wwmiv

It'll take awhile for this area to mature. It's still off the beaten path. A few years from now once the other parking lots have been developed and there's more of a residential base directly adjacent... these units wont be empty.

The new design may not be as gorgeous, but it is still nice.

The current design seen on Humphrey's website is different, so I'm not sure which is the final product.

USC.

Also, the housing project at Pendleton and Assembly is also now moving dirt.

That's not a crane.

http://www.midlandsanchor.com/cason-development-group-announces-cottontown-redevelopment/ The developer who renovated the space now belonging to The War Mouth has purchased two properties (2222 Sumter and 2238 Sumter) and is renovating one of them (the latter address) around the corner on Sumter. The renovated property will be home to a coffee house, wine and beer bar, as well as a salon. The other space is not yet leased. The article also mentioned a brewery being put in at 1223 Franklin. That'll create a good nucleus of activity to build off of, but this area really needs some streetscape improvements and a few more initial projects to really take off.

There seems to be an ongoing discussion about whether the city got ahead of itself with the size and scope of this development given the size and scope of the regional economy, with comparisons I've seen made to Greenville, Charleston, and Charlotte. I'm gonna just throw away Charlotte, because that is an illegitimate comparison, being the urban core of a metro area that is almost precisely 3 times as large in population and whose metro area commands 4.5 times the GMP: https://www.bea.gov/newsreleases/regional/gdp_metro/2016/pdf/gdp_metro0916.pdf Greenville's economy is only slightly larger in 2015 than Columbia and has a lower GMP per capita than Columbia. Both grew at similar rates (2.4 to 2.1) year over year. Charleston's economy is actually slightly larger than both, and therefore has a larger GMP per capita, too, than both other cities and they also have a faster economic growth rate as well. As to population, same thing. But here's the thing, Columbia isn't behind the other two in any meaningful sense. They're all peer cities (I'd add Greensboro, Winston-Salem, Knoxville, and prospective planning to follow slightly larger cities like Raleigh, Birmingham, and Richmond, or a city that is the same size but acts bigger, Baton Rouge*, to that list) with similar fundamentals to the other cities. If they can maintain a number of urban clusters economically, Columbia should be able to as well. Why aren't they succeeding in a real way? Because they aren't interconnected into the existing urban fabric in a walkable way. There's no reason to walk over that way at all from the current urban clusters. That's the recipe for success. Taylor street from Main all the way to Allen / Benedict Colleges has historical architecture that could be reconfigured and revitalized in the same way as Gervais pretty easily. Many of these places already have tenants. All that would need to occur is streetscape improvements with a planted median, and large tree shaded sidewalks. That would connect the two HBCs into the urban fabric of downtown, but it would also help to connect Bull Street as well when seen in combination with the cultural landscape master plan walkability improvements (which are... meager). Essentially, this would turn Taylor street into the Gervais street of East Downtown. Blanding, also should have the same streetscape pedestrian improvements that Lady has recieved as an ancillary urban street to Gervais. Harden Street all the way from five points to Calhoun should also have a planted median and wide sidewalks with large tree planters and parking bays, which would better connect Five Points into the urban fabric as well. Pedestrian improvements to Pickens should then also extend all the way to the University. I'm sure the University would help in that, given that they have office along this corridor, and it'd help to connect those offices to the University better. http://www.historiccolumbia.org/Media/Default/PDFs/HC Cultural Landscape Master Plan.pdf Columbia is currently large enough to support ALL of these improvements, which would encourage walking between the areas. There are a also number of warehouses on Sumter north of Elmwood which could be redeveloped quickly and cheaply as coffee houses and restaurants if the city simply did streetscape improvements on its own. I'm sure the Cottontown residents would love that, actually. Each of these corridors (Taylor, N. Main/Sumter, Harden, only need two or three small apartment projects with good street interaction each. We don't need big box apartments. The city should be think small: boutique apartments. The Capitol Places consortium of apartments is a good model to follow, where the manage their smaller properties as a collective and market them together. That way you get the feel of a small and family feel of the apartment itself in the middle of a large city while getting the high market visibility of being collectively a large number of units. Of course, that can only happen once the streetscape improvements happen. But the city doesn't have the leadership or the courage to politically market the proposals necessary to actually help accomplish the goals it has set out for itself. How do they get there? It's largely out of the city's control and instead in the state leg's. How much the state leg decides to help the University. The endowment should be much larger than what it is. The enrollment here should increase and we should decrease in-state tuition while increase out of state tuition and continue to aggressively pursue foreign students. But state funding needs to increase to ALL departments in the university. We focus on our law school, our business and public health stuff and we obviously have great sports and arts venues, but we're largely ignoring the humanities and social sciences and some of our stem facilities need significant expansion as well. Many of the buildings that the humanities and social science departments are in are falling apart and need to be replaced. These faculties, some of which used to be highly regarded in their fields, are similarly atrophying. The political science department, for instance, has lost a number of world renowned and nationally regarded people over the last five years that have never been replaced and is in a building with asbestos. Why? Because the state has cut funding too much. *Look at Baton Rouge's economy v. their population size. They're the same size MSA (rank #70 v. #71, with 20k separating the two in 2015), but are a significantly larger economy: 54k to 38k million GMP in 2015. Why? Because Louisiana is historically a more activist state, and thus Baton Rouge's economy has benefitted.

Yeah no. I'm not into endless city vs. city discussions with vacuous content, which City Data has a bunch of. I mostly just watch the posts and take mental stock of the activity. It helps inform my some of my research ideas as a PhD student here at USC in political science (I study the effects on representation of the underlying political geography, of which urban geography is an important piece).

LOl Thanks man, it was you who unwittingly brought me here from SSP. SSP has a total lack of Columbia related content, whereas this forum doesn't so... just as I split my time between Austin, San Antonio, and Columbia in real life, you'll probably see me here pretty often as well as on SSP's Austin subforum still.

Columbia scores well on livability, at least.