This Week in Metro Atlanta: A $5 Million Hole in a Westside Budget, and a 1932 Schoolhouse Finally Gets a Developer

Most weeks this column is about where the money is going. This week it is about what the money buys, which is a different and less comfortable question. Three items: a Westside apartment building that stopped mid-construction because the budget moved, a shuttered 1932 schoolhouse that finally has a developer attached, and a North Fulton hotel that sold for a number worth writing down.

Start on the Westside. The Proctor, at 698 Oliver Street NW in English Avenue, is an eight-story, 137-unit building with 10,000 square feet of street-level retail and a three-level parking deck. It is roughly 20 percent built, and it has been sitting still since January. Urbanize Atlanta reported on October 1 that developer Rod Mullice of Windsor Stevens Holdings says the private capital the project needs has gone from $40 million to $45 million - a $5 million gap - because of tariffs on lumber, concrete, aluminum and steel, inflation he puts at about 3.5 percent a year, and fuel. Hoodline, covering the same story, reports a total capital stack of $55.6 million and quotes a diesel figure of nearly $6.40 a gallon. Treat that fuel number as the developer's accounting of his own line items rather than something I have independently verified. Mullice expects a funding decision in mid-November and is targeting a January 2027 restart. His own line on it: he is confident he is not the only builder-developer facing these challenges.

Here is why this matters to somebody who is not building anything. The Proctor is not a luxury tower. Of the 137 units, 41 are capped at 50 percent of area median income and 55 at 80 percent, with 46 at market rate, and some are reserved for Atlanta Housing Choice Voucher holders under a 30-year affordability commitment. That is 96 income-restricted apartments on the Westside that are not coming online in 2026, and probably not in 2027 either. When people ask me why Westside rents have not softened the way they expected, this is the answer in one building - supply that is 20 percent built is not supply. It is also why I have stopped letting sellers of 2015-and-newer construction compare themselves only to resale. If replacement cost is climbing at this pace, a well-built recent house is quietly worth more relative to what a builder could put up next door today. That is not a reason to overprice. It is a reason to stop apologising for your number when the appraisal lands on the nose.

Second item, and this one is a slower, better story. Atlanta has picked a redevelopment partner for the former Lakewood Heights Elementary School at 335 Sawtell Avenue SE, closed since 2004. The partner is Ali-Graceline Development, a joint venture of Ali Development LLC and Graceline Partners LLC. The plan is about 54,700 square feet on roughly 2.1 acres: 42,721 square feet of residential and 12,000 square feet of commercial, with the original 1932 school building preserved and adaptively reused rather than torn down. Urbanize Atlanta puts the unit count at approximately 55, most of them two- and three-bedroom rentals. The Atlanta Board of Education approved the development agreement and ground lease on September 1 and the Atlanta Urban Development board followed on September 24, which makes this the first joint APS and Atlanta Urban Development deal of its kind. Groundbreaking is targeted for the fourth quarter of 2027.

Two things to take from that. The first is practical: 55 units of mostly family-sized rental on a corner that has been dead for twenty-two years changes foot traffic and comps on the surrounding blocks in south Atlanta, and Q4 2027 means the pricing effect starts showing up in 2026 and 2027 land trades, not in 2028. The second is structural. Atlanta Public Schools owns a lot of empty buildings. If this one works, it becomes the template, and anybody holding property near a shuttered APS school in Lakewood, Pittsburgh, Adair Park or the English Avenue and Vine City area should be reading the next few of these announcements closely. I would not buy a block on the strength of a template. I would absolutely want to know which school is next.

Third, north. Crescent Real Estate announced on September 25 that it had sold The Hotel at Avalon in Alpharetta, which it had owned since September 2020. Connect CRE and Commercial Property Executive both report the price at $220 million and the buyer as a joint venture of Endeavor Real Estate Group and Cox. The hotel has 330 keys at 9000 Avalon Boulevard, opened in 2018, and includes the 65,000-square-foot Alpharetta Conference Center and 407 parking spaces. Divide it out and that is roughly $667,000 per key for a suburban hotel. Avalon itself is reported as an 86-acre, $1 billion district with about 2.3 million square feet of retail, dining, office and entertainment space and more than 600 apartments and homes.

I am not in the hotel business and neither are most of you. The reason that number belongs in a column for homeowners is that institutional capital does not pay $667,000 a key in a suburb it thinks is finished. Alpharetta has been priced like a mature market for a decade, and the people with the most information just wrote a very large cheque that says it is still compounding. Pair that with Medley opening in Johns Creek later this month and north Fulton is getting a second wind that the resale numbers have not fully caught up to yet.

So what to actually do this week. If you own or rent on the Westside, mid-November is the date to watch on The Proctor - a yes on that funding is the difference between 96 affordable units arriving in 2028 and arriving never, and it will tell you more about Westside rents in 2027 than any forecast will. If you own land or a house in south Atlanta near a closed school building, go look at which APS properties are on the surplus list before the next partner gets named. And if you are selling a newer home anywhere in the metro, the replacement-cost story in paragraph two is now something you can point to rather than something you have to argue. Send me the address and I will pull what it would actually cost to rebuild it today against what the comps say it is worth - that gap is the whole negotiation.