Sixteen years after bulldozers leveled the 520-unit Herndon Homes public housing complex, Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens and city officials gathered Thursday and Friday to celebrate the opening of 201 new apartments rising from the same English Avenue ground. Legacy at Herndon Square's Phase II, a mixed-income rental community, marks the latest and largest completed piece of a redevelopment effort that has stretched across more than a decade.
The grand opening ceremony, held August 27 and 28, brought together developer Pennrose, Atlanta Housing, and the mayor's office to mark the milestone, according to a FOX 5 Atlanta report on the ribbon-cutting. Dickens and other Atlanta officials attended the event in downtown Atlanta, per that report. Additional details on the project's scope came from Pennrose, which confirmed the ceremony celebrated the completion of the 201-unit community.
Of those 201 apartments, 170 are set aside as affordable housing for households earning between 30% and 80% of the Area Median Income, with 80 of those units backed by Atlanta Housing's Homeflex project-based vouchers, the developer's announcement notes. The remaining 31 apartments rent at market rate.
A $57 Million Build With a Health Clinic Attached
General contractor Capstone Building Corp and architect Thriven Design delivered Phase II as a $57 million, six-story building spanning 335,348 square feet, according to Multifamily & Affordable Housing Business. The building includes an interior courtyard, a fitness center, an enclosed parking deck, and an on-site health and wellness clinic for residents, per the same outlet.
Capstone's work in English Avenue wrapped before the contractor moved on to a similarly sized project outside Georgia; Hoodline has previously reported that Capstone completed the Atlanta building before beginning a 270-unit apartment complex near Orlando International Airport.
The Long Shadow of Herndon Homes
The 12-acre site once held Herndon Homes, a 520-unit public housing development built in 1941 for African American families and torn down by the Atlanta Housing Authority in 2010, according to WABE. The name honors Alonzo Franklin Herndon, who was born into slavery, built a career as a barber and real estate investor, and founded the Atlanta Life Insurance Company to become the city's first Black millionaire, according to the High Museum of Art.
The gap between demolition and this week's opening was not without friction. When Phase I of Herndon Square broke ground in January 2020, local community activists and former Herndon Homes tenants protested at the ceremony, raising concerns about gentrification, the lack of tenant input, and whether displaced residents would ever receive one-for-one housing replacement, according to SaportaReport. That tension remains rooted in the numbers: across all five planned phases of Herndon Square, the same SaportaReport account notes, fewer overall deep-subsidy units are expected to exist than the 520 units the original complex provided.
Five Phases, Up to $200 Million, and a Grocery Store to Come
Phase II is one piece of a five-phase master plan valued between $166 million and $200 million across the full 12 acres, according to Urbanize Atlanta. The plan already includes a 97-unit senior housing building completed in 2021, and it calls for an under-construction 178-unit Phase III, townhomes, and 30,000 square feet of commercial space envisioned for a fresh food grocery store along Northside Drive, the outlet reports.
Public financing helped make the project possible. Invest Atlanta's Board of Directors, chaired by Mayor Dickens, approved $41.5 million in tax-exempt loan financing in August 2023 for Phase II, followed by another $37 million in tax-exempt financing approved in August 2024 for Phase III, according to Invest Atlanta.
The site's location adds another layer to its significance. Herndon Square sits adjacent to Science Square, a bio-health and life-sciences campus developed by Georgia Tech and Trammell Crow Company, and it lies two blocks from the BeltLine's Westside Connector Trail, per Atlanta Housing's account of the project.
Part of a Bigger Citywide Push
The opening feeds directly into Dickens' signature housing metric. The mayor set a target during his 2024 State of the City address of creating or preserving 20,000 affordable housing units citywide by 2030, and by 2026 more than 13,000 units had been built or placed under construction toward that goal, according to Capital B Atlanta. Hoodline has covered that broader push before, including Dickens' roadmap released with Atlanta Housing CEO Terri M. Lee, and a separate proposal from Gorman & Company to build 166 affordable units on a Memorial Drive encampment site tied to the same citywide goal and the city's multi-agency Housing Strike Force.
Herndon Square is not the only former public housing or city-owned site undergoing a public-private overhaul on Atlanta's Westside and beyond. Hoodline has also reported on the first new building topping out at the Atlanta Civic Center after a decade of delays, another Atlanta Housing-led redevelopment of public land. Together, the projects mark a broader shift in how the city is attempting to replace aging public housing stock with mixed-income developments backed by tax credits, vouchers, and municipal bond financing.
