Atlanta's Cascade Road reopens after nearly 4 years of construction

The Cascade Road community in the heart of southwest Atlanta has waited nearly four years for city construction crews to finish a major revamp of the roadway.

The slow progress on the project, business owners along the corridor said, hurt their profits and reduced vital foot traffic in the area.

But this week — after they amped up pressure on the city to finish construction — those business owners stood alongside Atlanta officials to finally celebrate the reopening of Cascade Road.

“I made a promise — a promise made is a promise kept,” Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens said while standing along the roadway Wednesday. “Cascade Road is now open from the city limits on, all the way to Ralph David Abernathy (Boulevard).”

Dickens served on Atlanta City Council in August 2021 when the body approved $21 million in improvements for 3.5 miles of Cascade Road, funded through the voter-backed T-SPLOST and Renew Atlanta bond initiatives.

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

Expediting the construction was no small task and the “around-the-clock” work schedule of Department of Transportation crews came with the price tag of around $87,000.

Construction was originally slated to finish in the spring of 2026.

Key upgrades include new pavement from Willis Mill Road SW to Kingsdale Drive SW, new sidewalks with enhanced pedestrian safety features, and “multimodal” paths for both bikers and joggers.

New traffic signals, benches, street lighting and trash cans are the final touches of the project still yet to be completed.

“Our business community has endured,” Atlanta’s Transportation Commissioner Solomon Caviness said of the slow construction.

Businesses owners also asked the city for financial relief, saying the years of construction hurt their profits. A online petition asking the city to establish a recovery fund of at least $8 million has garnered nearly 1,200 signatures.

ExploreFinancial relief floated for Cascade businesses hurt by slow city construction

Credit: abbey.cutrer@ajc.com

Southwest Atlanta council member Marci Collier Overstreet introduced legislation that would set aside money from the Atlanta Recovery Fund — first established to help businesses impacted by last year’s water crisis — that Cascade business owners can tap into.

“I see you, and I have from the beginning — I felt your pain, I saw the numbers,” Overstreet said Wednesday. Cascade business owners “told us just what we needed to hear, to understand what our job was, what that assignment was, and we got it.”

The Cascade Road community isn’t the only area of the city where residents have waited years for voter-approved projects to cross the finish line.

An audit released earlier this year found that only about $47 million of the $660 million Moving Atlanta Forward bond program had been spent as of August 2024 — about 7% of planned project funds.

Dickens said Wednesday that he is in favor of 24-hour work schedules for infrastructure projects, but the timing brings challenges.

“It’s noisier, it’s dustier, and that means sometimes that people have those inconveniences through the night,” he said. “Sometimes you have schools nearby, or you have critical infrastructure that you don’t want to be inconvenienced that long.

“So it’s all on a case-by-case basis,” Dickens said.