MARTA: High-rise future for Arts Center station is back on table

A MARTA transit station in the heart of Midtown’s arts and museum district that attracted daring redevelopment proposals from teams across the country is gearing up to come back into play for a high-rise transformation, transit agency officials tell Urbanize Atlanta. 

John Benton, who was hired by MARTA earlier this year to lead transit-focused real estate development and asset management, said a Request for Proposals for redevelopment of MARTA’s Arts Center station could be reissued as soon as January. 

“I’m looking at my list right now—I’m not exaggerating—and it’s first on the list,” Benton said in a phone interview this week. “My comments within the RFP about the architecture will be that this property needs to be significant architecture that will shine, because of where it’s located."

MARTA issued a similar RFP in late 2022 seeking developers capable of turning the 6-acre Arts Center station in the 1200 block of West Peachtree Street into a denser, Transit Oriented Development that includes affordable housing. 

The station—now something of a low-rise anomaly in the growing subdistrict—is zoned SPI-16, a Midtown Special Public Interest District designation that encourages dense urban uses and historic preservation. The development offering will include air rights for building above the rail station and adjacent MARTA bus loop, located between 15th and 16th streets along West Peachtree Street. The site is also adjacent to Woodruff Arts Center, home to Alliance Theatre, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and the High Museum of Art.

MARTA’s earlier call for development ideas attracted a striking, stacked-cube concept and others. Benton said a development team was eventually picked, but after they struggled to make the financials work with the site’s 20-percent affordable housing requirement, MARTA’s board eventually severed that relationship. Benton hadn’t yet been hired and wasn’t involved in that process; we’ve asked MARTA officials for details on the former development team and their cancelled plans but have yet to hear back. 

According to Benton, staff shakeups and economic challenges including interest rates were detrimental to progress on several MARTA TOD projects, including Arts Center station plans. 

Another ambitious concept that wasn’t picked came to light this week via Los Angeles-based landscape architects Relm, which worked on Arts Center redevelopment designs with the HKS architecture firm. That vision called for an arts-and-culture focused remake with multiple glassy high-rises and green plazas atop MARTA infrastructure.

Scott Baker, Relm founding principal, said his team was interviewed about Arts Center station in June 2023 and didn’t hear much until the project was formally cancelled in December last year. 

“We can speculate as to why,” Baker said this week, “but there were a number of senior folks that departed MARTA, and the party line at the time of the cancellation was that they didn't have the staff to shepherd the project forward.”

Attributes of the Relm/HKS design have made an impression on Benton, a seasoned planned with experience in Miami and Maryland who joined MARTA about six months ago.  

“I saw the rendering in a storage unit, [and] I just really liked it,” Benton said. “I took it out of storage and put it in my conference room. That’s how much I like the look—and so does everybody who comes into the conference room.”

Benton said the Arts Center station RFP will be part of a broader push by MARTA to set redevelopment of underused land around transit hubs into motion. 

Other development activity near the station, the potential for dropping interest rates, and MARTA’s flexibility to work with another development team on affordable housing requirements (the agency requires 20 percent of new residential to qualify as workforce housing, at the city-standard 80 percent of Area Median Income) should make redevelopment prospects more enticing than in recent years, Benton said. 

A new proposal “might not hit 20 percent workforce housing—we want to encourage that—but it might not kill the project,” Benton said. “I think [the site] is a gem, to be honest. It has potential to be a multi high-rise site. It’ll take a real developer with real horsepower to develop it. It’s a complex site. So the selection will have to be a developer who’s done something similar, has experience, can work through the complexities of the site itself, and have the financial wherewithal to build it at one time.”

Benton said he plans to include “timing triggers” in the RFP to swiftly set redevelopment back into motion, but the complexity will require negotiations in terms of groundbreaking schedules and other aspects of development. 

Developing Arts Center station would echo TOD activity along MARTA’s Blue/Green Lines, where the Marchon mixed-use complex has remade King Memorial station property, the Quill apartments and adjacent development transformed Edgewood/Candler Park station, and another affordable-housing project remains in the pipeline at Avondale Station. 

MARTA’s Board of Directors voted in summer 2022 to move forward with pre-development work at five more stations, spanning from Bankhead to Brookhaven and Stone Mountain. The recently opened Brookhaven City Centre is the first significant example of those efforts bearing fruit, whereas other projects have stalled. 

In the gallery above, find more context for the MARTA Arts Center station site and big redevelopment ideas that haven’t come to fruition—at least not yet.   

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