Spotlight On: Clyde Higgs, President & CEO, Atlanta Beltline
June 2025 — For Atlanta, much of the metro area’s projected growth will center around the Beltline, a 22-mile loop integrating nature, housing, retail, and business into one enterprising ecosystem. Nearly a decade into his tenure, Beltline President & CEO Clyde Higgs sees the project hitting a new gear in development, with increased investment and ancillary projects expanding the Beltline’s reach. “The Beltline is not just a paved wilderness walk; it’s really a pathway to commerce,” he said in an interview with Focus:.
What are some recent or upcoming milestones for the Beltline?
We’re approaching two major milestones: the four-year anniversary of the Special Service District (SSD) and, in 2025, the 20-year anniversary of the Beltline itself. The SSD alone has generated $100 million to support Beltline design and construction efforts. That’s in addition to $80 million from the Woodruff Foundation and $30 million from Cox Enterprises and their foundation. Altogether, we’ve raised about $400 million over the last four years through the SSD initiative.
Over the past 12 months, we’ve started to see the real output from that financing. Today, we have over 10 construction projects actively underway. It’s something that, having been with the Beltline for nearly a decade, I would have once considered unimaginable.
To date, we’ve completed more than 11 miles of the trail, about halfway to the full 22-mile loop. By spring 2026, we expect to reach nearly 18 miles of continuous Beltline trail, with about 85% of the project completed or under construction.
How are you managing the growth of the Beltline?
We find ways to manage it, but what we really feel is the pull of ancillary projects wanting to connect to the Beltline in some way.
You have the Beltline as the hub, and then you have these spokes starting to emerge.
So, while we’ve found ways to manage growth, we’ve also seen more projects actively seeking to connect to the Beltline, and that’s exactly the kind of momentum we want to see.
How can other cities learn from the Beltline?
We actually had to put a structure in place because we get so many tour requests for information from other cities, not only across the U.S. but around the globe. It’s really about trying to understand: what’s the secret sauce for the Atlanta Beltline?
The Beltline is not just a paved wilderness walk; it’s really a pathway to commerce. We’ve invested about $800 million into the Beltline to date, and what we’ve seen is about a $10 billion follow-on effect from that investment. (Not a multiplier effect — literal investment in the ground.) This is really Atlanta’s beachfront property in many ways.
The counsel we give to other communities is to make it very intentional about commerce. We support small businesses, medium-sized businesses, and Fortune 500 and Fortune 100 companies. It’s a really good mix of entities flanking the Beltline, from BlackRock and McKinsey to Mailchimp and small businesses like The James Room and Two Urban Licks that most people outside of Atlanta perhaps haven’t heard of.
Someone I know referred to the Beltline as a 22-mile Main Street district for Atlanta, connoting support for small businesses.
We also talk to them in cautionary terms: make sure a structure is in place to support legacy residents, and ensure that you don’t price out people who have been in those neighborhoods for a long time.
How unfortunate would it be for you to develop this new infrastructure, and then price out schoolteachers, public safety workers, or restaurant workers? You really want all these people who provide a service and value to the community to be able to live close to this investment.
That’s one of the things we’re excited about. The days of developing green space trails in isolation are gone, you have to think about the Beltline comprehensively. And that’s probably the biggest piece we talk about when we teach other communities why this project became so special.
Given expected population growth, how is your team planning for that on the Beltline?
Even before I landed here, thinking through housing affordability and, to be quite frank, commercial affordability was part of the early planning.
Shirley Franklin, Kathy Woolard, Ryan Gravel, and a number of others had the foresight to really think this through.
For the last four years, the Beltline has exceeded its affordable housing goal by over 70%.
We are approaching 75% of our goal of 5,600 units of affordable housing by 2030. And if you project out, it looks like we’ll beat that goal by close to 30%. Right now, we’re projecting that we’ll create or preserve somewhere around 7,200-7,300 units of affordable housing.
It’s not just Beltline, but other entities as well. If you talk to Eloisa Klementich at Invest Atlanta, Terri Lee with Atlanta Housing, or Mayor Dickens’ team, we’re all working in connection to make sure that Atlanta remains affordable — and that’s part of our secret sauce.
Culture is kind of hard to quantify. But the reason why all these high-flying companies are looking at Atlanta is because of our culture. You know, you can immediately set up shop if you’re a Fortune 500 company, and you diversify your ranks because of what Atlanta is. There is really no other city in the world, perhaps, that has such an educated, diverse workforce like the city of Atlanta.
That’s part of our competitive advantage. And even if you don’t believe that affordability is the right thing to do from a heartstrings perspective, you cannot deny the business case for why it’s important.
People should be able to work, live, play, and be educated without having to get in a physical car.
How have you seen investor interest grow with the Beltline?
From a real estate investment perspective, the Beltline is one of the most important places in the city of Atlanta right now.
If you look at where companies are making investments, the Beltline helps them attract workforce.
We eclipsed 2.4 million trips in 2024. This is where people want to be, and they choose to come here on the weekends if they want a place of joy and happiness, and to access things that make them happy. It’s the Beltline.
If you’re a company like BlackRock and you need to hire a thousand people, put an office on the Beltline somewhere. It’s going to be a lot easier to attract the type of workforce you’re looking for because you have a location where people want to be.
So yes, to your question, we continue to see that momentum not only on the Eastside, but it’s starting to happen on the Southside as well.
We own an additional 90 acres of land around the Beltline not just for the trail, but for future mixed-use development. And once we put that land out for RFPs to look for a development partner, we anticipate a lot of interest.
Where might you see yourselves at the start of this next decade as it relates to Beltline developments?
There needs to be a conversation in earnest about what happens to our main funding source, the Beltline Tax Allocation District (TAD), which potentially sunsets in 2030.
There are a lot more projects that we need to think about, including more parks that the community is asking for, future transit for the Beltline, and, in general, maintaining the asset beyond 2030.
We are going to deliver billions of dollars of infrastructure by 2030, and we need to make sure that we have a financial model that is going to honor all of the infrastructure that we put into place.
We need to focus on maintenance of the Beltline to ensure that as we invest in this high-class infrastructure, it’s maintained as such.
Thinking about the growth of Atlanta, with almost 2 million people expected to come to metro Atlanta in the next two decades or so, we’ve got to have a serious conversation about density and transit.
There are also some iconic parks that are part of our plan that we won’t get to before 2030.
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