Ambitious downtown Atlanta office tower conversion plans cancelled

Two years after they first came to light, ambitious plans for injecting one of Atlanta’s tallest and most recognizable office buildings with a sky-high mix of apartments and retail have fallen apart. 

Owners of Georgia-Pacific Center, a downtown landmark for four decades, in September 2024 unveiled adaptive-reuse plans for converting the 51-story tower into mixed uses with some of the highest apartments in the Southeast—an undertaking called one of the largest redevelopments of its type in the U.S. 

But today Suzanne Maynard, Georgia-Pacific head of real estate development in Atlanta, said project leaders have made the decision to discontinue the redevelopment. It joins a growing list of potentially transformative but shelved large-scale developments across the city—including other downtown towers at Underground Atlanta, South Downtown, and near Centennial Olympic Park. 

“We have invested significant time, capital, and resources to bring this project to life,” said Maynard in a statement, “but higher construction costs and broader market headwinds changed the economic viability of the project at this scale.”

When we last checked with Georgia-Pacific officials in March, they were optimistic the conversion could break ground late this year but noted a number of variables still stood in the way. 

Updated plans called for capping 30 percent of more than 400 apartments at rates deemed affordable for households earning between 50 and 80 percent of the Area Median Income, with a special focus on families, essential workers, teachers, nurses, hospitality employees, and younger corporate professionals, Maynard said at the time.  

Maynard said in March a “strong, active public-private partnership” would be required for the project to move forward, which would mean securing “city-approved public tools,” aligning assets Georgia-Pacific already owns, and finding the right capital partners. Georgia-Pacific at the time was also dangling the adjacent 6-acre block the company owns as a redevelopment bargaining chip. 

Georgia-Pacific Center’s updated phase-one development plans called for 80,000 square feet of retail, dining, and entertainment space. 

Elsewhere, the proposal called for more than 400 apartments to be created from offices on the tower’s uppermost floors. Other aspects would have included a landscaped, MARTA-connected central plaza spanning about 1 acre and facing Peachtree Street along the Atlanta Streetcar line.

Another component would have seen 600,000 square feet of Class A offices anchored by Georgia-Pacific and Koch Inc., with more than 2,100 parking spaces in the mix.

Later phases could have included a hotel, plus more retail and residences, according to officials. 

Standing 697 feet tall, the world headquarters of Atlanta-based pulp and paper giant Georgia-Pacific is now the seventh-tallest skyscraper in the city (surpassed last year by 1072 West Peachtree) and one of the most recognizable, with its pink granite exterior and dramatic, stair-stepped rear design and changeable lighting patterns facing east. The Class A office tower, totaling 1.3 million square feet today, was opened in 1982. The Skidmore, Owings & Merrill firm originally designed the structure, with pink granite quarried in Marble Falls, Texas. 

When the conversion project was announced two years ago, Christian Fischer, then Georgia-Pacific's president and CEO, said his company is “acutely aware of the need for more residential, shopping, dining, and entertainment options in our downtown neighborhood,” while Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens called the proposal “transformative” and a significant step toward breathing new life into downtown.

But executing new large-scale residential—outside of student housing and Centennial Yards high-rise projects—has proven a difficult proposition for a section of Atlanta that could need it most.  

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