By the end of 2026, the Southern Poverty Law Center hopes to transform contaminated land in the English Avenue neighborhood into a sustainable, community-facing campus.
One year after acquiring 2½ acres on Atlanta’s Westside, the nonprofit organization has selected a developer and architect to oversee the project, which will create a campus with space for use by both the law center and the public.. Quest Community Development Corporation, which is active in building affordable housing on the Westside, has been tapped as the developer, while Cooper Carry is the architect, according to an announcement from the SPLC.
The SPLC wants to add three buildings on the site, two of which will have space for job training, educational opportunities and for community members to hold meetings or events. The third building will be the organization’s offices. The campus also will honor the legacy and civil rights history of the neighborhood.
“We want something that is much bigger than just being a place for our employees to go to work every day,” SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang said. “But also something that serves the larger community.”
This will be the organization’s largest expansion in Atlanta since opening offices in the metro area nearly two decades ago. Partly due to safety precautions, the Montgomery, Alabama-headquartered SPLC has maintained offices in a nondescript building in Decatur.
The SPLC wanted a physical presence in the communities it serves, and the Westside was the only location it considered for its expansion. The law center paid $10.2 million for the land in 2023, according to Fulton County property deeds.
Over the past year, the law center has asked members of the community and elected officials to share their needs and wants for the campus.
What they learned, Huang said, is that environmental pollution was a chief concern within the community. The Westside has more than 600 acres of land with high levels of land contamination, not to mention fewer trees than any other part of the city, which keeps temperatures there higher.
In 2022, the Environmental Protection Agency added a site stretching across both English Avenue and Vine City to the Superfund National Priorities List, a designation reserved for locations that pose serious health threats and require long-term cleanup. SPLC’s site is within the boundaries of the Superfund site but not subject to soil screening since the land is not planned for residential use. The law center has conducted environmental testing of its own and did not find lead contamination, but there were other contaminants it needs to remediate.
As SPLC officials learned more about environmental challenges in the area, they began to consider making one or more of the structures a “living building” — meaning that it’s meant to have a minimal impact on the environment by being self-sufficient. These buildings must meet a rigid certification program, which includes using nontoxic, locally sourced and renewable building materials, producing more energy that it uses over the course of a year and maximizing natural light, among several other standards. Atlanta has one building certified under this program: the Kendeda Building for Innovative Sustainable Design at Georgia Tech.
The law center also learned there were organizations in the area that didn’t have a place to meet, including teachers at a nearby middle school. This is why project plans include space for the public to meet.
From the get-go, the organization knew it wanted to work with local firms like Atlanta-based Quest to plan the campus. SPLC officials first connected with the organization’s president, Leonard Adams, in 2020 and quickly learned they wanted to collaborate with him in some capacity. Adams has worked with neighborhoods on the Westside for years, Huang said, and is committed to upholding the history and legacy of the community.
In fact, the law center’s concept for its campus was inspired by Quest’s own on Joseph E. Lowery Boulevard NW.
Cooper Carry’s design presentation captured much of what the SPLC wanted to see in the campus, including a nod to the area’s history and a design that doesn’t cut the campus off from the neighborhood.
The law center expects to begin construction by the second half of 2025 and aims to complete the campus by the end of 2026, Huang said. The organization has already made safety and accessibility improvements to the site, including building a new access point that required replacing sidewalks.
“The goal is to get this place functioning and up and running so it can be used by everyone as quickly as it can,” Huang said.
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