An affordable housing project coming together in Westside Atlanta is offering what backers call an innovative new model and chance to live stylishly on the cheap.
Tenth Street Ventures, a veteran of older apartment renovations in places like Buckhead and Midtown, has teamed with Alexander Goshen and ARRC Capital Partners to remake a vacant apartment complex in the Hunter Hills neighborhood, just west of Vine City and Washington Park.
The team closed on the 20-unit, garden-style property last week.
The apartment location just west of Atlanta BeltLine corridor that extends up from the Westside Trail's current terminus in Washington Park. Google Maps
Plans call for doubling the number of apartments to 40 studio units, fully furnishing them, and renting all at rates attainable for people earning 60 percent of the area’s median income.
According to Fannie Mae, the AMI for Hunter Hills is about $82,000. That means anyone earning around $49,000 or less would qualify for the apartments.
The deal was funded by an Atlanta Affordable Housing Fund loan, with The American South Real Estate Fund providing equity, and it required no subsidies, according to TSV reps.
The property includes two apartment buildings, totaling just shy of 12,000 square feet, built in 1960 in Hunter Hills—one of Atlanta’s few planned Black communities of its time and a magnet for both blue and white-collar homeowners beginning in the 1940s.
A planned extension of the BeltLine’s Westside Trail would be built about two blocks east. Microsoft’s investment at the former Quarry Yards site and the nearly finished Westside Park are less than a mile north of the apartments.
The vacant 1960s complex today. Courtesy of Tenth Street Ventures
Brian McCarthy, a TSV principal, said the furnished apartments will drastically reduce the burden of moving costs. A “substantial amount of art and design” is planned for each unit, with a goal making tenants proud of their homes, as part of a programs called A.L.L., or Affordable Lifestyle Living, McCarthy said in a release.
“Through the use of art and design,” added Miles Alexander III, a principal at Alexander Goshen, “we’re creating a new standard of affordable living.”
Focused on 10 states across the South, ASREF is an impact fund that finances projects aiming to positively impact low-income and moderate-income communities in need of economic and community boosts.
Meanwhile, AAHF’s mission is “to raise and deploy $25 million in low-cost capital while generating a modest return to its investors,” per the organization.
So far, the fund has raised $13 million from donors and committed half of that to developers the group deems as mission-driven or nonprofit.
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