Commission narrowly approves large student apartment complex near Lay Park

Tempted by a large public benefit package, the Athens-Clarke County Commission narrowly approved a new student apartment complex near Lay Park in a split 6-4 decision this week.

At the same meeting, the ACC Commission also accepted the withdrawal of controversial plans to redevelop the Homewood Hills shopping center, tweaked the ordinance that prevents sidewalk obstructions and delayed a decision on the TSPLOST 2026 project list.

Contents
Core Spaces development approved
Homewood Hills shopping center redevelopment shelved
Tweaks to the sidewalk obstruction ordinance
TSPLOST 2026 project list update

Core Spaces development approved

The ACC Commission has approved a new 1,400-bedroom student apartment complex in downtown Athens to be constructed by Chicago-based developer Core Spaces. The complex will extend past the Foundry across what is now publicly-owned land just south of Lay Park. The local government has agreed to sell this land for $4.7 million as part of the deal. 

As an additional payment, Core Spaces will build a new 425-space public parking deck, paying for almost half of the expense. The Athens Downtown Development Authority will manage the new deck and pay the remainder of the cost. This deck is estimated to increase net parking revenues by $225,000 a year over the cost of operation. 

Such a large project would strain the downtown sewer system, so the developer has agreed to pay $2.5 million for sewer improvements in the area. The developer is also contributing $7.8 million into the city’s affordable housing trust fund through the city’s inclusionary zoning ordinance.

Check out APN’s earlier reporting for a more thorough rundown of the Core Spaces development.

Commission skepticism

Despite these public benefits, the commission’s opinion of this proposal has been mixed ever since it was announced. If the project goes forward, some commissioners are very concerned about potential impacts to Lay Park. For example, the parking lot that many people use when visiting the park would be destroyed. Furthermore, dropping children off there would be quite difficult while the apartment complex is being constructed. Finally, some commissioners worry that the (mostly white) students who will end up living in the apartments may make the nearby area, including Lay Park, seem less inviting for Black residents.

Because of these concerns, Commissioner Dexter Fisher predicted in November that in five or ten years “Tom Lay [Park] may not even be there, may not even be in existence.”

New public benefits announced

In December, Core Spaces announced a new set of public benefits to encourage commissioners to vote in favor of the development, including a $400,000 scholarship fund for Black students and the offer of greatly reduced rent in the Foundry building for some Black-led nonprofits, including the Northeast Georgia Black Chamber of Commerce and Destined, Inc., a nonprofit that promotes youth literacy.

In addition, Andy Sevoy, Vice President of Development at Core Spaces, announced his commitment to hire local, minority contractors during the construction phase of the project.

As a result of these benefits, Athens resident Theresa Omanovic came to the commission meeting on Tuesday to speak in favor of the development on behalf of the Northeast Georgia Black Chamber of Commerce. 

“This is a huge opportunity for local contractors here that have minority owners. The construction project itself has an $180 million budget,” Omanovic said.

Other Black Athenians also spoke in favor of the project during public comment, including Holly Fuller, the co-owner of Five Star Painting of Athens, and Tawana Mattox, co-founder of Destined, Inc.

Even as Mattox was asking the commission to vote in favor of the development, she took a moment to criticize the negotiation process, which she said was unnecessarily secretive.

“I believe that there should be early transparency and accountability for long-term community impact [when negotiating deals like this], particularly [if the projects are] in historically-Black areas with a legacy of displacement. We need stronger transparency policies to ensure that this does not continue,” Mattox said.

Commissioners narrowly approve the development

The biggest supporters of the project were Commissioners Mike Hamby and Melissa Link, an unlikely pairing. Hamby, who represents the commission on the Athens Downtown Development Authority (ADDA), supports the project in part because of the parking deck, which the ADDA has long sought in this part of downtown.

Link supports the project because she feels that providing student housing downtown can serve to reduce the number of students who live in the residential neighborhoods of her district, in addition to the other benefits listed above. She praised the proposal at Tuesday’s meeting, calling it “a model going forward for how we can use private development to truly benefit the community.”

Fisher spoke up to oppose the development on Tuesday, as did Commissioners Carol Myers and Tiffany Taylor. Fisher and Taylor were primarily concerned about the potential impacts to Lay Park, as discussed above. Furthermore, Fisher rejected the whole premise that Athens needs more student housing, saying that “there is an enormous amount of vacancies” in the currently existing student housing complexes.

Fisher may be incorrect about this. Jeff Humphreys, director of the Selig Center for Economic Growth at UGA, estimated Athens’ rental vacancy rate to be about 4% in a talk he gave last year, which is significantly lower than the state average. The exact vacancy rate for student apartments in Athens is not known.

Beyond the potential impacts to Lay Park, Myers questioned the entire rationale behind the land swap arrangement, saying that it would be preferable for the developer to build only on the land they already own by the Foundry.

