mallguy

You're welcome to your tastes of kiosks and local themed street fairs, but those don't necessarily make a place "urban"; they're just your taste. Malls have kiosks and fairs in them, but nobody who I know would qualify a mall with kiosks and a fair as "urban". Nor does closing down S. Tryon to cars make it "urban"; New York City, for example, has few if any streets that are closed to cars, but Raleigh in the 1970s did. Which is more urban?

I keep hearing rumors! I certainly may be totally wrong/off-base here; just calling it like I see it though. cltbwimob, your posts are very well thought and thorough.

I appreciate your facts (and thoroughness), but I read the outcome differently: that there is not enough profitability available to support both a Harris Teeter and a Publix uptown. If only 6% of uptown's labor force commutes to Lake Norman, then Publix would also have to thrive off of uptown residents (and uptown office workers who come for lunch). Uptown's residential base has grown since the "Harris Teeter isn't profitable" report came out, but it hasn't doubled to support 2 stores. Further, Harris Teeter and Publix generally target the same customer base and have similar business models, focusing on service and customer experience rather than rock-bottom prices. I could see having Harris Teeter and Publix on opposite ends of uptown, and a Publix on S. Church would probably not carve up the same market with Harris Teeter, but 2 similar grocery stores in Fourth Ward just doesn't work. Even one of the developers of the site says that it's tough to make it work: http://www.bizjournals.com/charlotte/print-edition/2014/10/17/skyhouse-developers-shopping-for-grocery-store-in.html

My post makes 100% sense; you just completely misread it. My post is part of a discussion about people who work uptown and shop at a grocery store uptown. I think that people who work uptown and live at Lake Norman (and whose end-of-day commutes take them north) would shop at a grocery store on N. Tryon. Of course almost nobody would drive from Lake Norman to uptown to shop at a grocery store uptown. One thing that the developer needs to consider, though, is that N. Church St. heads south, not north, and a trip north on Tryon would require a left turn into the SkyHouse site. Those facts are both very disadvantageous to a site that would otherwise attract people heading home from work; they need to be able to turn right into the store. People also prefer parking lots rather than parking decks, and so if someone has a choice of a grocery store with a parking lot, accessible via a right turn (in suburbia), versus an uptown store with a left turn and a parking deck, s/he'll choose the first. At least a few years ago, the Harris Teeter store was unprofitable (as per the Charlotte Business Journal), and that was before Target and Trader Joe's moved into Midtown. I don't think that profits are there to support all of those stores.

The only people who will shop at a grocery store on N. Tryon are people who live at Lake Norman and drive north from uptown and Third/Fourth Ward residents-the same people who already shop at Harris Teeter. There isn't enough business for both. I don't think that the uptown employment numbers have hit 100k yet.

I'm very familiar with both a downtown Publix (in Greenville, SC) and urban Whole Foods in NYC; I shop at both regularly. I don't think that so many grocery stores uptown can make it.

Why does the N. Tryon area need a second grocery store, with maybe a 3rd grocery store on S. Tryon? The uptown Harris Teeter has capacity, and Reid's failed.

I like Harris Teeter and am glad to see Lewis Plaza get an upgrade, but: 1. The HT architecture should be keeping with the Lewis Plaza style. "Mid-century Modern" or whatever the HT architecture is will be horribly dated in the future. 2. I love my downtown Publix and will keep shopping there; Cleveland Street into downtown is much easier to navigate than Augusta Road, with traffic and narrow lanes. 3. Why do we need a 3rd Starbucks in between the one on S. Main and the one already on Augusta?

Is it now over for the BI-LO next to the Kmart near the hospital? That Kmart will surely close when the chain does, if not sooner, and I cannot imagine the Chanticleer/Augusta Road crowd shopping at a BI-LO (in general, but particularly one in a downscale shopping center) instead of a nice Harris Teeter.

I liked the HTs on Roper Mountain Road and S. Pleasantburg & Mauldin Road in the '90s. I'd have given HT a better shot at doing well then, since the only higher-end grocery competition back then was the Fresh Market. Now there are Publix locations around town plus Whole Foods. Wonder why HT thinks that the second time around will work?

