtown Atlanta. 

Following years of planning, design tweaks, and construction that kicked off at the end of 2024, the mixed-use Sweet Auburn Grande project has transformed a formerly moribund and mostly empty block along Auburn Avenue and the Atlanta Streetcar line. 

For phase one, or what’s currently under construction, Sweet Auburn Grande’s plans call for more than 100 multifamily residences along Auburn Avenue, at the southeast corner of the Jesse Hill Jr. Drive intersection. Roughly 8,500 square feet of commercial space will be included at street level, along with a new parking deck.

The project—as led by Wisconsin-based affordable housing developer Gorman & Company and national commercial firm Red Rock Global, alongside Sweet Auburn-based Butler Street Community Development Corporation—is aiming to create a “new era of affordable housing and community revitalization” in a section of the city that’s suffered from disinvestment for generations, officials have said. 

Finalized plans call for 109 apartments, with 92 of them reserved for residents earning, at most, either 30, 50, or 80 percent of the Area Median Income. Seventeen of the apartments will rent for market-rate.

The walkable retail component will aim to serve Sweet Auburn Grande residents, Georgia State University students, and visitors to nearby Martin Luther King Jr. historical sites, as Gorman officials have said. 

Eventually, the two-phase Sweet Auburn Grande project calls for reviving corners across the street from each other, on the southwest and southeast sides of where Auburn Avenue meets Jesse Hill Jr. Drive. 

The initial phase is restoring and incorporating the historic but long-vacant 229 Auburn building (Atlanta Life Insurance Building). That structure once housed pioneering Black businesses during the district’s heyday, including Atlanta State Savings Bank, the first Black-owned bank in the city and Georgia’s first state-chartered Black bank. The building was constructed in 1908 and more recently housed the Butler Street CDC.

Meanwhile, across the street, the Sweet Auburn Grande project’s second phase calls for restoring two more historic structures: the 1920 former Butler Street YMCA-JD Winston Branch and the Walden Building. An attractive, functional public greenspace would also be added at the corner, at the base of the iconic, towering John Lewis HERO Mural.

Butler Street CDC, which owns the 219 Auburn Ave. property that’s currently a parking lot, rechristened that corner “Good Trouble John Lewis Memorial Park” in 2022. No concrete timeline for phase-two construction has been announced. 

Gorman’s construction timeline calls for delivering the first apartments at Sweet Auburn Grande later this year. 

Phase one is expected to cost roughly $56 million, Gorman officials previously told Urbanize Atlanta. Invest Atlanta’s Board of Directors in 2024 approved a $28.3 million tax exempt loan that green-lighted the property’s closing.  

Following construction, Gorman plans to oversee the Sweet Auburn project’s management, too. Butler Street CDC, meanwhile, will be on board to continue stewardship of Sweet Auburn’s historic assets, officials have said. 

In recent years, Gorman has been on a building spree around Atlanta, debuting its first project in Westview and another near MARTA’s Hamilton E. Holmes station in 2024, with another proposal near the Mall West End redevelopment also in the pipeline. 

Another Gorman development with an adaptive-reuse component, Folio House (formerly the Atlanta Constitution Building), is under construction but paused for 2026 FIFA World Cup on the flipside of downtown, while the company’s proposed remake of historic church property elsewhere downtown is gearing up to break ground soon, company officials have said. 

In the gallery above, find more context and a close look at where the Sweet Auburn Grande project stands today. 

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