Candler Road and Glenwood got the news residents have been waiting decades to hear. Candler Crossing officially broke ground on June 11, 2026, ending a long stretch where this corner of DeKalb has been written off as a food desert. A real grocery store. Real retail. Real investment.
The project is a $28.9 million mixed-use development anchored by a Publix on a 7.26-acre site at the corner of Candler Road and Glenwood Road, according to Decaturish's coverage of the groundbreaking. And yes, a full-size Publix. Not a scaled-down version. Not a "we'll see how it does" pilot. The anchor grocer the rest of the metro takes for granted.ted.
So what's actually getting built?
Candler Crossing will include a 50,325-square-foot Publix grocery store and an 11,200-square-foot multi-tenant retail building, with pedestrian-focused community amenities woven in. The development was supported by a $3.82 million grant from Decide DeKalb, which is the kind of public-private math that usually decides whether projects like this happen or stall out for another ten years.
If you're wondering why a grocery store at this corner counts as news, the short answer is the Kroger at Belvedere Plaza closed and left this stretch without a walkable option. A Publix two miles up the road is not the same as one you can walk to from your block. For residents right here, that difference shows up every week at the grocery budget, the gas tank, and the clock.
Why did this take so long?
Grocery chains use foot-traffic models and income data that have historically redlined neighborhoods like this one right out of consideration. DeKalb County CEO Lorraine Cochran-Johnson has been working toward this project for six years, starting when she was the commissioner for this district. Standing at the groundbreaking as CEO, she called it a promise kept. The demand from South DeKalb residents was never the question. The investment was.
What does this mean for the rest of the neighborhood?
Mixed-use anchored by a grocer tends to pull other things with it. Restaurants. Coffee. Service retail. The grocery store is rarely the end of the conversation. It's the start.
And while the plans don't lay out a residential component or a specific timeline for the next phase, the broader pattern of DeKalb development right now suggests Candler Road is finally on a map it's been left off of for a long time.
If you want to see what the groundbreaking actually looked like, we covered it from the ground in our recent video on DeKalb groundbreakings, and the energy was real. Not performative. Real.
A Publix at Candler and Glenwood is not just a grocery store. It is a signal. For decades, the message to South DeKalb residents has been that their dollars weren't worth competing for. Candler Crossing flips that. The $28.9 million price tag, the 50,325-square-foot anchor, the $3.82 million in public backing, these are not symbolic gestures. They are infrastructure. And once a corridor gets infrastructure, it gets options. Residents around this intersection are about to have a different relationship with their own zip code, and that shift is permanent. This is the kind of project the 404 should have been building twenty years ago, and the next ten years on Candler Road are going to look nothing like the last ten.
