rabbit seisin

"The four-story building at 702 S. Main St., called The Avant, will include units on the fourth floor that have two additional levels" It's a four-story building but the fourth story is three stories. Got it?

Academy and Church are like giant pedestrian moats, anything the city can do to mitigate danger and inconvenience to foot traffic crossing those routes will raise quality of life and property values downtown in the longer term.

Agree with others who feel that this looks a little uninspired. However it's an improvement (imo) over the previous two-building design. I'll be the forum nutjob and suggest they build a 300 foot tower in gothic revival, in homage to the adjacent Christ Church Episcopal. If you don't think it can be done, google "cathedral of learning Pittsburgh" and jog your imagination.

I do like OJ's; it's one of a dwindling number of certified Greenville classics. I would hate to see it go. I'm inclined to agree with Dino's assessment that a road diet and/or construction of same would hurt OJ's business. He has skin in the game and he would know. By the way, this can be true even if the planned changes are a net positive for area businesses overall (which I also believe). However the city's goal is to make the area safer and more accessible by foot and bicycle, with the broader goal of knitting the South Main area with West Greenville. Whether or not you agree with these goals, they've been in process for many years with plenty of opportunity for public input. A cash grab by a private developer would be one thing, but this is a public infrastructure project advanced by elected officials and prefigured by years of public deliberation. The specific impact on a meat-and-three diner, however venerable, is not the determining factor here and nor should it be. Businesses on Pendleton Street will adapt or move.

Yeah this is a shame because I think a cafe/deli in that area has the potential to be very successful. Area already gets a ton of Unity Park traffic and that neighborhood is only going to grow. Anyway this is complete hearsay and there are two sides to every story, but the story I heard is that the city nitpicked this one to death.

New county-level census estimates for 2023 just dropped. The bureau estimates that Greenville County grew to 558,036 as of July 2023. This would represent 6.2% growth from the 2020 census. View the table here. Also of note, Spartanburg County estimated at 356,698 which would be an 8.8% increase over 2020 numbers. Anderson grew 4.6% to 213,076.

Sadly I find myself in this camp, although in theory I think an observation tower in the park could be great. It would have been nice if the design had shown any appreciation for the people, history, and culture of Greenville. My thought would have been something reminiscent of a textile mill's bell tower (look at Mills Mill, or for a different flavor the bell tower on the old Camperdown Mill #2, which had a bit of a gothic revival vibe going on). Unity Park's other features have industrial motifs already, so it wouldn't have been a stretch.

That’s a great area, hopefully something on par with the McDaniel & McBee project

I’m a big hater when it comes to modern architecture and I think this one came out pretty well.

Speaking of the Laurens Road corridor, I was recently reminded of this story from 2019 where Greenville County was awarded a small grant to study fixed rail connecting Mauldin to downtown Greenville. Did anything ever come of this? Even if it just generated a .pdf on the County website I'd be curious to see it. Anyone know?

This is second-hand info so take it with a grain of salt, but my understanding is that the owner is self-financing. So, like you said, they are completing the project in a piecemeal fashion as cashflow permits. It looks like a lot of the interior work has been done and they are waiting to do some paving and runoff remediation in/around the parking lot area.

It would be nice to have a good retail draw in the lobby there. Currently the feeling you get when you hit College/Beattie heading north is YOU HAVE REACHED THE END OF DOWNTOWN

For something that arrived in our town via a wormhole from communist Yugoslavia, it's not that bad

We have been getting some fantastic small to mid-sized multifamily proposals lately. This would look great fronting that traffic circle.

The right developer could do amazing things with this property. Fingers crossed!

Back in March, the city announced that it was soliciting proposals for their 10-acre parcel along Mayberry street through the end of the year. I wonder how that's going. It's an amazing location and deserves an ambitious project.

Well said. Gimmick retail with gimmick architecture (the rendering for the bowling place is repellent); each of these “concepts” represents a shortsighted waste of prime real estate. But I’m sure there will be plenty of PARKING

This little corner of downtown has a ton of unused potential. Hopefully this gets built and the adjacent lot can be redeveloped too, so we don't have to look at the featureless wall forever. I'd also like to see something more ambitious done with the greenlink garage with some street level interest added to Richardson and Laurens streets. The east side of Laurens Street has some gorgeous facades but the west side currently looks like a dungeon. I always thought that area could be a natural extension of the N Laurens pedestrian corridor. Join that with First Pres, Grace, and the historic architecutre of the Summit, calm Richardson St. a little, and I think you would have a very attractive urban space to lure pedestrians off Main St.

There are already four colleges in Greenville County. Enrollment is down in all of them and enrollment trends nationally have been firmly negative for years. Next idea, please.

These look great!

Oh man, are they serious with that sculpture? That should look great next to the mini-McClaren!

Second question: once finished, how long will we have to wait before demolition?

For a small southern city, Greenville is pretty densely populated. All of its charm and accolades come from the scale and density of its downtown and the immediately adjoining neighborhoods. That said, in my view the biggest opportunity areas for growth are still within the city limits. Hopefully the nodes-and-corridors strategy imagined by the new zoning master plan will bear fruit. A more integrated, urban fabric across the entire municipal footprint would take Greenville to the next level. Places like Sans Souci, City View, and Judson are natural targets for annexation due to proximity and population density, but I would want a thorough assessment of the costs and benefits first. Unfortunately, infrastructure in many of those neighborhoods is severely decayed and it would require major city resources to bring it into this century. As others have noted upthread, the county has been largely unable to meet the needs of these lower-and-working-class areas for decades.

Yeah, here's the money quote from that article: Emphasis mine. The reason this woman can't afford to live in Southernside anymore is because she's losing her HUD assistance. The circumstances surrounding her eviction are tragic, but they could have happened in any town in America. This is a systemic failure of means-tested welfare administered by an impersonal centralized bureaucracy. The fact that the woman in question lives near Unity Park is the slimmest thread by which the Greenville News ties their despicably-named "Cost of Unity" series to her hardships. It is practically begging for a companion series called "The Benefit of Segregation" where we advocate for the preservation of shattered post-industrial brownfields which offer zero amenities but at least keep the nearby rents low. By the way, I'm in Unity Park all the time and it's full of visitors of every age race and creed playing alongside one another in harmony. That must chap the Greenville News absolutely raw.

Yeah, Main & Broad has to be the most valuable surface parking in North America. You could build anything there. Maybe someday they'll make the craniacs on this forum happy and put up a 500 foot office building.