One of Atlanta’s most high-profile affordable housing efforts seems stuck in a holding pattern, with key questions about how the city will pay for it unanswered.
Atlanta officials celebrated the start of the Two Peachtree project in early 2023, when the city bought the 41-story office tower from the state with plans to turn the long-vacant office tower into a major mixed-use development with hundreds of apartments, refurbished office space, and street-level retail.
Just steps from MARTA’s Five Points train station, the ambitious conversion promises 287 rental units for households earning less than the area median income — at last check, at least.
But downtown’s largest affordable housing project appears to have hit a snag. On Monday, the Atlanta City Council discarded legislation to pay $520,000 to an architectural design firm, Fitzgerald Collaborative Group, for the overhaul’s planning and design. Council members said the city’s economic development agency, Invest Atlanta, needs to first iron out details on how to finance the ambitious project.
Several council members told Atlanta Civic Circle this week that Invest Atlanta has left them in the dark on the project’s progress — and that they’re not sure how the city intends to pay for Two Peachtree’s gutting and retrofitting as a mixed-use development.
“The last time I got an honest-to-goodness update was when I was on the Invest Atlanta board,” said District 4 Councilmember Jason Dozier, who represents the downtown district where the tower is located. He left the agency’s board in 2024.
Councilmember Michael Julian Bond, whose at-large post covers the entire city, echoed Dozier’s concerns and criticized Invest Atlanta for operating behind closed doors.
“I had a walkthrough [of the property] in August, but I haven’t heard much about it since then,” he said. “The way Invest Atlanta was originally conceived, they were our mule — they were supposed to report to us all the time. Now, they’re acting as a co-equal part of the city government, but it’s not supposed to be that way.”
At issue is how Atlanta will assemble the financing needed to transform the largely disused tower, which will likely require a mix of public subsidies, private financing, and municipal tax credits. Large office-to-residential conversions can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, though the full price tag for Two Peachtree’s overhaul has not been publicly shared.
The city purchased the building for $39 million with funds from the Eastside Tax Allocation District (TAD), a key source of public subsidy for redevelopment projects. But it remains unclear how much additional TAD funding the project might require.
“We are evaluating different scenarios and hope to present the path forward soon,” Atlanta’s new chief housing officer, Amanda Rhein, said in a text.
Rhein said one financing option the city previously explored — a loan from the federal Transportation Infrastructure Finance and Innovation Act (TIFIA) program — is uncertain. “TIFIA still exists, but is set to expire this year if not reauthorized,” she said.
In a statement, Invest Atlanta said the project “continues to move forward,” pointing to a recently approved $2 million Eastside TAD grant for 5 Peachtree Senior, a 65-unit affordable housing development across from Two Peachtree that is the first phase of the broader development.
“The development team is refining its financing strategy in response to the current federal funding environment,” the agency said. Because the TIFIA loan “has taken longer than expected to materialize, the development team is actively evaluating alternative sources of capital to support the project and long-term financial stability,” it said.