Report: ‘Downtown’ ATL among national leaders in post-pandemic apartment construction

Josh Green

Thu, 05/15/2025 – 14:13

Few places in the United States have swelled with new apartment construction like intown Atlanta since the pandemic, a new analysis using Yardi Matrix data has found.

Core Atlanta subdistricts have stood out during a recent nationwide slowdown in apartment building, tallying more than 11,000 new rental units in projects that have beefed up and transformed the Midtown skyline and parts of downtown, according to national apartment search platform RentCafe.

The wave of new apartment options appears to be the highest Atlanta has seen over the past three decades, according to the analysis.

Those findings were part of RentCafe’s new Downtown Construction Report that examined the 50 largest U.S. cities, with a goal of spotlighting places making big bets on urban revival with new-construction and adaptive-reuse rentals.

Many of the Midtown high-rise rentals shown here in December 2022 delivered last year, continuing a multifamily boom. Urbanize Atlanta

The Yardi Matrix data was limited to buildings with 50 units or more through January this year. But it stretched back for 35 years—to 1990, when Atlanta was a vastly different place.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Midtown and downtown Atlanta had completed 11,130 apartments—bested only by the downtowns of Washington D.C., Chicago, and Denver, respectively, per the analysis.

Analysts also found that apartment construction in Atlanta exploded after another calamity, the Great Recession, as nearly 16,000 units were finished in the 2010s. (Talk about resurgens.) That tally was twice as many as the previous decade—and five times what Atlanta saw in the 1990s, per RentCafe.

It’s important to note that intown apartment hot zones such as Buckhead, Atlantic Station, and Old Fourth Ward were excluded from the tally, according to a breakdown of zip codes provided to Urbanize Atlanta.

Breakdown of the five zip codes considered in the RentCafe analysis—30303, 30308, 30309, 30312, and 30313—stretching across Midtown, West Midtown, and downtown. USmapguide.com

But with more than 2,000 office-to-apartment units in Atlanta’s pipeline, the forecast says that could change soon.

Washington D.C., the leading city for the sheer number of downtown apartments finished between 2020 and 2024, tallied nearly 23,000 units, more than double what Midtown and downtown saw, per the analysis.

RentCafe