This Week in Metro Atlanta: Atlanta's Zoning Rewrite Gets a Failing Grade, and Lawrenceville Says Yes to Costco

Three things moved this week that change what a lot in Metro Atlanta is worth, or how long you will wait to find out. One of them is the city's own consultant telling Atlanta that its new zoning code is worse than the one it would replace.

Start there. Atlanta has not meaningfully rewritten its zoning ordinance since 1982, and ATL Zoning 2.0 was supposed to be the fix. The city paid Sara Bronin -- an attorney, architect and George Washington University law professor who founded the National Zoning Atlas -- to evaluate the draft. Her 41-page review was finished in June and has now been reported out, and it is blunt. Urbanize Atlanta reports her finding that about 95 percent of residentially zoned land in the city allows single-family housing by right, and that by her accounting 56 percent of all land in Atlanta is zoned to allow nothing but single-family homes. On length, her review puts the existing code at 852 pages against Chicago's 269 and Philadelphia's 277; Axios reports she faulted the proposed December draft for running longer still, at 981 pages. The line that matters is her conclusion that the draft "fails to make any meaningful changes to the zoning map." She did credit it for eliminating most residential parking minimums.

On September 22, Council's Zoning Committee voted unanimously to hold the proposed code while the Dickens administration revises it. Council member Mary Norwood has said the committee will hold a work session on October 15, with webinars to follow before an amended proposal goes to the Neighborhood Planning Units and the Zoning Review Board, and a revised draft could come back to Council as early as the first quarter of 2027.

Here is what that means if you own a house in the city. The accessory dwelling unit cap was going up from 750 to 850 square feet in the draft -- and ADUs were still going to be prohibited in northern neighborhoods including Buckhead. If you were counting on a basement apartment or a backyard unit to pencil out a purchase, that option is not arriving in 2026, and the shape it arrives in is now genuinely open. The October 15 work session is on the calendar and it is public. If you own in an NPU where a by-right duplex or ADU would change your math, that meeting is where the map gets argued over, not the final vote.

In Gwinnett, Lawrenceville's mayor and City Council unanimously approved a Costco at 2555 University Parkway, a little more than two miles north of City Hall and just south of State Route 316. The numbers: 158,000 square feet, 32 fuel pumps, 854 parking spaces on close to 20 acres. City staff estimated about 7,000 car trips in and out daily, and Costco submitted a 600-page traffic study of the surrounding intersections. Costco will build a connector road at its own cost; the city plans to add turn lanes and retime signals.

The part most people will skip is the timeline, and it is the only part that matters for a 2026 decision. Costco still has to buy the land from the city, which Lawrenceville's city manager put at six to twelve months. Council member Randy Travis said publicly the store is not expected to open until 2028 or 2029, around the same time the State Route 316 work wraps. So if you are looking at a house near University Parkway, you are buying two or three years of construction and signal retiming before you get the warehouse. That is a different bet than buying next to an open Costco -- not a worse one, since the land assembly and the approval are the hard parts and both are now done, but you should price the wait rather than the ribbon-cutting.

In DeKalb, Belvedere Plaza is moving, and the detail that matters got clearer this week. Hutton is putting $24.3 million into the 1950s strip center at Memorial Drive and Columbia Drive in Belvedere Park, and Decide DeKalb Development Authority approved up to $3 million from the Tax Allocation District Urban Renewal Fund to help. Decaturish reported in August that the former Kroger box will be split into three spaces of roughly 9,000, 3,600 and 26,000 square feet for three national soft-goods retailers, and that Hutton's lease with a grocer was expected to be finalized by October 1. That date has come and gone without an announcement. A local report on October 8 quoted Hutton's senior vice president of operations, Brandy Chadwick, from a September 11 site visit saying no leases had been signed yet, that the grocer needs only 20,000 to 30,000 square feet and would go at the Columbia Drive end where Wingstop is, in a later phase planned for 2027, and that she hoped the grocer could be announced by early 2027.

So read the grocery question carefully if you are buying near that corner. The grocer is not going back into the old Kroger space -- that box is being carved up for soft goods -- and the replacement is smaller and later than the headline number suggests. There is real money behind it: Decide DeKalb's award drops by $600,000 if Hutton cannot make commercially reasonable efforts to land a full-service grocer as one of four anchors, which is the clearest signal anyone has given that the county knows the grocer is the whole point. One housekeeping note: the finish date has drifted in the telling, with WSB reporting spring 2027 back in July and Urbanize's October 6 piece saying renovations should be done by next summer. The address is 3479 Memorial Drive, at Columbia. Planet Fitness, Hibbett and Value Village are staying either way.