The Brookhaven City Council has approved a rezoning that will bring more than 300 new apartments to the Ashford Green office campus just south of Interstate 285, converting roughly five acres of a long-struggling suburban office park into housing, retail and shared coworking space. The 320-unit project would rise on the site of the 268,000-square-foot office complex at 4170 Ashford Dunwoody Road NE, where developer Woodfield Development plans to build a five-story residential building alongside apartments ranging from studios to three-bedroom floorplans.
According to Urbanize Atlanta, Woodfield Development plans to acquire the Ashford Green site in the second quarter of 2027 and kick off construction soon afterward, though no firm delivery timeline has been set. Property owner Vela Companies, which bought the office campus from John Hancock Life Insurance Co./Manulife in December 2022, intends to renovate the existing office building while building a 16,000-square-foot retail village elsewhere on the campus. The planned apartments will include a clubhouse, a large pool and coworking areas, and the development team includes Dwell Design Studio as architect, Spacecraft as landscape architect and PEC as civil engineer.
Patrick Kassin, a member of the development team, called Ashford Green an opportunity to inject a new high-quality residential component into one of metro Atlanta's most established employment centers, per the same Urbanize Atlanta report. That framing echoes a shift playing out across metro Atlanta's office parks, where employment centers are evolving beyond their traditional office base with new investment in housing, retail, healthcare and public infrastructure, the outlet notes.
Central Perimeter's Office Glut Is Reshaping the Skyline
The Ashford Green rezoning lands amid a stretch of stubbornly high office vacancy across the Central Perimeter submarket, which stood at 26.0% in the first quarter of 2026 even after 253,184 square feet of positive net absorption driven by moves like AIG's 178,000-square-foot lease at Perimeter Summit, according to a Lincoln Property Company report. Metro-wide, the picture is similarly bleak for traditional office landlords: the region recorded zero new speculative office deliveries for three consecutive quarters through the second quarter of 2026, the longest supply freeze since 2016, which helped push overall metro office vacancy down to 26.4%, per Partners Real Estate.
That freeze has sent capital chasing residential conversions on underused office sites throughout the I-285 corridor. In neighboring Dunwoody, Workspace Property Trust won local approval in mid-2025 to redevelop 600,000 square feet of former State Farm office space at 64 and 66 Perimeter Center East into a 441-unit residential community combining condos, townhomes and age-restricted rentals. Sandy Springs has seen similar moves, where Ardent Companies purchased the 360,000-square-foot Perimeter Pointe power center in early 2026 for $48 million with plans for a transit-oriented mixed-use redevelopment near the Sandy Springs MARTA station.
A Site With a History of Failed Housing Bids
This is not the first time part of the Ashford Green campus has been proposed for residential use. In May 2024, the Brookhaven City Council allowed the withdrawal of an earlier rezoning application by Ashford Green Ventures LLC that had sought to convert part of the same site into a senior living development with 138 independent-living, 41 assisted-living, 28 memory-care and 201 active senior units, according to the City of Brookhaven. That history underscores how much local political and infrastructure resistance developers have had to navigate before landing this approval.
Density fights have also flared elsewhere in Brookhaven's commercial core. High Street Residential proposed a 280-unit apartment complex at nearby Perimeter Summit in early 2026, in addition to its under-construction 350-unit Ashford Heights project, but quietly withdrew that application in April 2026 after community opposition over density and traffic congestion, as Rough Draft Atlanta reported. Hoodline covered the original Perimeter Summit proposal in a earlier apartment announcement before that plan fell apart.
Pedestrian and Bike Safety Concerns Linger
Planned pedestrian improvements tied to the Ashford Green corridor include a new sidewalk and a multi-use pathway stretching between Lanier Drive and Mabry Road, near the intersection of Ashford Dunwoody Road and Windsor Parkway. But Brookhaven residents have raised concerns about design and safety involving higher-speed electric-powered bikes and scooters sharing lanes with pedestrians, prompting the city council to vote to remove a separate multi-use pathway from a planned infrastructure improvement project near Peachtree Golf Club following resident pushback.
City officials say they plan to work with the Georgia Department of Transportation on pedestrian improvements along the corridor, and separated bicycle infrastructure could come to the area in the future, according to officials cited by Urbanize Atlanta. The Ashford Green project itself sits just south of I-285 in Brookhaven, placing it at the center of the same traffic and infrastructure debates that have complicated other nearby developments.
Part of a Wider Apartment Wave Along the Perimeter
Woodfield Development, the firm behind the Ashford Green residential component, has been active elsewhere in metro Atlanta this year. The company delivered its first 25 build-to-rent townhomes at Woodrow House along the Atlanta Beltline's Westside Trail in August, part of a 325-unit mixed-income project featuring 66 workforce housing units and 12,000 square feet of commercial space, according to Atlanta Agent Magazine. The developer is also advancing a $150 million to $200 million redevelopment of the North River Shopping Center in Sandy Springs that would replace the aging retail center with 336 apartments, 85 townhomes, 10,000 square feet of retail and a public park, per Urbanize Atlanta sister coverage.
Investor appetite for new apartments in Brookhaven remains strong. Key Real Estate paid $101 million in July for the newly built 291-unit Alta Porter on Peachtree apartment building on the Brookhaven border, a deal Hoodline detailed in its report on investors swarming the Buckhead border. With office vacancy still hovering near 26% and no new speculative office towers on the horizon, Ashford Green's transformation looks like one more entry in a growing list of Central Perimeter properties trading office square footage for apartment units.
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