Creating a downtown: Sandy Springs restarts expansion of its city center
Sandy Springs is trying again to kick-start the expansion of its walkable town center called City Springs after a prior deal fell apart.
The Sandy Springs City Council this week selected a new development team for the second phase of City Springs. The project would transform 5.5 acres south of Mount Vernon Highway into a mixed-use hub with a new hotel, restaurants and housing.
Dallas-based Trammell Crow Co., through its residential subsidiary High Street Residential, was picked as master developer. Hedgewood Homes, Third and Urban and DSM Real Estate Partners are also part of the real estate team.
Since opening in 2018, City Springs has helped give Sandy Springs, a suburb that incorporated in 2005, a new identity away from its roots as a bedroom community and commuter pass-through.
Sandy Springs lacked a historic downtown area to revamp like those in Roswell or Alpharetta, so city officials led a $230 million project to remake 14 acres into a new City Hall, performing arts center, restaurants and park.
“City Springs has fundamentally transformed the way our community comes together,” Mayor Rusty Paul said in a news release. “This is an opportunity to build on that foundation, bringing new energy, amenities and connections to the heart of our city.”
Cities across the metro area have worked to build defining city centers, including Smyrna, Roswell, Alpharetta and Lilburn.
The resolution approved this week allows Sandy Springs officials to negotiate purchase and sale agreements with the development team. A rezoning process could start in December, with the hope to complete the project around 2030, city officials said.
“There’ll be a lot of opportunity for public input, review and discussion about what’s going on over there,” Paul said during Tuesday’s City Council meeting.
Early concepts for City Springs’ second phase include a hotel and apartment building with a central gathering space and ground-floor retail.
Hedgewood Homes would build 28 single-family homes on another parcel, a component that Paul praised during the meeting this week.
“We’re hoping that this can be replicated all across Sandy Springs to bring in more homeownership opportunities,” the mayor said. “That’s what we’ve been begging for, and they’re coming in with an idea that I think will be a nice, neat, walkable, close-in neighborhood.”
High Street and Third and Urban may be familiar names in Sandy Springs. The developers are behind another major project near City Springs called Hillcrest, which is rising on land formerly owned by Sandy Springs United Methodist Church.
“A major selling point of our Hillcrest site was its proximity to City Springs and the tremendous placemaking that has been created by the city through that development,” Scott Kirchhoff, a principal with Trammell Crow, said in the release. “We look forward to building on the foundation that has made City Springs such a success.”
The second phase of City Springs has been in the works for several years. In late 2022, Sandy Springs City Council updated its master plan and shortly after issued a request for proposals. In 2023, city officials selected the development team of Regent Partners and Morris and Fellows for the project.
But the deal never got off the ground, and city officials ultimately terminated the agreement last year.
“That was a difficult time in the marketplace,” Chris Burnett, Sandy Springs’ director of economic development, said at the meeting this week. “We were still recovering from post-COVID economic challenges. The capital markets were not robust at the time.”
This year, city officials decided to go back out to the market and received eight proposals from developers.
“I firmly believe that good things come to people that wait, and I think that happened here,” City Councilmember Melissa Mular said during the meeting. “This time we have much more interesting designs. We have for-sale product that’s included and potentially better financial outcomes.”