1736 Magazine - Fall 2018

A traffic roundabout, also called a traffic circle, being
built along Twiggs Street near the intersection with 7th
Street in Augusta, Ga
PHOTO BY MICHAEL HOLAHAN
than the corner of Wrightsboro Road and R.A.
Dent Boulevard, where the city and its development
partner is building an upscale 221-unit
market-rate apartment complex called Foundry
Place. The $30 million partnership between the
city and Columbia Ventures
of Atlanta is designed
to boost the low-income
neighborhood’s per-capita
The Foundry is
important because
it’s an economic
stimulus. It needed
to happen.
Hawthorne Welcher
income to attract new businesses.
The neighborhood was a
center of black commerce
during the segregation era.
However, the once-thriving
area started declining in the
1950s and ‘60 as black consumers
began to move and
shop elsewhere.
Dozens of abandoned and
dilapidated homes have been
demolished, but more work
is needed, City Administrator
Janice Allen Jackson said.
“Although we dedicate hundreds of thousands
of dollars each year to demolition and mowing
vacant lots, that degree of resources is only the
tip of the iceberg compared to the total need,”
she said.
City leaders in 2008 adopted a special hotel/
motel tax fund to assist with revitalization efforts,
including the Heritage
Pine neighborhood on Pine
Street in 2011, Twiggs Circle in
2014 and the Legacy at Walton
Green apartments in 2016.
But no
project is more
ambitious than
the Foundry
Place, the
largest-single
investment
in the
Laney-Walker/
Bethlehem
area in more than 50 years.
The $900- to $1,200- a month
apartment community is being
built on a 7.6-acre former
brownfield site across the street
from Augusta University’s Dental
College of Georgia.
The development, along with
a soon-to-be-announced 60- to 70-unit complex
on Laney-Walker Boulevard, is part of Welcher’s
strategy to “hurriedly repopulate” the area with
higher-income residents who can attract businesses,
such as pharmacies and grocery stores,
and eventually job-creating industries.
“The Foundry is important because it’s an economic
stimulus. It needed to happen,” Welcher
PHOTO BY MICHAEL HOLAHAN
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