Anyone who parks in the Government Center deck to visit City Hall has walked past the fenced dirt at Trinity Avenue and Shirley Clarke Franklin Boulevard for years. Long enough to stop seeing it.
There is a building on it now.
By early September, portions of the exterior had reached two stories. The finished structure will rise nine stories on one end and 10 on the other, topping out at 123 feet in brick and architectural precast.
This is Trinity Central Flats, an affordable housing development rising on 1.3 acres directly across from Atlanta City Hall.
Most of the public documents count 218 apartments. General contractor J.M. Wilkerson describes a 219-unit building, but the developer, Invest Atlanta and the project’s housing-finance partners continue to use 218. Radiant Development Partners says that count includes one non-revenue unit.
All 218 apartments are expected to carry income restrictions for renters earning no more than 80 percent of Area Median Income. The latest financing announcement says 193 will be reserved at either 50 or 60 percent AMI.
What a renter can actually do with this information
Nothing yet, and that is the honest answer.
The contractor lists February 2028 as the completion date. The development team has not opened a leasing portal, published an application date or named the company that will manage the property.
What we can tell you now is how eligibility is expected to work.
Twenty apartments will carry Atlanta Housing HomeFlex vouchers for people experiencing or at risk of homelessness. Residents in those units will pay no more than 30 percent of their income toward rent and will receive supportive services.
The remaining apartments will not require the same voucher, but applicants will still have to meet the income limit assigned to each unit. That means “affordable” does not simply mean the rent looks affordable to you. Household income, household size, the apartment’s AMI tier and the property’s screening requirements will all matter.
Invest Atlanta published a proposed rent schedule in 2024, but those figures were part of the project’s financing plan not a 2028 leasing sheet. The table showed income-capped rents ranging from $893 to $1,924, depending on unit size and AMI level.
What “hundreds of jobs” could actually mean
Radiant says Trinity Central Flats is expected to create “hundreds of construction and permanent jobs.”
That wording needs context.
No public source we found separates temporary construction jobs from permanent positions. There is also no published count of full-time jobs, Atlanta residents hired, wages, apprenticeships or minority- and women-owned contractors participating in the project.
During construction, hundreds of people could touch a project this size over more than two years. That workforce could include concrete and steel crews, equipment operators, masons, carpenters, electricians, plumbers, HVAC installers, roofers, glaziers, drywall crews, painters, landscapers, safety staff, project managers and supervisors.
But those workers would not necessarily be on the site at the same time, and most of those positions end when construction does. “Hundreds of construction jobs” can mean hundreds of individual workers cycling through a project, not hundreds of permanent jobs created at one address.
The permanent positions would look different. A 218-unit building will need property management, leasing and income-certification staff, maintenance technicians, custodial workers and possibly security personnel. The 20 supportive apartments will also require some form of service coordination.
Three retail spaces totaling 6,721 square feet could add store managers, sales or food-service workers, depending on who leases them. No tenants have been announced, so those jobs do not exist yet.
The practical question is not whether the development creates work. It will. The question is how much of that work is permanent, what it pays and whether people who already live in Atlanta get access to it.
Watch for construction hiring information from J.M. Wilkerson and its subcontractors, the names of the three retail tenants and the property-management and supportive-services contracts. Until those details appear, “hundreds of jobs” remains a projection rather than a hiring announcement.
