At long last, groundbreaking nears for downtown affordable housing block

Should developers’ plans come to fruition, one downtown Atlanta block could see a mini boom in affordable housing construction in coming months, with two separate projects underway next door to each other. 

The Invest Atlanta Board of Directors last week approved new financing structures—and millions of additional dollars—for a mixed-use project called Trinity Central Flats that’s been in the pipeline since the waning days of the COVID-19 pandemic but hasn’t managed to break ground, officials tell Urbanize Atlanta. 

That’s set to change soon, with a groundbreaking now scheduled for the fourth quarter of this year, according to Invest Atlanta. Trinity Central Flats calls for retail space and 218 apartments reserved as affordable housing rising from a vacant but centrally located corner across the street from Atlanta City Hall. 

At a site immediately to the east, affordable housing developer Gorman & Company plans to break ground next spring on a 16-story affordable housing tower as part of The Sanctuary, a $41.3-million remake of Trinity United Methodist Church’s historic campus. That project will include 89 mixed-income units, per Gorman. 

With the public-private Trinity Central Flats, Invest Atlanta had previously approved $72 million to cover development costs, but that no longer appears sufficient. The revised amount recently approved by Invest Atlanta’s board is $90.3 million, including $45 million in tax exempt bond financing. 

According to Invest Atlanta, Trinity Central Flats is expected to take two years to build, putting its projected opening in late 2027. 

In addition to 218 apartments, the 104 Trinity Ave. project calls for 7,500 square feet of retail space along Central Avenue, facing Atlanta City Hall, to help activate that downtown thoroughfare.  

All of the units will be offered at below-market rates, capped for renters earning 80 percent of the area median income or less. The vast majority—193 apartments total—will be reserved at either 50 or 60 percent AMI, according to Invest Atlanta.   

No resident will be required to pay more than 30 percent of their income, as Atlanta Housing’s HomeFlex vouchers will be available for supportive housing units. 

The development team behind the Trinity Central Flats proposal filed for building permits in October with Atlanta’s Department of City Planning, lending false hope construction was near. According to those filings, the 10-story, brick-and-precast project at the southeast corner of Trinity and Central avenues will top at 123 feet tall at the .84-acre site. A bicycle storage room with exterior access, an arts and crafts room, a computer lab, a gym, a laundry facility, and other communal spaces are in the works.

Vacant and fenced-off for well over a decade, the Trinity Central Flats site is within walking distance of three MARTA stations, as city officials have noted in calling it one of Atlanta’s “most convenient locations.”

The Atlanta City Council voted unanimously in spring 2021 to offload the corner parcel for $1 to Invest Atlanta.

Invest Atlanta lists Radiant Development Partners and Capitol Hill Neighborhood Development Corporation, a neighborhood booster group established in the early 1990s, as project leaders.

The development team was picked in December 2021 following a public selection process. Elsewhere in Atlanta, Radiant is a partner in a Beltline-adjacent project with an affordable housing component near Lindbergh.

Designs by architecture firm SSOE/Stevens & Wilkinson also call for an 18,000-square-foot urban garden atop a connected, existing parking deck next door—and the largest solar array on any multifamily building in Georgia, officials have said.

Those green, sustainable facets are expected to reduce energy use in the building’s common areas by 30 percent, bringing down residential utility bills in the process.

The Trinity Avenue property will remain under Invest Atlanta’s ownership and be leased for 99 years instead of sold outright. That arrangement, as city officials put it in 2021, is meant to help developers “achieve deeper, longer-term affordability for residents and local businesses by saving millions of dollars otherwise spent on land acquisition in a traditional property sale.”

Find more imagery and context for the Trinity Central Flats project in the gallery above.

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