On the west side of Atlanta, Georgia, nestled along the city’s 22-mile beltline walking trail and the largest park in the city, sits one of the last remaining undeveloped tracts of land within the metropolitan boundaries.
Until last month, that 90-acre piece of land—located at the heart of several historically Black and economically disadvantaged neighborhoods, including Grove Park and Center Hill—was set to become a new campus for Microsoft.
When Microsoft announced the project in early 2021, locals greeted the news with both excitement and concern. The company had promised to set aside about 25 percent of the land for affordable housing and other community projects, and some were enthusiastic about the potential economic uplift in communities long ignored by investors. But others worried that house prices would rise, driving longtime residents from their neighborhoods. Real estate prices in the neighborhood rose by more than 50 percent from 2022 to 2023, according to Redfin data.
Then, in February 2023, Microsoft told local news outlet Bisnow Atlanta that it had indefinitely paused its plans for the new campus, leaving locals with the inflated prices but none of the jobs and investment. And the company hasn’t listed the land for sale, meaning it’s unclear when, or if, the space will be developed.
“You’ve got a lot of people that were truly invested in trying to get Microsoft here, wanting the jobs and resources of that nature. It’s at the point now where it’s like, are they still coming or not?” says Tim City, an English teacher who owns the DA City Hookah Cafe in Grove Park. City just began his term as the secretary for the neighborhood planning unit adjacent to the Microsoft land.
“I still have high hopes that it can pull through. Being a business owner, I know how many opportunities it can bring for the community and how many lives it can change. Building a Microsoft HQ and hoping it employs a lot of people who are qualified in our communities, it would just be transformational.”
Microsoft declined to answer questions on the record.
Atlanta mayor Andre Dickens has called Microsoft to express his concerns over the pause, according to a statement from Michael Smith, Dickens’ press secretary. “The 2021 announcement of the campus had economic consequences for the surrounding communities,” Smith says. “This announcement of a delayed development creates uncertainties, and the mayor wants to ensure that Microsoft fulfills the commitments it has made to our city.”
Over the past decade, Atlanta has fostered an unusually diverse and thriving tech startup community, with meeting platform Calendly perhaps its most well-known success story. A concentration of colleges and universities—including Georgia Tech, Clark, Spelman, Morehouse, Georgia State, and the Savannah College of Art and Design—feed into a large and diverse pool of tech talent.
It’s this that originally drew Microsoft to the city for its new campus, President Brad Smith said in the company’s February 2021 Atlanta investment announcement. In the original statement, the company said that it intended for Atlanta to become one of its largest Microsoft hubs, preceded only by offices in San Francisco and Washington state. “We understand the impact that an investment of this size has on a city like Atlanta. It has huge potential, but if not done right, the downsides can outweigh this promise,” he wrote at the time.
Microsoft says it still plans to reserve about one-quarter of the land for community use, but those uses have no timeline. The pullback in Atlanta is part of the company’s broader cost-cutting efforts, which include layoffs of around 10,000 employees and reassessment of the company’s real-estate holdings and leases. Microsoft isn’t the only company to reconsider its future office plans; Amazon paused construction plans for the second and larger half of its new HQ project in Arlington, Virginia, in March, and Alphabet will also be reducing its office holdings.
Atlanta councilman Dustin Hillis, who represents some of the residents around the proposed site, says that Microsoft hasn’t been in touch either before or since it announced its pause. “However, given its significant investment and promises made to Grove Park and other surrounding neighborhoods, I hope Microsoft moves forward with development of this substantial piece of land—potentially with less office and more affordable/workforce housing and retail that fulfills the area’s needs,” Hillis says.
Since the 1920s, the neighborhoods that abut the land bought by Microsoft have housed almost entirely African American residents. Nearly 100 percent of the Grove Park neighborhood’s residents identify as Black, which is about three times the Atlanta median, according to data from the Atlanta Regional Commission’s Grove Park Community Goals and Neighborhood Assessment.
In recent decades, economic disinvestment in the region has left the neighborhood without even basic commercial resources like grocery stores and pharmacies. In 2018, the median household income for Grove Park families was $23,000, and about half of all residents made less than $25,000 a year (compared to less than a quarter of those in the Atlanta metropolitan area). Between 2010 and 2017, the neighborhood’s population declined nearly 25 percent.
“The whole area is really a food desert. The closest grocery stores are more than 2 miles away. When Microsoft came in, they said they’d be investing in the community, putting in a grocery store, putting in affordable housing, as well as a bank and things like that. So the concern now is, what is going to happen now that they’re on pause?” asks Arthur Toal, the board president of the Howell Station Neighborhood Association, representing one of the neighborhoods near the development site.
“The property values have already gone up significantly, and that’s impacting people in terms of their taxes. So that’s already having an impact, but we’re not getting the good stuff that is promised when something like that happens. It’s having a big impact on people in that regard,” he says.
City and other residents emphasize that the surrounding communities do not see Microsoft as a savior, but instead as a catalyst for much-needed investment. “This area is going to be resilient regardless, but we would love for Microsoft to be a part of that,” City says.
“Center Hill is disappointed in Microsoft’s decision. However, we believe that the Westside will thrive and move onward and upward,” says Miranda Blais, the vice chair of the Center Hill Neighborhood Association, on behalf of the association’s members.
But local investors and politicians are arguing that if Microsoft isn’t going to develop the site, the least it can do is move aside so someone else can.
“The best resolution for Microsoft and Atlanta is a quick one: Either keep moving forward on the new campus or put the land up for sale,” says David Cummings, CEO and founder of VC and incubator Atlanta Ventures and of tech-startup hub Atlanta Tech Village. “A 90-acre parcel of land near the biggest park in Atlanta and a rapid transit station is too good to let sit.”
