MARTA is moving forward on its latest lease of property adjacent to a transit station for a residential and commercial development. The deal is designed to spur ridership and simultaneously boost the authority’s bottom line.
Invest Atlanta, which helped broker the deal, chose Columbia Ventures to build primarily apartments on five acres that is currently an underused parking lot at MARTA’s Edgewood/Candler Park station.
The first phase of the project, expected to break ground in 2015, will be the building of 200 units of market-rate housing. The second phase will include an additional 235 housing units. At least 20 percent of the apartments will be priced compatibly with affordable workforce housing. There will also be some commercial space for lease. The full project is expected to be completed by 2019.
“Redevelopment of Edgewood has been quietly happening over the last decade and this project is the capstone to many of these efforts,” Garry Long, president of Organized Neighbors of Edgewood said in a press release issued by Invest Atlanta on Thursday.
Columbia Ventures has developed more than 400 housing units across the Edgewood neighborhood over the past decade, including senior housing, market rate housing, affordable housing and for-sale townhomes.
“We’re listening to what metro Atlantans want when it comes to transportation and quality of life,” said MARTA CEO Keith Parker in the release. “Fewer and fewer people are willing to spend hours in traffic, and they want the convenience of leaving work and getting home without the aggravation of sitting on the interstate.”
The Edgewood/Candler Park project is the first Transit Oriented Development on which Invest Atlanta (the city of Atlanta’s economic development arm) has partnered with MARTA as the guarantor on the lease. MARTA’s objective is to have five MARTA Transit Oriented Developments underway within two years.
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