Concrete slabs where buildings used to be, and grass growing over the rest. That is what 2769 Lakewood Ave looks like today, and it looks that way on a stretch of Southwest Atlanta where four separate housing projects have gone up or broken ground since 2021.
Eighty apartments are planned for that lot. Two three-story buildings.
The number worth sitting with is not 80. It is 79, because that is how many of those apartments are reserved for households earning 30 to 80 percent of Area Median Income($24,750-$66,000 for a single adult). The eightieth is a rent-free unit for the on-site manager.
What is actually planned at 2769 Lakewood
The project is called Andover Place. The unit mix is planned as 25 one-bedrooms, 41 two-bedrooms and 14 three-bedrooms, with expected rents of $1,209, $1,452 and $1,677, and 18 units receiving rental assistance, according to a market feasibility analysis by Real Property Research Group.
Those figures come from a feasibility study and a funding recap, which means they are what the project was underwritten against, not what a lease will say. The timeline is the same kind of number: construction starting in 2026, delivery in late 2027.
Money in the stack: a $1 million Metropolitan Tax Allocation District Resurgence Grant from Invest Atlanta, plus 4 percent Low Income Housing Tax Credits allocated by the Georgia Department of Community Affairs. We covered the grant itself when the board approved it, in the piece about the $210,000 line item the board actually argued about. This is what that $1 million buys.
Why this matters to anyone already paying rent here
Straight answer first: it does not lower your rent. Nobody living around Metropolitan Parkway today pays a dollar less because of this.
What it does is add 79 income-restricted apartments to Sylvan Hills by late 2027 if the schedule holds, including 14 three-bedrooms, which are the units families actually need and the hardest ones to find at a restricted rent.
Here is the part that trips people up. In an income-restricted building, rent is generally attached to the apartment's tier, not to the tenant's paycheck. The 2025 market study proposed monthly tenant rents from $965 to $1,447 for non-assisted one-bedrooms, $1,146 to $1,852 for two-bedrooms and $1,311 to $2,084 for three-bedrooms, depending on tier. Water, sewer and trash included. Other utilities on the tenant.
Rental-assisted units are the exception. Those households pay a share of their income instead. The 2025 study counted 18 of them. A July 2026 Atlanta Housing action reportedly raised that commitment to 31, a figure we have not confirmed.
For scale on who qualifies: AMI for a four-person family in the Sandy Springs-Roswell-Atlanta area is about $114,200, so 30 percent works out to roughly $34,260. That arithmetic is ours, and it is a rough gauge only. Actual income limits vary by household size, by program and by unit.
Every neighbor on this block was financed the same way
Walk south from the site and you reach Hartland Station, 131 affordable units at 2040 Fleet St., opened by Wendover Housing Partners after Invest Atlanta approved bond financing in August 2019 for what was then 110 units at 60 percent average AMI.
On a 10.2-acre site nearby, Atlanta Housing finished a 184-unit affordable senior phase in 2022, on land a partner noted once held nearly 300 modest World War II-era apartments. In July 2025 the same team broke ground on Sylvan Hills II: $52.7 million, 233 fully affordable units, 24 at or below 50 percent AMI, 93 at or below 60 percent, 116 at or below 80 percent, roughly 20 months of construction with first units due late 2026.
In May 2024, Invest Atlanta approved a $37.5 million tax-exempt loan and a $2.9 million housing opportunity bond loan for Metropolitan Place in Perkerson: 176 affordable units plus mixed-use, everything at 70 percent AMI or below, 36 units at or below 30 percent.
Tax credits. Bonds. TAD dollars. Public loans. Five years of it, project by project, on the same few blocks.
So when funders describe a revitalizing Metropolitan Parkway corridor, what they are describing is largely a subsidy pipeline holding steady long enough to produce buildings. Andover Place is the smallest and newest link in it, arriving while a $700 million teaching hospital is planned further up the same road.
The most important update is not the $1 million grant. It is Atlanta Housing increasing the assisted portion from 18 to 31 apartments.
If those 31 units survive financial closing, construction begins in 2026 and the late 2027 target holds, Andover will deliver deeper affordability than the original market study described. The next evidence should be physical: a financial closing, demolished slabs and construction equipment on the property. Until then, the rents and dates remain financing assumptions rather than something a household can act on.
