Chantell Glenn grew up seeing that a place is defined by its community, not its buildings.
She left her tight-knit slice of Chicago four decades ago for Atlanta only to find herself surrounded by the same Rust Belt sensibilities — just a more Southern version.
Glenn is now a senior associate for the Annie E. Casey Foundation, a Baltimore nonprofit focused on community and youth improvement. She oversaw the Pittsburgh Yards redevelopment in Atlanta’s Southside.
South Atlanta is filled with industrial iconography, especially in the predominately Black neighborhood of Pittsburgh, 3 miles south of downtown. The neighborhood got its name from railroad smog that reminded residents of Pennsylvania steel mills, a pillar of the Rust Belt just like Glenn’s hometown.
The area endured disinvestment for generations and saw its railroad presence fade with time, clearing a way for the Atlanta Beltline trail to wind through the neighborhood. Glenn, whose career centers on developing community-driven real estate projects, was inspired by the resilient Pittsburgh community to build spaces designed for legacy residents — not developments that could push them away.
“The continued disinvestment just goes back years and years and years,” Glenn said. “It’s time to double down on who is already in this community and who we’re building things for.”
Building skills
Glenn’s career has revolved around trying to bring equitable developments to fruition in Atlanta, a directive inspired by her time at Spelman College in the mid-1990s. While studying economics, she took an urban economics class she said was eye-opening.
“It really taught the technical knowledge of how our social welfare system is built,” Glenn said.
Community investment and economic development weren’t seen as compatible career trajectories at the time, so she had to forge her own path. Her journey wound through the public, private and nonprofit sectors, each teaching lessons on how to overcome the challenges of affordable projects.
She described it as playing the same game, just in a different position.
From 2005 to 2013, Glenn worked for the city of Atlanta on analyzing economic growth patterns, the Georgia Department of Community Affairs on grants addressing homelessness and Fulton County on affordable housing programs. She worked on similar initiatives as the director of community and economic development for the city of Riverdale in Clayton County.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Glenn also worked as a real estate agent for Wilson Realty Group and as a brokerage assistant with real estate services firm Colliers. Those experiences culminated in 2018 when she joined the Casey Foundation, leading the Pittsburgh Yards redevelopment.
“It takes various entities — private, public and nonprofit — to do this type of work. However, there’s a different lens with each sector,” she said. “... You think about that community impact differently if you’re leading with kindness, which is embedded in a nonprofit versus a for-profit focus.”
Returning the land to its true use
Through the redevelopment initiative Glenn led, Pittsburgh Yards is a now-bustling coworking space providing entrepreneurs a place to grow. The project transformed a dilapidated trucking terminal off University Avenue into the Nia building, named after the Kwanzaa principal of purpose.
The communities that comprise Neighborhood Planning Unit V, which includes Pittsburgh, were consulted for years on what the project should embody. Those feedback sessions informed the building’s Swahili-inspired name, its aesthetic and its focus on affordable commercial spaces, hearkening back to the neighborhood’s industrial roots.
“We really see this project as returning the land to its true use and returning it to community,” she said.
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
The 61,000-square-foot small business hub is about 80% leased and offers $50-a-month memberships for access to its coworking space. Individual micro-suites that start at 100 square feet are available for entrepreneurs.
Former Atlanta Public Schools teacher Marsha Francis leases four suites at Pittsburgh Yards for her nonprofit STEAM Truck, which provides mobile hands-on education services meant to engage kids in science, technology, engineering, art and math — subjects that form “STEAM.”
“We felt like the community, the amenities and the accessibility was much more valuable than square footage,” said Francis, the nonprofit’s executive director. “We wanted to make sure that we could be in a space with like-minded individuals in the heart of the community.”
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Credit: arvin.temkar@ajc.com
Preserving homes and jobs
Founded in 1883 by formerly enslaved people, the Pittsburgh community is one of the oldest in Atlanta, and is often overlooked.
As recently as May 2018, the average home value in the neighborhood was less than $100,000, roughly a third of the citywide average at the time, according to Zillow. Investing in under-resourced areas like Pittsburgh presents the tricky task of mitigating gentrification, which is when affluent people displace longtime residents as neighborhood amenities are improved and housing values go up.
The Casey Foundation acquired the 31-acre Pittsburgh Yards site in 2006 as an anti-gentrification effort, according to Nonet Sykes, who spent 16 years with the nonprofit.
“We knew we needed to purchase the (Pittsburgh Yards) property to prevent it from being picked up by speculators and ultimately pushing out the existing community,” said Sykes, who is now the chief people and impact officer for the Beltline.
Credit: Ben Gray
Credit: Ben Gray
Pittsburgh was among the Southside neighborhoods devastated by the 2008 Great Recession and housing bust, which prompted high rates of foreclosures. The Casey Foundation’s focus switched to purchasing foreclosed homes in the area to preserve their affordability, leaving Pittsburgh Yards on hold.
“There was work done to preserve folks in their homes, but now we’ve got to do something about the jobs that are shifting out of the community further north,” Glenn said. “So it was decided this would be more of a jobs and entrepreneurial hub.”
The Casey Foundation raised $26 million to complete the redevelopment. Those funds included $6.5 million in new market tax credits from Invest Atlanta and a $1.5 million grant through the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration, both of which Glenn said were crucial to delivering a project focused on affordability.
The Nia building opened in late 2020 with about 20 tenants in tow. It now has about 150 businesses across its suites and coworking roster. Fears the project would spike home prices haven’t come to fruition with average home values in Pittsburgh mirroring other nearby neighborhoods and lagging Fulton County as a whole.
The Beltline two years ago bought nearly 14 acres next to Pittsburgh Yards to develop into new housing and commercial development, both with affordability components.
“Equity and equitable development are about partnering with the community and not doing things to them,” Sykes said. “... I do think Pittsburgh Yards can be a model, and we’re using the same approach on all of the other developments that we have around the Beltline corridor.”
Pittsburgh Yards has room to grow, with multiple pad sites ready for partner organizations or developers to build upon the project’s vision.
“Pittsburgh Yards has definitely given me hope that if you do go into a redevelopment project with a mission-driven mindset, it can be done now,” Glenn said.
Chantell Glenn
Education: B.A. in Economics from Spelman College
Role: Senior associate with the Annie E. Casey Foundation
Residence: Atlanta
AJC Her+Story is a new series in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution highlighting women founders, creators, executives and professionals with in-depth profiles and stories exploring important topics. AJC Her+Story is about building a community. Know someone the AJC should feature in AJC Her+Story? Email us at herstory@ajc.com with your suggestions. Check out all of our AJC Her+Story coverage at www.ajc.com/herstory.
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