A development team has been selected to redevelop the vacant Atlanta Medical Center site, a lofty project to replace the shuttered hospital with a community hub.
City leaders have nodded their approval and lifted two years of bans on remaking the property.
Wellstar Health System, which owns the 22-acre Old Fourth Ward property, announced Thursday it chose Integral Group to lead the pivotal project. A majority of the hospital building will be demolished to make way for new construction, although some of the campus’s towers may be preserved for conversion into other uses.
The announcement coincides with this week’s expiration of a series of zoning moratoriums designed to give city officials and community members time to envision a redeveloped hospital campus that is “consistent with the character of the surrounding area,” according to the ordinances.
Integral Group Chairman Egbert Perry said the new development will be community-centered, especially given it’s along a corridor of Boulevard that has been overlooked for decades.
“This master development project is a significant milestone, as it marks a major private investment in a neighborhood that is central to Atlanta’s future,” Egbert said in a written statement. “This redevelopment is about much more than buildings. It’s about revitalizing a community with empathy and foresight.”
Credit: Courtesy Integral Group
Credit: Courtesy Integral Group
However, the project’s details are preliminary and are still being formed. Integral said the property’s scope should be leveraged to “shape a vibrant mixed-use neighborhood,” which will likely include both for-sale and rental residential units alongside public green spaces and neighborhood retail.
A spokesman for Wellstar, Matt O’Connor, said the new development would include some sort of health and wellness component, which he said will become clearer with community listening sessions Integral will hold.
The announcement comes nearly two years after Wellstar abruptly closed Atlanta Medical Center in 2022, leaving Atlanta leaders in shock and disrupting the city’s health care ecosystem. The closure left Atlanta with only one Level 1 trauma center: at Grady Memorial Hospital.
Atlanta Mayor Andre Dickens, who was critical of Wellstar for closing the hospital and led the drive to impose moratoriums on development, on Thursday hailed the progress.
“Through direct engagement with the Old Fourth Ward and surrounding stakeholders, we now have an opportunity to create an inclusive, forward-looking and thriving new development that meets the community’s needs for affordable housing, green space and safe streets — while maintaining some medical use and retaining the neighborhood’s unique character,” Dickens said in a written statement.
Wellstar Health System CEO Candice Saunders in her own statement agreed that support for the community remained a driving force in the deal.
“We will work closely with the city to build on its revitalization plan and bring to life our shared vision of a thriving, healthy addition to the Old Fourth Ward,” Saunders said.
Integral Group said it will soon begin preparing Atlanta Medical Center for demolition, starting at the northwest corner of the site along Ralph McGill Boulevard and Boulevard. The demolition will take place in stages and will signal “the beginning of the site’s physical transformation,” Integral said.
A health care hole
The absence of plans for a new hospital leaves surrounding hospitals continuing to deal with the overflow from the absent AMC.
When Wellstar closed Atlanta Medical Center, both the main AMC in Atlanta and the AMC South earlier in East Point, all their patients were then forced to go to other hospitals or clinics, or to forgo care. The emergency rooms of other hospitals in the area, already stretched by staffing shortages, reported being much worse off.
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Credit: Miguel Martinez-Jimenez
Even now at the moment of the announcement, Grady Memorial Hospital was “dangerously overcrowded” and on medical diversion, too full to accept ambulances for regular medical patients, according to the website used to coordinate hospital diversion.
The population using AMC was disproportionately uninsured, however, making the hospital tough to run profitably.
Top-level trauma centers are vital health care facilities capable of managing the most complex trauma cases, such as severe car accidents, gunshot wounds and major falls. Most major U.S. cities have multiple nationally recognized top trauma centers, making Atlanta one of the nation’s largest with only a single such designated adult hospital in its city limits.
‘Community’s needs and vision’
While redevelopment was blocked, city officials and Old Fourth Ward residents refined their vision of what they’d like to see replace the vacant hospital.
In August, plans to transform the hospital and surrounding blocks into a bustling community hub with parks, housing, retail shops and office space were presented to the area’s local neighborhood planning unit. The plan didn’t include any medical facilities at the site.
Credit: Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Credit: Jason.Getz@ajc.com
Those plans included up to 2.4 million square feet of residential units, 120,000 square feet of commercial and retail shops and 240,000 square feet of offices space. The massive undertaking offers the chance to connect the longtime hospital to Freedom Park Trail, Old Fourth Ward Park and the east side of the Beltline.
Integral officials said that plan, which was developed by Atlanta’s Department of City Planning and engineering consultant Kimley-Horn, is being used as the “conceptual framework” for their redevelopment vision. Specific details, however, are subject to change, and the project hasn’t entered into a firm design phase.
Integral Senior Vice President Eric Pinckney said multiple rounds of neighborhood meetings will take place to gather feedback and understand “the community’s needs and vision for the future.”
“This project is about creating a neighborhood that serves everyone and builds on the rich history of this area,” he said in a statement.
Lynne Alston-Leonard, an Old Fourth Ward resident who has spoken publicly of the damage AMC’s closure did to former patients, had mixed emotions after hearing those assurances.
Her first thoughts in an interview Thursday were that Wellstar should have done that before it closed the hospital. But then she looked forward.
“I hope that, knowing that they want to tap into the community, they’ve got to make sure that they tap into all of the community,” including longtime residents and seniors in affordable housing like her and her neighbors, Alston-Leonard said.
“I mean, my reaction to that is that’s absolutely critical,” she said. “It’s important. I think it can make a difference.”
Creating the ‘Atlanta model’
Integral has long been an influential developer in Atlanta and is credited with reimagining how the city approaches affordable housing projects.
Integral developed the mixed-income housing model in the mid-1990s — which would go on to be known as the “Atlanta model” — by replacing aging and dangerous public housing complexes with communities of varying economic status. One of the group’s initial projects was transforming Atlanta’s Techwood Homes, the first public housing in the U.S., into a multigenerational mix of rental and single-family units called Centennial Place.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The developer has continued to intertwine itself with Atlanta by taking on several high-profile and challenging projects. These include the former General Motors plant in Doraville, which has been redeveloped into Assembly, and the historic former University Homes complex, which was the nation’s first public housing project for Black Americans.
Integral Group is also among the four developers tasked with transforming downtown Atlanta’s 2 Peachtree tower — a government building long viewed as a money pit — into one of the city’s tallest residential buildings with a focus on affordable units.
