Invest Atlanta selected Gorman & Co. to restore the five-story Atlanta Constitution building, located at 143 Alabama Street in the heart of Downtown Atlanta. The agency intends to negotiate a ground lease and master development agreement with the company, whose preliminary plan includes 197 mostly affordable residential units.
After years of false hope for Atlanta preservationists and downtown boosters, the development team has been picked to lead the transformation of a historic but ailing landmark building and inject the Five Points area with a significant amount of new housing.
That will include a new mid-rise apartment building rising from a parking lot along Ted Turner Drive, between Five Points and the under-construction Centennial Yards megaproject.
The 95,000-square-foot brick building dates back to the 1940s and housed the Atlanta Constitution’s printing facility until the newspaper merged with the Atlanta Journal in 1953. The city has owned it since the 1990s.
Last summer, Invest Atlanta officials set an Aug. 2 deadline for developers to respond to a Request for Proposals regarding the city-owned, architectural landmark across the street from MARTA’s Five Points station that’s stood mostly vacant since before Jimmy Carter was president. That RFP repeatedly stated a redevelopment team must be capable of making significant progress on the Atlanta Constitution Building’s renovation prior to the start of Atlanta’s month of World Cup matches beginning in June 2026.
Gorman, a national developer, has been on a building spree at sites around Atlanta, debuting its first project in Westview and another near MARTA’s Hamilton E. Holmes station this year. Another Gorman development with an adaptive-reuse component, Sweet Auburn Grande, is expected to break ground any day, while another near Mall West End has more recently entered the pipeline.
Gorman & Co., which focuses on developing affordable and workforce housing, plans to split the project into multiple phases.
The building would be filled with residential units and ground-level commercial space. A later phase would add a new residential building on adjacent land by 2028.
The project includes a mix of units with one, two or three bedrooms. Units would be rented at prices affordable to households earning 30% and 80% AMI.
