If you walked past 1017 North Highland Avenue this summer, you noticed the corner had changed even before you saw a menu. The Farm Burger sign came down at the end of last year. By summer, the corner belonged to Myles Moody and Rachael Pack, the husband-and-wife team who already run Kinship Butcher & Sundry across the sidewalk, now operating a fifty-seat wine bar called So. Fox in the same building. The lot has cycled through a filling station, a service garage, and a run of restaurants over roughly a hundred years, and the new tenant is the latest chapter in a corner that keeps outliving whoever holds the lease.
That single storefront is easy to notice because it sits right at the intersection that gives Virginia-Highland its name. What is harder to see, unless you have been tracking the paperwork, is that the blocks around it are being reshaped by two outside landlords at the same time, each running a different playbook, while a longtime local business writes its own chapter in between. One landlord's plan is already visible if you know where to look, half a mile up the same avenue.
The corner that changed hands without changing owners
The So. Fox transition is the one story on this list that has nothing to do with outside capital. Kinship already had a foothold on the block. Moving into the old filling station is a business expanding into a space its owners could see from their own front counter. That matters because the building at 1017 has never been just real estate. Farm Burger's co-founder George Frangos said the restaurant had helped start the Virginia-Highland Farmers Market and had hosted Winterfest and Porchfest during its run in the neighborhood. Whoever took the lease next was inheriting civic infrastructure along with the kitchen equipment.
That is worth sitting with for a second, because it is the opposite of what is happening two blocks away.
A different kind of buyer
In May 2026, Atlanta real estate investment firm 26th Street Partners paid $17.3 million for two segments of Virginia-Highland retail space, according to Atlanta developer and broker Gene Kansas, whose firm helped represent seller Scott Stern alongside broker Ted Bradford. The deal covers the VA-HI corner at Virginia and North Highland, home to Paolo's Gelato, Pielands Sub & Slice, and Kinship Butcher & Sundry, along with the Highland Avenue Market strip at North Highland and Amsterdam, where San Francisco Coffee Roasting Co., Mali Restaurant, and a U.S. Postal Service branch have operated for years. Mali has served Thai food and sushi in that spot since 1999. The transaction closed off-market and had not yet appeared in Fulton County property records at the time it was reported.
That is a lot of daily-use retail changing hands in a single deal. It is also not a new strategy for this buyer. 26th Street Partners is the same firm that bought Krog Street Market and the surrounding Krog District last year, and it describes high-traffic, daily-needs retail as a core focus of its business.
You can already see this landlord's playbook, half a mile up the street
Here is the part that most people walking past Paolo's Gelato this fall will not think to check: 26th Street Partners already owns another North Highland Avenue retail center, and in July 2026 it told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution exactly what it plans to do there. Morningside Village, a roughly 50,000-square-foot shopping and dining hub in the Morningside-Lenox Park neighborhood that straddles North Highland Avenue and includes Whiskey Bird, The Family Dog, Doc Chey's Noodle House, Highland Fine Wine, Highland Runners, and Intown Animal Hospital, is getting new lighting, landscaping, paint, awnings, and artist murals, along with improved wayfinding and distinct crosswalks meant to tie the property together as a cohesive district.
That is a refresh, not a rebuild. No mention of new construction, no signal that existing tenants are being pushed out. If that is the template, the reasonable read on the VA-HI corner and Highland Avenue Market is cosmetic upgrades layered onto the same storefronts, not a wholesale reinvention of the block. The daytime rhythm of coffee at San Francisco Coffee, a sandwich at Pielands, and gelato at Paolo's was very likely underwritten on those tenants staying exactly where they are.
Here is how the two active buyers on North Highland Avenue compare on paper right now:
| 26th Street Partners | Third & Urban | |
|---|---|---|
| Recent purchase | $17.3M, VA-HI corner and Highland Avenue Market (May 2026) | $13.75M, first-phase buildings on North Highland (late 2024), plus a second phase added Sept. 2025 |
| Visible strategy elsewhere | Cosmetic refresh at Morningside Village: paint, lighting, awnings, murals | New construction: indoor-outdoor courtyard at 780 North Highland |
| Completed work so far | None reported yet on the new VaHi purchase | Facade, signage, railings, and a mural by local artist Janice Rago at 842 North Highland |
| Stated goal | Keep daily-needs tenants, improve district cohesion | Fill vacancy with "community-focused food and beverage tenants" |
The other landlord's bet looks nothing like it
Third & Urban's approach on the same avenue is closer to a rebuild than a refresh. The firm has been assembling what it calls the Atkins Park Collection since late 2024, when it bought the first phase, roughly 35,370 square feet of retail along North Highland and St. Charles avenues. It added a second phase in September 2025, including the building housing Neighbors bar and City Church, on the block between Greenwood and St. Charles. Now it is putting more than $3 million into building and streetscape upgrades across three blocks, with Bridger Properties handling the leasing.
The centerpiece is a section that has sat largely vacant at 780 North Highland Avenue, where the plan calls for an indoor-outdoor courtyard surrounded by new retail. Construction was scheduled to start in late spring, so several months of work should already be visible along that block by now. Down the street at 842 North Highland, the work is already done: new signage, updated railings, and a mural from local artist Janice Rago now front a building that holds a yoga studio and a salon.
Hank Farmer, a Third & Urban cofounder and a resident of the neighborhood himself, described the goal in a company announcement: "Many of these businesses are homegrown with roots planted deep in the community." The firm is working alongside the nonprofit Virginia Highland District on the project, and the timing lines up with a September 2025 City Council resolution that made street parking free throughout the area, a move aimed at reversing retail vacancies and getting more people out of their cars and onto the sidewalk.
So two landlords, two different bets, both currently active on the same half-mile of pavement. One is polishing what already works. The other is building something new inside a stretch that has been sitting empty.
What doesn't change hands
None of this touches the calendar that actually organizes the neighborhood's year, and that calendar is run by the residents, not the landlords. Porchfest turned six in 2026 and, for the first time, sold tickets instead of giving the event away free. Organizers cited rising costs and crowd safety, and used the money to double security and restrooms and split the footprint into four zones. Katie Voelpel, executive director of the Virginia Highland District Association, put it plainly: "We strive to make Porchfest better every year without losing what makes it special." The festival, started in 2021 by Nina Carrick and the VHDA board as a pandemic-era gathering, raised $95,000 last year, money that goes back into street cleaning, tree lighting, public safety, and the events that keep running through every ownership change on the block, including the VaHi Farmers Market and North Highland Restaurant Week.
Restaurant Week runs the first week of November this year, November 8 through 12, with prix fixe menus at twenty restaurants spread from Morningside Village to Atkins Park, which is to say the exact same corridor where 26th Street Partners and Third & Urban are both currently working. The businesses changing hands and the businesses staying open for a discounted dinner are, in several cases, the same buildings.
That is the actual shape of this year in Virginia-Highland. Ownership on North Highland Avenue is moving faster than most residents have clocked, but it is moving in two directions at once, refresh here, rebuild there, and the neighborhood's own institutions are still the thing holding the sidewalk together in between. If you have been wondering whether your favorite corner is about to look different, the honest answer depends entirely on which landlord owns it, and in at least one case, you can already see the answer a half-mile up the street.
If you're curious how any of this touches your own street or your home's value on it, Bolst Homes works block by block across Virginia-Highland and the rest of intown Atlanta. Find a Home. Make an Impact.
