Campus 244 just got a lot more ambitious. RocaPoint Partners and The Georgetown Co. filed paperwork to rezone portions of their Central Perimeter mixed-use project to add a 350-unit apartment complex, a second hotel with 150 rooms, 200,000 square feet of office, and another 30,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space on top of what’s already there.
For anyone who’s driven past the Element hotel and that sleek redeveloped office building off I-285 and thought, “okay, but what’s going in all that surface parking?” That’s your answer.
What's actually changing
The existing Campus 244 already delivered a modernized office building and the Element hotel. This new filing is about layering residential and more commercial onto the site. According to Bisnow's reporting, the proposal includes:
350 apartment units
A 150-room hotel (the second on site)
200,000 square feet of office
30,000 square feet of retail and restaurant space
That’s a serious density bump for a corner of the Perimeter that, until pretty recently, was mostly known for cubicle towers and lunch chains. The fact that a developer is pitching apartments here at all is the part worth sitting with. Central Perimeter’s office vacancy has been running in the high 20s for a while now, elevated, though not actually the highest in metro Atlanta. Midtown and Downtown both run a few points higher. Still, the conventional wisdom for a while was that nobody wanted to live next to that much empty Class B office space. Apparently RocaPoint and Georgetown disagree.
Why apartments, why now?
You might be wondering if 350 units is a lot for this submarket. It is, and that’s the point. The whole thesis behind Campus 244’s original redevelopment was that suburban office parks die unless you give people reasons to be there outside of 9-to-5. Hotel guests helped. Restaurants helped. But residents are the ones who turn a campus into an actual neighborhood. Think of it this way: who wouldn’t want to curate the type of environment where someone walks out for coffee on a Saturday and the retail tenants don’t go dark on weekends?
Who is RocaPoint and should we trust this?
RocaPoint Partners is the developer that took Campus 244 from a tired 1970s office building to what it is now, with The Georgetown Co. as their partner. They've delivered phase one, which is more than a lot of paper-only proposals around town can say. That track record matters when you're asking for a rezoning to triple down on a site.
The skeptic in me wants to know what the apartments will actually rent for and whether any of them will be attainable, because Central Perimeter doesn't need another luxury-only stack. The filing doesn't get into affordability specifics, so that's a question for the rezoning hearings.
How this connects to the bigger Atlanta story
Across Atlanta right now, developers are racing to convert underused commercial land into housing, which makes sense as people are looking to work, live, and play without having to experience heavy Atlanta traffic or pay over $20 to park.
If you want a deeper look at how these mixed-use bets are reshaping different parts of town, our coverage of major projects across the metro is the easiest way to keep up. This is exactly the kind of transformation story we live for at ATL Vibes & Views, where we cover what's actually changing in your neighborhood.
The apartments are the real headline here, not the extra office or hotel rooms. Adding housing to a site this established is a bet that Central Perimeter can become a place people choose to live, not just commute through, and that's a bigger swing than another office building would have been. What I'll be watching for at the rezoning hearings isn't whether it gets approved, track records like RocaPoint and Georgetown's usually get there, it's whether “economically viable uses” ends up meaning anything for renters who aren't already making six figures.
