Teixeira's Westside Project Was Denied Affordable Housing Incentive Before Sale To Microsoft

The former developers of a much-watched Westside Atlanta parcel failed to come to terms with city officials for incentives to build affordable housing.

Urban Creek Partners, led by former Atlanta Braves and New York Yankees All-Star first baseman Mark Teixeira, was seeking a grant of $2.2M to $4.1M to help cover the cash-flow loss for the 40% of the housing units that would have been designated as affordable on the 70-acre undeveloped mixed-use site known as Quarry Yards, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported.

But city officials and Invest Atlanta, the economic development arm for the city, balked at the price tag.

“BeltLine is amenable to funding but those amounts are a bit high for them,” Invest Atlanta Senior Vice President Alan Ferguson said to an Urban Creek Partners executive in an email Jan. 16, according to the AJC, which acquired the communication as part of an open records request.

In September, tech giant Microsoft paid $127M to buy the Quarry Yards site from Urban Creek. Urban Creek originally planned to transform the site next to the Westside Reservoir Park into a $400M mixed-use development with office, retail, hotel and hundreds of apartment units, a portion of which were to be designated as affordable.

"The reason we stopped communicating with the city is that we were under a term sheet for the sale," Teixeira told Bisnow via email. "The negotiations with the city had nothing to do with our sale of Quarry Yards." 

Microsoft has yet to reveal its plans for Quarry Yards. Communications between the city and Urban Creek ended in February, the AJC reported. Seven months later, the developer sold the site.

UPDATE, NOV. 2, 3:18 P.M. ET: The story has been updated with comments from Mark Teixeira.