Images: How latest residential bet is stacking up near southside Beltline

Just a few weeks before the next sections of Southside Trail are scheduled to open in January (tentatively, following delays), another large-scale residential build that’s aiming to capitalize on Atlanta Beltline fervor is starting to round into shape.  

Atlanta-based developer TPA Residential is building a nearly 300-unit mix of housing types across an 8.2-acre Boulevard Heights site once home to a city-operated drinking water chlorination facility that had been a massive, abandoned landfill capped with fill-dirt for years. 

Remediation efforts that took nearly three years to complete created what locals had derisively dubbed “trash mountain,” or “Mount Rubbish.” But that’s been cleared for infrastructure and vertical construction.  

The 1104 Avondale Ave. project is located less than two blocks from the Beltline’s under-construction Southside Trail sections and Grant Park.

According to paperwork filed with the city in 2023, TPA plans to start development with a single 212,000-square-foot building with 228 housing units. Partially clad in brick, that section is standing over Avondale Avenue now. 

Full construction is scheduled to continue throughout 2025, with delivery of the first units expected early next year. 

Beyond that mid-rise building, TPA’s scope calls for 63 rental townhomes in 10 structures situated closer to United Avenue, according to site plans. As required by zoning, a small retail space will be included in one corner of the multifamily building.

The project could be called “The Garrison,” a nod to a Georgia National Guard outpost near the site, as a project official told Urbanize Atlanta in April. 

Remediation and removal of the landfill reportedly cost $7 million, and TPA plans to spend another $1 million building a better Beltline connection with lighting and landscaping.

Officials have said roughly 150,000 yards of garbage had to be removed before the site could be ready for construction. Two previous development efforts by other companies at the site sputtered and ultimately pulled out.

The Development Authority of Fulton County approved a $3.7-million tax abatement for TPA to help with cleaning up the site in 2022. The development was also approved for the Brownfield Tax Credit Program for “the voluntary cleanup and redevelopment of an environmentally contaminated site,” per TPA’s project website. 

Fifteen percent of the apartments and townhomes will be reserved as affordable housing, as required by Beltline inclusionary housing rules, per TPA’s plans. Prior to remediation delays, earlier schedules had called for delivering the first units in spring or summer 2024. 

TPA’s plans for the apartments (ranging from studios up to three-bedroom options) call for 43 units to be reserved for tenants earning 80 percent of the area median income or less, according to earlier filings.

The Avondale Avenue project joins other pockets of recent development near the southeastern-most Beltline corridor, where construction on the next 1.2-mile stretch of the Southside Trail began in June 2023. 

Empire Communities’ the Swift, a large townhome project with 120 units, claimed another vacant parcel next door several years ago.

Down the street, TPA also built a 275-unit project called The Penman on 6 acres that directly front the Beltline, near the Southside Trail’s intersection with Boulevard. About 7,000 square feet of adaptive-reuse retail space was included in that project, too. 

Swing up to the gallery for more current project images and context. 

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