MARTA on Thursday selected the partners who will transform 15 acres of unused parking space near Brookhaven station into a huge development boasting a park, apartments, hotel, shopping, office space, condos and senior independent living, among other amenities.
A partnership to build offices and retail on a smaller, 2.14-acre parcel at Chamblee station also was approved Thursday by the MARTA board.
The transit-oriented development planned for Brookhaven could become a neighborhood showpiece, with plans for a project to be built in three phases. The first phase will be apartments, offices and retail. The next phases will be built based on market demand, to include additional retail stores, senior independent living and condominiums, said Amanda Rhein, MARTA’s senior director of Transit Oriented Development.
A park with public gathering space at the core of the Brookhaven development will span both sides of Peachtree Road, and be connected through the existing tunnel that goes beneath it. Partners for that project are The Integral Group and Transwestern.
“They came in with a proposal that brings in residential, hotels, a library, and including the DeKalb Housing Authority all as partners while also preserving some green space,” said MARTA CEO Keith Parker in an exclusive interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. “It is as innovative a package of a live work and play area as you could find.”
Parker said that reisdents will be able to walk from their door to the MARTA platform, which will help boost MARTA’s ridership and bottom line.
“They are built-in customers,” Parker said.
MARTA expects to gain an additional 800 to 1,200 new customers per day from the Brookhaven project alone.
The Chamblee station development will be constructed sooner, with groundbreaking expected next summer and opening about a year later. That development will not feature any homes, but instead will have just a mix of 38,000 square feet of offices and 13,000 square feet of retail space. An anchor tenant, Pattillo Industry, has already been identified, Rhein said.
The development will include a connection to Chamblee’s existing rail trail.
The two newest transit-oriented developments (TODs) at Brookhaven and Chamblee bring to seven the number of TODs that MARTA has launched beside its stations in just a little over two years. The others include King Memorial, Edgewood/Candler Park, Avondale, Arts Center and Oakland City.
The transit agency put out a request for proposals from developers interested in building near Oakland City earlier this week. MARTA wants to transform a closed south parking lot on 3.7 acres into a mixed-use development that would be mostly residential, perhaps with a small retail component like a coffee shop or pharmacy, Rhein said.
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