Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said Wednesday he will propose having the Atlanta Housing Authority purchase the city’s civic center.
Reed made the announcement at a meeting of the City Council Finance/Executive Committee, saying that council could see the proposal in the coming weeks.
“I think you all will be pleased,” Reed said without offering any details.
The Boisfeuillet Jones Atlanta Civic Center, long a money-loser for the city, could be a prime redevelopment site. The city started the process of selling it in 2014, and the following year Reed announced he was seeking a deal with Houston developer Weingarten Realty for the nearly 20-acre site.
Weingarten wanted to buy the complex for $30 million, and announced an ambitious $300 million redevelopment that would raze the civic center and replace it with a mix of apartments, retail, office space and a park.
The sale of the aging facility had been part of a push by the city to bring mixed-use development and more affordable housing to the area that is just steps from the controversial Peachtree-Pine homeless shelter.
But in October Reed said the deal was dead.
“We couldn’t come to terms that were acceptable to the city,” Reed told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution at the time. “I felt the deal had dragged on and was unwilling to continue to engage in a negotiation. Either they wanted to purchase it or not. That’s where we ended up.”
The scuttled sale was seen as a setback, and many in the real estate community said the nearby Peachtree-Pine homeless shelter weighed on the purchase price of the property. Reed said then that the city would likely wait until a process to seize the homeless shelter by eminent domain was completed before returning the property to market.
City Councilman Alex Wan said Wednesday he is intrigued by the idea of selling the civic center to the AHA.
“I look forward to the discussion around the Civic Center,” he told Reed. “That’s good news.”
A message left for the AHA was not immediately returned.
Like many growing cities, affordable housing has become a pressing issue in Atlanta. Much of the new development in the city since the Great Recession has been geared to luxury buyers and renters.
The city’s development arm, Invest Atlanta, has a program in place to provide tax incentives in exchange for a percentage of rental units being reserved at rents affordable for working families.
The housing authority has a few new projects in the pipeline, including a mixed-income development at the former Herndon Homes site near Mercedes-Benz Stadium that is expected to include 700 apartments.
The housing authority since the mid-1990s has shifted to replace aging public housing stock with new mixed-income communities.
In April, the authority announced plans to seek development partners for a 37-acre property along Englewood Avenue in Chosewood Park in southeast Atlanta.
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2016 VIDEO: City leaders want to sell Civic Center
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