On a recent visit to Atlanta, John Gagnier decided to walk through High Street, a new 36-acre town center district his company has been building for the past three years.
The project rises in Dunwoody, a suburban Atlanta city about 30 minutes north of Downtown, which still has plenty of single-family homes on wooded lots. But city officials have also approved hundreds of newer more densely packed housing units around its MARTA transit station and sprawling Perimeter Mall.
Gagnier, chief operating officer with GID Development Group, was walking through High Street to see its progress when he got a nice surprise. He met a health care worker, still in her scrubs, walking home from her job on Pill Hill, a cluster of hospitals about a mile away.
“She had this big smile on her face,” Gagnier said. “She just seemed to love the experience. We are seeing people approaching how they live in Perimeter in completely different ways. I knew it would happen. But I was surprised I would see the evidence so quickly.”
High Street and other projects in the area could add over 3,000 apartment units, according to data from the Perimeter Community Improvement District. Atlanta has used transit-oriented development as the core of its thesis that many prefer to live and work near transit, a way to cut down on transportation costs. But MARTA ridership has plummeted since the pandemic.
It’s the same story for the Dunwoody transit station, where monthly ridership dropped from about 100,000 prior to COVID. This past March it hovered at just over 20,000.
But for people like the health care worker Gagnier ran into, a car-free commute still has value. It’s an option if the housing is close to the job.
“I live in Manhattan, and if I walk to work it’s quite far,” Gagnier said. “It’s not something I can do all the time. It feels like the greatest luxury.”
Since January, GID’s property management arm, Windsor Communities, has inked more than 100 leases for apartments within the Brompton and Avery buildings at High Street, Atlanta Business Chronicle recently reported. This past week Gagnier said it’s approaching 150. Units are ranging from $1,550 to $3,200.
What is interesting to Gagnier is the breadth of industries workers are coming from, he said.
“It’s people from the medical field. It’s people in the tech field,” he said. “There are retired folks. Many have some connection to the corporate offices adjacent to us.
“I think it’s just a little too early to see how the trends will come together, but there appears to be a very strong interest in living in a mixed-use environment.”
| Rank | Prior Rank | Company name |
|---|---|---|
|
1 |
1 |
RangeWater Real Estate |
|
2 |
2 |
First Communities Management Inc. |
|
3 |
3 |
Greystar Real Estate Partners LLC |
