Details come to light for Bowen Homes redevelopment's first stages

Plans are coming into clearer focus for the redevelopment of a long-vacant public housing site on Atlanta’s Westside that secured a significant boost of federal funding last year.

Invest Atlanta officials recently relayed phase-one development plans and a rendering for what’s called “Bowen Homes I,” the initial phase of a mixed-income community with more than 150 residences and a greenspace component included.

Fifteen years ago, Bowen Homes became the last of Atlanta’s major family housing projects to be razed, and the site has been abandoned since. The 74 acres in question are located just inside the Interstate 285 Perimeter, near the intersection of James Jackson Parkway and Donald Lee Hollowell Parkway.

Invest Atlanta’s Board of Directors has authorized a $1.5 million Hollowell/M.L. King Tax Allocation District grant, in addition to $1.5 million in Series 2021 Housing Opportunity Bonds, to help finance the Bowen Homes development.

Agency leaders predict the project will transform the surrounding Brookview Heights neighborhood and revitalize “a historically neglected and environmentally stressed area… into a place of natural, social, and economic regeneration,” according to an Invest Atlanta project update.  

Multi-building plans at Bowen Homes I call for 151 apartments total. Of those, 48 will be reserved for households earning 30 percent of the area median income, while 49 will be capped at 60 percent AMI. The rest will rent at market-rate, according to Invest Atlanta.

The Bowen Homes initiative was one of five affordable housing resolutions Invest Atlanta’s Board approved last month. So far in 2024, the agency has closed on financing for 735 affordable housing units, with expectations of that number exceeding 2,000 units by year’s end, according to agency leaders.

In summer 2023, the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development announced a $40 million federal grant to kickstart Atlanta’s Bowen Choice Neighborhood program, a revitalization effort for the former Bowen Homes and surrounding Westside properties. The HUD grant aims to help the City of Atlanta eventually transform the bones of Bowen Homes into more than 2,000 housing units for renters and homebuyers, officials said at the time.

Other aspects of the redevelopment call for a Community Resources Center and Innovation Hub that will offer Bowen Homes’ residents job-training opportunities and affordable commercial space. In late 2022, Atlanta Housing selected a redevelopment team called Bowen District Developers—led by The Benoit Group and McCormack Baron Salazar real estate companies—to bring the area back to life.

Backed by U.S. Senators Jon Ossoff and Rev. Raphael Warnock and Congresswoman Nikema Williams (GA-05), Atlanta Housing and officials with Mayor Andre Dickens administration formally applied in early 2023 for HUD’s Choice Neighborhoods Implementation Grant. The project’s scope calls for rebuilding the Bowen Homes site and next-door neighborhood Carey Park, along with a section of Almond Park.

Bowen Homes was built in the early 1960s as a model multifamily community in what was then considered Atlanta’s western suburbs, counting its own library, school, and eventually some 4,000 residents.

By 2008, the 650 apartments spread across 102 buildings had devolved into a sore spot of crime and a magnet for the drug trade—typifying the ills of the American public housing experiment. According to Atlanta Housing, Bowen Homes experienced 168 violent crimes in just a six-month period that year, including five murders.

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