“I don’t agree that the land swap benefits the community in the long-run. Student housing, built by right with inclusionary zoning on the land already owned by the developer could be done without the land swap. This would also produce significant dollars for affordable housing,” Myers said. “Swapping the land so we can build a public parking deck in the back of the Foundry to be mostly used for long-term student parking, is not, in my perspective, the best use of ACC land or money.”

Commissioners took two votes on the development. The first vote was for changing the zoning of 293 Hoyt Street from “government” to “commercial-downtown,” a necessary component of the land swap arrangement. The second vote authorized the broader development agreement, which spanned hundreds of pages.

Each passed with a slim 6-4 majority, with Taylor, Fisher, Myers and Commissioner Stephanie Johnson voting in opposition.

Commissioners voted unanimously to begin the process of designating Lay Park as a historic landmark at this meeting as well.

Homewood Hills shopping center redevelopment shelved

Carter, an Atlanta-based real estate firm, has requested that the mayor and commission allow them to withdraw their controversial plan to redevelop the Homewood Hills shopping center rather than having it voted down. In a unanimous decision, the commission agreed and allowed the proposal to be shelved indefinitely.

The residents of Homewood Hills who had sharply objected to the redevelopment plan may rightly consider this a win. However, Commissioner Patrick Davenport warned that something worse may be on the way, something that the commission wouldn’t be able to stop.

“A by-right development could literally right now be built without public input, without commissioners’ [input], without any input from anybody, because it’s zoned that way,” Davenport said. “It’s unfortunate, but I completely understand [why people opposed Carter’s plan].”

Tweaks to the sidewalk obstruction ordinance

The commission has unanimously agreed to revise their right-of-way ordinance to make sure that local businesses don’t have their doorways blocked by people experiencing homelessness. This has been a problem for some businesses, especially in the downtown area.

The ordinance tweaks are modest in scope but the commission nevertheless spent a great deal of time discussing them in several meetings, including in an ad-hoc Right-of-Way Committee, at Tuesday’s meeting and also during their agenda-setting meeting last month.

The previous right-of-way rules, which the commission has now replaced, simply said that it was illegal to “hinder or impede free ingress or egress to or from any place of business, institution or public building or property after having been directed by a police officer to move away therefrom.” The commission greatly expanded this simple rule with two additional pages saying essentially the same thing. The new ordinance now includes many precise legal definitions and exceptions for various situations, such as for medical emergencies.

The new ordinance now explicitly mandates that a warning shall be given for the first offense, a protection that wasn’t present in the original.

You can check out the new rules here.

The commission conversation continued on the general topic of homelessness after they had reached agreement on the right-of-way ordinance. During their discussion, Commissioner Ovita Thornton ended up expressing a mostly false idea, often repeated, that nearby counties send people experiencing homelessness to Athens on purpose as a way of getting rid of them.

“We know that other counties, cities are dropping folk off. If you drop a dog off and you get caught, you’re going to get locked up,” Thornton said. “It’s not right … to drop human beings off and leave them there to fend for themselves. We have been talking about this homeless situation since I have been on this commission, but we have not gotten to the root cause.”

Thornton’s comments contain a grain of truth, but the reality is a bit more complicated.

Hospitals and other service providers in nearby counties do drop people off in Athens, but only because their policies prohibit releasing people out onto the street. After enduring a medical procedure in a hospital, patients must be released to an address, which in the case of those experiencing homelessness, often means a homeless shelter. If there are no homeless shelters nearby, the hospital may have no choice but to send these individuals to Athens, or to the closest shelter no matter where that may be.

State Representative Houston Gaines championed a law in 2023 which was intended to prevent this sort of patient transfer. Due to this law (SB 62), it is now illegal to send people experiencing homelessness to an out-of-county shelter. Yet, the law did not include any funding for additional homeless shelters in Georgia. Therefore, the practice continues because hospitals have no choice, lest they turn into homeless shelters themselves. The law did not contain an enforcement mechanism and it is unclear who would be held accountable in any case.

Yearly counts of people experiencing homelessness in Athens show that those coming in from another county are a very small percentage of the total number residing in Athens. A significant number of people experiencing homelessness may arrive in Athens every year from other counties, but all available evidence shows that they don’t put down roots here and quickly move on.

TSPLOST 2026 project list update

This May, voters will decide whether a 1% sales tax earmarked for transportation projects should continue in Athens. 

Yet, we aren’t quite sure what the final TSPLOST 2026 project list will look like. At their meeting on Tuesday, commissioners weren’t ready to approve it, so they delayed making a decision until January 20.

What they did agree on was extending this sales tax program out for six years instead of the normal five. That will provide an extra $42 million in sales tax revenue, bringing the total up to $239 million. Commissioners agreed to allocate some of this extra money to Winterville for improvements to their five-points intersection.

Several residents spoke during public comment to encourage the commission to allocate some TSPLOST 2026 funding to trails or other multiuse paths such as the Middle Oconee River Greenway. Currently, there is no money for greenway expansion in TSPLOST 2026.

Help APN continue covering local news for the Athens area!
Please consider becoming a member or giving a one-time donation via PayPal.