Now that the World Cup tents are down, a familiar question is back: why don't more people live in Downtown Atlanta? Urbanize Atlanta revisited the twin towers of South Downtown that were supposed to answer it, and never got built.
Four years ago the Newport plan for South Downtown kicked up as much urbanist excitement as anything in the city, promising dense new residential in the blocks around Underground Atlanta. Since then, hiked interest rates and a wobbly post-pandemic financing climate have stalled large downtown housing again and again, from a MARTA-adjacent parking lot on Forsyth Street that drew zero developer bids to a proposed tower over Underground.
The World Cup showed what a lively South Downtown can look like when the crowds show up. The harder trick, as Urbanize notes, is making that energy stick with people who actually live there, and that takes the kind of dense residential the towers promised.
For a district that just spent six weeks as the center of the soccer world, the next chapter is less glamorous and more important: getting somebody to build the housing.