Ugh, as much as I like Harris Teeter, I love my downtown Publix. What store will be impacted the most? The Bilo near the hospital, maybe? Wouldn't Harris Teeter plan to open a number of new stores in Greenville then? Usually grocery stores don't open just 1 per market.

The Southeast High Speed Rail corridor is completely misnamed. No true HSR is coming to the Southeast, even if the corridor were fully built- which it won't be. HSR requires extensive infrastructure improvements, such as electrification of the rail line, which isn't happening. All that'll happen, at most, will be modest upgrades to the existing freight-focused rail lines and maybe some more trains, and modest increases in speeds. For all those who worship government and its alleged wisdom, that idiotic article about moving the train station should dispel any legends. Plus the quality of the facts in the article is poor. "Norfolk and Southern Railroad"? No such thing exists.

Isn't Publix concerned about siphoning off business from the downtown store?

For my post about the retail being enough for just boutiques and restaurants, remember, retail needs anchors. Downtown retail is almost all cutesy boutiques- thank goodness for Mast and some other larger ones, which generate more traffic that spills over for the cutesy boutiques. The Greenville News site would have been perfect for a larger store, but 44,000 or so sf, laid out according to the plan that I see, won't have it, but hopefully I'm wrong.

I'm not seeing a lot of retail space here; other than the movie theater and fitness center, the retail space seems large enough to accommodate just a few boutiques and restaurants at most.

The main thing that I see in Greenville's suburban developments is that the zoning powers that be still don't get it: without making streets on a grid system and with more pedestrian/transit-friendly layouts, any large new development could end up being the next Pleasantburg Drive in its time, Haywood Road in its time, Laurens Road in its time or Woodruff Road, with masses of unnecessary traffic. Wouldn't 4 consecutive traffic-choked sprawling areas have been enough to learn from?

CATS has done plenty of studies of ridership levels between Uptown and the airport. All of them fall short. Most riders would be people who work at the airport. Despite the airport's size, most of its traffic is connecting traffic since it's a hub, and since it doesn't draw as much from Charlotte for passengers as its size would indicate at first glance, there just isn't enough traffic to justify a rail line (using formulae for funding that have been required from time to time).

I'm all for more downtown development, but how dated will that property look in 20-30 years? Better to keep a classic style of architecture- even colonial or the like, or even just a red brick bland building.

Well, NC has the same GOP-dominated state government as it had before, and Kay Hagan and Obama never got a station built, so I don't see what will change. Democrats always seem to think that a liberal paradise will appear when a Democrat is in power, and nothing but awful things will happen if a Republican is in office, but the facts show otherwise.

...but Charlotte has way less rail ridership and way less need to spend a lot of money building a massive new station. I'm as pro-rail and pro-transit as anyone, but I'm also against waste. Just build what it takes to have a station uptown, serving the ridership that is anticipated over the next 20 years or so, and leave room for expansion.

Why not just build a NYC-area commuter railroad-type station and be done with this? Yonkers, NY, Croton-Harmon, NY, Trenton, NJ, etc. all have stations that Amtrak uses, and that serve far more people per day than a Charlotte station will, and they're not massively expensive. Just put up a waiting area and platform and be done with this!

I was hoping for something like this: http://www.shopatcitycenter.com The site is a former Macy's, and it has a Target, Barnes & Noble, Nordstrom Rack, movie theater and more. White Plains' downtown is larger than Greenville's, although it's not huge, either.

The guy in the article who makes such over-the-top statements about the Bass Pro Shops opening clearly isn't the type of person who would say something similar about a Neiman Marcus opening.

Oops, so I may well be wrong about "wiedersehen"/"wiedersehn". My mistake then.

I noticed today that above the entrance to/exit from the jetway at gate D3, there is a beautiful cut-glass sign above the door, with "Goodbye" in various languages. Unfortunately the German "Goodbye" ("Auf Wiedersehen") is misspelled; it is missing the last "e". That's embarrassing, particularly as it would be almost impossible to fix the typo without doing a whole new sign. How could someone not even just Google the term to confirm the spelling?