The land at North Avenue and Northside Drive was originally planned as Technology Enterprise Park, a 600,000-square-foot biotech campus assembled by Georgia Tech’s development affiliate in the mid-2000s.
Only one building materialized. TEP 1 opened in 2007 with 128,000 square feet of research space. The remaining buildings never followed.
Nearly 20 years later, Duracell has become a major tenant in the area’s next attempt at building a life-sciences district. On October 6, 2026, the company opened its global research and development headquarters inside the 13-story Science Square Labs tower at 101 Nerem Street NW. Its four-floor facility represents an investment of about $56 million and is expected to bring between 110 and 120 jobs from Bethel, Connecticut.
What the surrounding community gains
Science Square sits beside English Avenue and Vine City neighborhoods that have heard development promises for years without always sharing equally in the benefits.
Phase one, completed in 2024, delivered the lab tower, ground-floor retail and The Grace Residences, a 280-unit apartment building. Twenty-eight apartments are reserved for households earning no more than 60% of the area median income.
Trammell Crow Company also provided a $500,000 education and workforce grant and pledged an additional $500,000 for each of the district’s five planned phases. The full $2.5 million commitment, however, depends on all five phases being built.
The development received substantial public support. The Development Authority of Fulton County approved up to $29.4 million in property-tax incentives for Science Square, plus nearly $870,000 for Duracell. The site is also located within a federal Opportunity Zone.
The connection that is still missing
Georgia Tech has proposed a pedestrian and micro-mobility bridge across the CSX and Norfolk Southern rail corridor. The Westside Community Connector would link the campus and Science Square more directly with the surrounding neighborhoods.
Construction was projected to begin as early as 2026, subject to funding, but the bridge has not opened. For English Avenue residents, that connection could determine whether Science Square truly feels like part of the neighborhood or another development separated by the rail line.
What happens next
Duracell initially leased 59,000 square feet in March 2025 before expanding to approximately 83,000 square feet by move-in. That growth suggests strong confidence in the building.
Science Square Labs is now 83% leased. Its tenants include Shriners Children’s, Georgia Tech and Emory biomedical engineering faculty, the Georgia Department of Agriculture, Portal Innovations and Osmose. Shriners alone expects its research institute to create more than 470 jobs.
That demand strengthens the case for another lab and office building. The developer previously said planning for phase two could begin once the tower reached 50% occupancy a threshold it has comfortably surpassed. Still, no construction date has been announced.
The first biotech campus stalled after one building. Science Square has already attracted major tenants, but its long-term impact will depend on what comes next: additional phases, stronger neighborhood connections and the delivery of the community benefits tied to the broader vision.
I have watched enough Westside groundbreakings to know that the tenant announcement is the easy part and the connective tissue is the part that quietly slips. The tower is 83 percent leased, which means the condition Trammell Crow set for designing phase two was met more than a year ago, so the next thing anyone from English Avenue or Vine City should be asking at a community meeting is not how many jobs Duracell brought. Ask for a design start date on phase two, ask what the funding gap on the Westside Community Connector actually is in dollars, and ask who is holding the $500,000 for phase two until there is a phase two. Seventeen years passed between lab buildings on this exact dirt. The promises that outlive a developer's phasing plan are the ones nobody wrote a date next to.
