Decatur's Baby Kroger Site Is Finally Under Construction. The Contract Quietly Decided What Comes Next.

For almost four years, the fenced-off lot at 720 and 750 Commerce Drive has been the kind of empty that Decatur residents stopped really seeing. You drive past it on the way to the Square, or walk past it heading toward the cemetery, and it registers as background noise: another chain-link rectangle waiting on something.

"Lots of people who live within walking distance are praying for it to be replaced by Trader Joe's."

That's how one nearby resident put it to Urbanize Atlanta back when the store first announced its closing, adding that they stopped in almost daily for a quick snack and that the aisles were mostly filled with retirees walking over from nearby senior communities. That was written in the fall of 2022, right before the Commerce Drive Kroger, known to nearly everyone in town as Baby Kroger for its cramped, 15,000-square-foot footprint, closed for good on December 2. It had run for more than two decades, in a building that started life as a Colonial grocery in the 1960s. Its closure landed within days of Buckhead's similarly nicknamed Disco Kroger, and the two closures together read like the end of an era for old-school, walkable Kroger locations inside the perimeter.

Disco Kroger already had redevelopment plans lined up before it even shut its doors. Baby Kroger did not. The site sat behind a fence for years while Decatur's Downtown Development Authority worked to find a replacement, and residents were left guessing.

That guessing period is over. Construction crews are now actively clearing and building on the site, and the mechanism that determines what goes there isn't a rumor anymore. It's written into a contract.

What actually happened to the building

AMLI Residential purchased the 4.3-acre property in January 2026 from Pope & Land Enterprises, the Atlanta developer that owned the site before selling to AMLI. A demolition permit followed in February, and by September, the site had been fully cleared and infrastructure work was underway on a project called AMLI Market Square.

Here's the shape of it, laid out plainly:

The finished project is planned as a $144 million mixed-use development: 358 apartments, a 642-space parking deck, and roughly 26,000 square feet of ground-floor retail anchored by a grocery space of about 14,500 square feet. Of the direct construction and land costs, $108.3 million is going toward building the thing and $36.1 million toward acquiring the land and covering design and soft costs, according to Decatur Downtown Development Authority records. Thirty-six of the 358 units will be set aside as affordable housing under the city's inclusionary housing ordinance.

If you've been waiting years to see something happen on that corner, something is now visibly happening. What's less visible, and more interesting, is how the city made sure it would happen a particular way.

The size was never left to chance

Here's the part that doesn't usually make it into the neighborhood chatter: the Decatur DDA approved a $13 million tax incentive package for AMLI and Pope & Land, but that money came with a specific condition attached. To qualify, the developers had to sign a lease for what the agreement calls a "Qualified Grocery Store," defined as a space of at least 10,000 square feet operated by a chain with at least 200 locations. The economic development agreement even lists acceptable examples: Aldi, Fresh Market, Kroger, Publix, Sprouts, Trader Joe's, and Whole Foods.

That's a wide net on paper. In practice, the actual grocery shell being built is roughly 14,500 to 15,000 square feet, a size that WABE has described as essentially an exact match for a standard Trader Joe's format. AMLI has reportedly signed a lease with Trader Joe's for the space. The chain hasn't confirmed it, which tracks with how Trader Joe's typically operates. It doesn't list new locations publicly until it's ready to.

AMLI's own senior vice president, Annie Hirst, addressed the silence directly in a letter to the city: the grocery lease prohibits AMLI from revealing the tenant's name until the grocer announces it themselves. DDA member Darren Comer put it more casually when asked about the uncertainty: "I don't see it as an issue, and it just adds to the mystique."

So the honest version of the story isn't "Trader Joe's is coming to Decatur." It's that the contract paying for this building was built around a physical footprint that happens to match one specific chain almost exactly, while every party involved is legally required to stay quiet about it until the grocer says so publicly. That's a different kind of certainty than a rumor. It's a structural detail sitting in public DDA filings, available to anyone who wants to read the agreement itself.

What's actually within walking distance right now

While the site finishes construction, and preleasing doesn't start until late 2028, it helps to remember why the gap has felt so specific to residents. Back in 2022, when Baby Kroger closed, the closest thing to a walkable grocery left in the immediate downtown core was Savi Provisions, more specialty market than full weekly-shop grocery run.

For anyone doing a full weekly shop, the options sit a short drive rather than a walk away. Aldi, Kroger, Sprouts, and Whole Foods all have locations on North Decatur Road. There's another Kroger on DeKalb Industrial Way, and two Publix stores, one on East Ponce de Leon Avenue and another on North Decatur Road. Notably absent from that list, at least for now, are Trader Joe's and Fresh Market, neither of which has a store in or near Decatur. That gap is exactly what the DDA's incentive was designed to close, and it's a big part of why the size of the AMLI Market Square grocery shell has gotten so much local attention.

Why the location itself keeps coming up

The site sits directly next to Decatur Cemetery, within walking distance of Decatur Square and the Decatur MARTA station, and close to Emory University, Emory Healthcare, and the CDC. None of that is new information to anyone who's lived here a while. What it does explain is why this particular empty lot has stayed a topic of conversation for four years running, rather than fading into the kind of background vacancy nobody bothers to ask about. It's positioned in the part of downtown people actually walk through on a normal week, which is also why the grocery gap has felt more like a daily inconvenience than an abstract complaint.

What's still unresolved

Nothing here is fully locked in. Trader Joe's has not confirmed a Decatur location on its own announcements page, and until it does, the honest answer to "what's replacing Baby Kroger" is: an AMLI-built retail space sized almost exactly like a Trader Joe's, financed in part by a city incentive that required a specific grocery format, operated by a company that legally can't say who it's leasing to yet. Preleasing is still two years out, and first move-ins further still. The fence has come down and the site has been cleared, but a lot can shift between infrastructure work and a ribbon cutting.

What's changed is that this stopped being speculation sometime around September 2026. Residents watching that corner aren't wondering if something happens next. They're watching a specific, funded, contractually shaped project move forward, with just one name still missing from the sign.

If you're the kind of Decatur resident who tracks corners like this one, that's not an accident. It's the same instinct that makes a neighborhood worth knowing well, long before anyone's thinking about buying or selling anything on it. Erin Olivier has spent years paying attention to exactly this kind of detail across Decatur and the surrounding north-metro neighborhoods, the kind that never shows up on a listing page but shapes what it actually feels like to live somewhere. If you ever want a second set of eyes on what's happening in your own corner of Decatur, or anywhere else in metro Atlanta, that's a conversation worth having before you need one.