In booming Blandtown, mixed-use project moves forward

A years-long development frenzy appears set to continue in the BeltLine-connected Blandtown neighborhood west of Midtown.

Charlotte-based Crescent Communities, an active Atlanta builder with multifamily projects dotted from Buckhead to Old Fourth Ward and the southside suburbs, filed permitting paperwork Thursday to start transforming low-density lots on Huff Road into a mix of apartments and retail.

The filings shed light for the first time on a project title—Novel Blandtown—that echoes other Crescent Communities ventures across the country and doesn’t shy away from the historic neighborhood’s atypical name.

According to filings this week, the first Novel Blandtown component to move forward with construction would be a concrete structure with 34 apartments, a leasing center, retail shell, amenities, and an internal courtyard and plaza.

The proposal calls for redeveloping a total of 3.03 acres at 1095 and 1121 Huff Road, located across the street from AuthenTEAK Furniture and other businesses.

Part of the acreage is currently home to a showroom for home improvement store PDI Kitchen, Bath, and Lighting. A vacant, triangular lot next door is also included in redevelopment plans.

Replacing that would be a seven-story multifamily building with 250 units and the 4,700-square-foot, one-story structure for retail topped with a patio overlooking Huff Road, according to project designers Niles Bolton Associates architects.

Plans also call for roughly 330 parking spaces in a new garage and surface lots, plus about 50 spaces for bicycle parking, according to a BeltLine Design Review Committee meeting in early 2023.

To comply with the BeltLine’s Inclusionary Zoning Ordinance, 10 percent of the apartments will be reserved for tenants earning 60 percent of the area median income or less, per the BeltLine DRC.  

The newest section of the BeltLine’s Westside Trail opened about two blocks away, directly west, in fall 2022. Now, a Northwest Trail segment of the BeltLine linking to Buckhead is under construction just to the north.

Practically next door to the Novel Blandtown proposal, Crescent Communities also built a 340-apartment community called Novel West Midtown that opened in late 2023 on Fairmont Avenue. Ten percent of those apartments were also reserved as affordable housing, as BeltLine inclusionary zoning rules in the area dictate.

Crescent Communities also recently sold a mid-rise project finished in 2022 along Spring Street in Atlanta, Novel Midtown, to California-based real estate firm Goldrich Kest.

The Blandtown plans would continue an explosion in residential product for the historically industrial neighborhood over the past five years.

Neighboring residential projects that have claimed underused Blandtown parcels include Minerva Homes’ 34-unit Hayden Westside townhomes and Empire Communities’ sprawling Longreen project, which is consuming an area roughly equivalent to three city blocks along Huff Road.

The insatiable development along the Huff Road corridor is the driving force behind what’s called the Huff Road Multimodal Study. That initiative is striving to eventually “reimagine [the] industrial freight corridor as an accessible, safe, and multimodal network, in line with the community’s goal of creating a restorative urban environment,” according to the Atlanta Regional Commission, which contributed $200,000 to the effort last year. 

As is, Huff Road includes two traffic lanes (and spotty sidewalks) for most of its length between Howell Mill Road and Marietta Boulevard, where it meets the BeltLine corridor.

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