For years, if you walked North Highland Avenue between Atkins Park and Morningside, you could count the empty storefronts without running out of fingers. That never squared with what surrounded the street. Virginia-Highland has some of the highest foot traffic and highest household density of any commercial corridor inside the Beltline, and the vacancies persisted anyway. Urbanize Atlanta, which covers Atlanta real estate development, described the mismatch bluntly earlier this year, calling it a strange reality given the demographic goldmine around it. Empty storefronts next to full sidewalks is not a normal equilibrium. Something had to give.
Something did. In the last stretch, two very different plans landed on two very different streets, both inside Virginia-Highland's boundaries, both aimed at the same underlying problem: what to do with aging, undersized commercial buildings that landlords could no longer fill the old way. North Highland Avenue chose to go smaller and cheaper to enter. Ponce de Leon Avenue, a short walk south, chose to go taller and start over. If you have only noticed one of these stories, you have only seen half the neighborhood's next chapter.
The Meters Came Off First
The clearest early signal came from Atlanta City Council, which voted to pull the parking meters along the Atkins Park commercial stretch. The logic was simple: free curb space does more for a struggling retail block than metered space ever did, and this stretch of North Highland had been struggling for a while.
The money followed the policy. Atlanta-based Third & Urban, the firm behind the Beltline's Westside Paper and the planned overhaul of Brookhaven's Corporate Square, has spent the past two years assembling what it calls the Atkins Park Collection. The firm bought the first phase, 35,370 square feet of retail along North Highland and St. Charles avenues, in December 2024, then added a second phase covering Neighbors bar, City Church and several other storefronts between Greenwood and St. Charles avenues. Together the two phases cover 61,120 square feet across three blocks, and Third & Urban has committed more than $3 million to building and streetscape upgrades.
Some of that work is already visible. The 842 North Highland building got new signage, railings and light fixtures, plus a new mural on the Intown Hardware side of the building by local artist Janice Rago. Renderings for the largely vacant 780 North Highland building show a bigger swing: an indoor-outdoor courtyard cut into the block, designed to pull pedestrians off the sidewalk and into the retail behind it. Third & Urban is working directly with the nonprofit Virginia Highland District Association on the project, with a stated goal of building daytime traffic, not just evening traffic, along the corridor.
What's Actually Moving Into the Empty Storefronts
Facade money and free parking only matter if tenants show up. On North Highland, they have, and the two highest-profile swaps say something about what kind of tenant this corridor can now support.
- Taco Mac announced it was closing its original location at 1006 North Highland Avenue after almost 50 years in business. Jack Brown's Beer & Burger Joint, a Virginia-based chain making its first Atlanta location, filed building permits for the space and said at the time it expected to open there by the summer of 2025.
- Farm Burger closed its 1017 North Highland location at the end of December 2025. Myles Moody and Rachael Pack, the husband-and-wife team behind Kinship Butcher & Sundry down the block, are taking over the space for a new concept. As of the team's most recent public statement, they had not revealed what it will be.
Neither swap is a chain retreating and neither is a national brand parachuting in to fill a gap. One is a regional burger chain making its Georgia debut on a block that just got its meters removed. The other is a local operator who already runs a farmers-market-driven grocery and butcher counter two doors down, expanding rather than exiting. That is a different kind of turnover than the vacancy years produced, and it lines up with the bet Third & Urban is making: smaller footprints, local operators, walk-up traffic instead of drive-up traffic.
Investors have noticed. In May 2026, Atlanta real estate firm 26th Street Partners, the same group that owns Krog Street Market, paid $17.3 million for two segments of Virginia-Highland retail space near Kinship Butcher & Sundry. That is not a speculative land bank. It is a firm that already knows how to run a food-and-retail destination, buying into a corridor it thinks is about to work the same way.
Down On Ponce, a Different Story
Walk south to where Ponce de Leon Avenue meets Bonaventure Avenue, across the street from Hotel Clermont and a newer brick-built Chick-fil-A, and the strategy flips entirely. Selig Enterprises owns three buildings between 780 and 798 Ponce de Leon Avenue, home over the years to Java Jive, China Dragon, Gusto! and the first Honey Bubble Tea location. Those tenants have closed or moved on, and Selig is not planning a facade refresh. The company has passed the City of Atlanta's Zoning Review Board stage for a project that would demolish the existing low-rise buildings and replace them with up to 375 apartments, 10,000 square feet of ground-floor retail, and a building as tall as 150 feet, or roughly 14 stories, stepping down toward the single-family homes on Maiden Lane. Fifty-seven of the units would be priced as affordable under the city's Beltline Overlay requirements. According to a February 2026 presentation Selig gave to the Virginia-Highland Civic Association, construction would not wrap until 2031.
That is the same neighborhood, a short walk away, choosing scale over storefront turnover. North Highland is betting that fixing the sidewalk and lowering the barrier to entry brings a corridor back one tenant at a time. Ponce is betting that the only way to make these particular parcels work again is to start over with several hundred more residents living on top of the retail. Both bets could be right. They are not the same bet, and a resident who only shops on one street could easily miss that the other is happening at all.
The Ramp That Makes Both Bets Possible
Underneath both stories sits a piece of infrastructure that took longer to finish than either. The pedestrian ramp connecting the Beltline's Eastside Trail directly to Ponce de Leon Avenue was part of the trail's plans since before the Eastside Trail itself opened in 2012. It broke ground years later than promised, and this January it finally opened, capping a 0.68-mile streetscape project along Ponce that had been under construction for years.
That ramp puts Beltline foot traffic directly onto Ponce de Leon Avenue, not far from North Highland's restaurant row, without forcing anyone to detour around the shopping center or wait at a crosswalk that used to be the only option. It is easy to miss because it is not a restaurant or a mural. But it is the connective tissue that makes both corridor strategies more plausible than they would have been five years ago. More people arriving on foot from the Beltline is exactly the traffic North Highland's smaller tenants need and exactly the density Selig is underwriting nearby.
What to Watch Heading Into Fall
None of this resolves cleanly into a single headline, which is probably why it has been easy to experience as a handful of unrelated updates instead of one story. A few things worth watching as the weather turns: the Virginia Highland District Association runs its annual Restaurant Week along this same stretch of North Highland, a low-effort way to see which of the newer tenants are drawing a crowd. The district also runs its Halloween trick-or-treat event through the same blocks, which will be the first real test of whether the wider sidewalks and new mural change how the corridor feels after dark. And Selig's rezoning will keep moving through city process this fall, worth tracking if you live anywhere near Bonaventure Avenue or Maiden Lane.
The short version is that Virginia-Highland is not becoming one thing. It is running two different experiments at once, on two streets close enough that most residents cross between them without noticing the difference in approach. Understanding both is the difference between watching your neighborhood change and actually knowing why.
If you are thinking about what any of this means for a home you own here, or one you are watching from outside the neighborhood, David Pruett tracks Virginia-Highland block by block, not just by median price. Book an appointment to talk through what these two corridors mean for your specific street.
