Downtown affordable housing; BeltLine streetcar route; Rivian balks

DOWNTOWN—For Atlantans who’ve stared at that still-empty, grassy lot across the street from Atlanta City Hall and wondered what’s going on, there’s good news this week: The 200 workforce apartments planned there are not D.O.A. The Atlanta Business Chronicle reports the Trinity Central Flats project has scored 4 percent, low-income housing tax credits that should generate about $50 million in funding via the Georgia Department of Community Affairs—or the bulk of the project’s expected $72 million cost. (A backlog in that funding source triggered by inflation had delayed other projects around town, including the under-construction Lodge venture near East Atlanta Village, developers have said.)

The 1.3-acre, empty downtown lot has been the source of affordable housing talks for eons, and it’s been more than two years now since city leaders picked Radiant Development Partners and Capitol Hill Neighborhood Development Corporation—a neighborhood booster group established in the early 1990s—as project leaders.

According to renderings and planning documents, Trinity Central Flats calls for 218 units in 10 stories, both affordable and market-rate, rising just south of Atlanta City Hall. (Plans also call for 7,500 square feet of retail fronting Central Avenue.) Department of City Planning officials have described the site as being among the city’s “most convenient” in terms of transportation and walkability. Most of the rentals will be set aside for households earning 50 to 80 percent of the area median income, and the development team reportedly hopes to break ground sometime this year.

According to Invest Atlanta, which approved $3 million in Eastside Tax Allocation District funding for the project last fall, construction is expected to take 18 months.

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EASTSIDE—A year after MARTA’s planning committee gave the thumbs-up to plans for extending the Atlanta Streetcar to the BeltLine’s Eastside Trail and Ponce City Market, the agency has compiled a preliminary land-acquisition blueprint for how to make that happen. The plan identifies land for utilities, stations, and tracks needed to bring the light-rail system eastward. MARTA is reportedly working to secure the needed land through purchases and easements, with eminent domain being a last resort.

Last summer MARTA picked HDR, an architecture and engineering firm, to complete final designs for what’s called the Streetcar East Extension. (That firm’s recent work in Atlanta includes Rodney Cook Sr. Park in Vine City.) The two-mile route would bring the streetcar along Edgewood Avenue, Randolph Street, Auburn Avenue, and Irwin Street into the BeltLine’s Eastside Trail corridor and extend it to Ponce City Market’s doorstep, with five new stops in between. MARTA officials estimate the extension’s cost will be $230 million at least.

MARTA’s revised outlook calls for breaking sometime next year and collecting the first streetcar extension fares from passengers in 2028.

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OTP—In what could be a blow to developers banking on proximity to Rivian’s sprawling EV factory as a selling point, the California automaker has decided to pull back and pause construction on its $5 billion project east of Atlanta, despite substantial work completed already to clear the 2,000-acre site, the AJC reports.

Rivian is putting construction on ice indefinitely in Morgan and Walton counties, where 7,500 jobs (with $56,000 average salaries) were promised, to instead focus on producing its planned R2 crossover model at the company’s lone plant in Illinois by 2026. Rivian leadership released a statement saying the Georgia initiative remains “extremely important,” but there’s no outlook on when heavy equipment might get rolling again. On the bright side, as one peeved lawmaker told the newspaper, Georgia now has “a great mega site available to offer a willing, interested, and trusted future partner.”

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