Belvedere Plaza has been sitting at the corner of Memorial Drive and Columbia Drive since the 1950s — one of the earliest malls in the area, back when 'mall' meant a strip of storefronts with a parking lot in front and a Kroger anchoring the whole thing. Kroger left. The anchor slot went dark. And the center drifted into the kind of tenancy mix that tells you a lot about what happened to a corridor over seventy years: Planet Fitness, Hibbett, Value Village, a furniture store.
Now Hutton, a commercial real estate developer, is putting $24.3 million into the site. The Decide DeKalb Development Authority just approved a $3 million Urban Renewal Fund award — sourced from the Avondale Mall/Columbia Drive Tax Allocation District — to help make it happen. That's a unanimous board vote. That's a developer writing a real check. That's not a rezoning application with a render and a prayer.
This is worth paying attention to, and not just if you own property near Memorial Drive.
What $24M Actually Buys at a 1950s Strip Center
Let me be real with you about what a renovation at this scale means for a 70-year-old strip center. These buildings were built on the cheap by the standards of their era — slab-on-grade construction, load-bearing masonry or tilt-up concrete panels, minimal mechanical infrastructure, and electrical systems that have been patched and re-patched across decades of tenant turnover. When a developer commits $24 million to a center like this, a significant portion of that money is not going to new storefronts. It's going to the building itself.
Roof replacement at a center this size runs $800K to $1.5 million depending on what they find underneath. HVAC infrastructure for commercial retail — not just units, but the ducting, rooftop curbs, gas lines, electrical panels, and the coordination between anchor and in-line tenant systems — is another $2-4 million if they're doing it right. Parking lot reconstruction, drainage, ADA compliance upgrades, utility upgrades to handle modern tenant electrical loads — you're looking at another $3-5 million before a single storefront gets a new facade.
The point is: $24 million is a serious number for a strip center repositioning. This is not a coat-of-paint-and-new-signage play. Hutton is rebuilding the infrastructure that makes the center leasable to tenants who have options.
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What Belvedere's Resurrection Signals for the Corridor
The Memorial Drive corridor between downtown Decatur and Columbia Drive has been one of the more interesting slow-burn stories in DeKalb County for the last decade. Avondale Estates to the east has been quietly gentrifying. Decatur proper has been doing its thing for years. East Atlanta Village and Kirkwood to the west have been transforming since the early 2010s.
Belvedere Plaza sat in the middle of this — a corridor that had the geography and the transit proximity (it's within range of the Avondale MARTA station) to justify investment, but that hadn't attracted it yet.
The Avondale Mall/Columbia Drive Tax Allocation District — the funding mechanism behind the $3 million award — exists precisely because DeKalb County identified this stretch as a redevelopment priority. TADs don't get created for corridors nobody believes in. The county has been building the financial infrastructure to attract private capital here for years. Hutton's $24.3 million is the private capital responding.
Watch for what happens to the anchor tenancy. The Kroger slot is the story. A 30,000-plus square foot former grocery anchor in a repositioned center in this corridor could attract a regional grocer targeting the demographics that have been moving into Avondale Estates and the surrounding neighborhoods — or it could attract a non-grocery anchor that signals a different direction entirely. The anchor lease will tell you everything about who Hutton thinks the customer is in 2027.
!Memorial Drive corridor looking toward Avondale Estates and Decatur, DeKalb County
What This Means for Residential Values in the Surrounding Neighborhoods
Belvedere Park — the neighborhood the plaza is named after — is a mix of mid-century ranch homes and post-war brick bungalows sitting in unincorporated DeKalb, south of Avondale Estates. It's been a value play for buyers who couldn't afford Avondale proper or Kirkwood but wanted proximity to both.
A $24 million commercial renovation at the neighborhood's anchor shopping center is the kind of catalyst that starts showing up in comps 18 to 24 months after construction wraps. Not because a fresh facade makes the houses better — but because walkable retail access is a quantifiable value driver in the intown DeKalb market, and right now Belvedere Park doesn't have it at the standard the surrounding markets offer.
If Hutton executes and the anchor tenancy lands right, this corridor closes some of the gap between Belvedere Park and Avondale Estates pricing. That gap is currently meaningful — Avondale Estates commands a 15-25% premium over comparable Belvedere Park homes on a price-per-square-foot basis, and a significant part of that premium is the walkable-to-decent-retail story that Avondale tells and Belvedere Park currently can't.
The risk is execution and timeline. Commercial renovations at this scale routinely run 12-18 months past initial projections. The anchor lease may not land the way Hutton is modeling it. And 'unincorporated DeKalb' is still a friction point for some buyers who want the incorporated-municipality story that Avondale Estates or Decatur proper provides.
But the direction is right. The money is real. And the corridor has been waiting for this for thirty years.
Send the address if you're watching a Belvedere Park or unincorporated DeKalb buy right now — Beckett Real Estate looks at what's coming as hard as what's already there.
