Apartment giant Post Properties on Monday broke ground on a $96 million residential project in downtown Atlanta that company CEO David Stockert called Post’s largest-ever bet in metro Atlanta.
Post Centennial Park, at Centennial Olympic Park Drive and Simpson Street, includes 438 units across two mid-rise towers, and city leaders hope will serve as a catalyst for further downtown residential development.
The project is next to Centennial Olympic Park and adjacent to another parcel along Williams Street that Post has owned for years and is expected to one day feature a luxury residential high rise.
“Downtown is on the upswing, and it has been rediscovered,” Stockert said. The Post project along with redevelopment of a former office building on Piedmont Avenue into apartments is part of a wave of residential bringing hundreds of new units to the city’s core.
But downtown has lagged the apartment surge of neighborhoods like Midtown and Buckhead. Stockert said downtown needs to prove itself as a rental market, but Post’s commitment to such a pricey project is a sign developers are willing to test the waters.
The project came about with help of about $9 million in city of Atlanta incentives, including a property tax break that calls for 10 percent of the units to be reserved as affordable housing.
Regular rents would range from $1,166 to $2,592 depending on unit size, while so-called “workforce units” would range from $955 to $1,418, according to documents obtained last year from the city’s economic development arm, Invest Atlanta.
The property tax break is the carrot in a city strategy to encourage developers of apartment towers to offer housing that Atlanta residents who make 80 percent of the average median income can afford.
“I am deeply grateful for the bet you are making in the city of Atlanta,” Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed told Stockert.
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