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Park7 Group construction is still getting reviewed about the design same with the The High rise next to the library.

 

Kline is on its final review with the city before construction starts.

 

Bull Street he didn't give me any info other the that everything is still on schedule.

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Park7 Group construction is still getting reviewed about the design same with the The High rise next to the library.

 

Kline is on its final review with the city before construction starts.

 

Bull Street he didn't give me any info other the that everything is still on schedule.

And the top two are exactly what I said. Glad we could prove the skeptic wrong.

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Located two blocks off Main Street and on the edge of the University of South Carolina campus, [Land Bank Lofts, the former AgFirst building] has attracted a mix of young professionals like medical school residents assigned to local hospitals, lawyers, and graduate students. In addition, Riley said a number of consultants have leased units while in town to help with the city’s efforts to rebuild from October’s devastating floods.

Leasing has been brisk, Riley said, adding that a soft launch will be held later this month at the Capital City Club. She added the building is on track to be 94% leased by Aug. 31.

http://www.columbiabusinessreport.com/news/real-estate-residential/-demand-brisk-for-new-land-bank-lofts-apartments/

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I guess this is really more Vista focused, but what sticks out to me is the pedestrian street and the plaza. I assume they would shut off Lincoln from Gervais to Lady in front of Blue Marlin? This seems like an easy win considering it is already brick and there are plenty of shops facing Lincoln. The plaza sounds like a great way to incorporate the tunnel. Tying the Vista and Finlay Park together would be a great way to encourage tourism.

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I forgot to post this when I read it the other day. I read the USC Board of Trustees meeting minutes every few months to get an impression of what is going on at the school. A line in the Building and Grounds Committee minutes from April 22 stuck out to me: 

"Mr. Huggins gave a progress report on the South Main Street District vision that included securing federal and state funding to bury utility lines, and other beautification improvements."

The blowup over the shadow study made it clear that USC wants to control development on South Main, between Pendleton and Blossom. Ownership of this property is fractured at the moment, though it is clear that some of the property owners would be willing to entertain redevelopment under the right conditions. Burying power lines is a great first step toward better connecting the Horseshoe to the business school, music school, and everything else on that side of campus. Another point also stuck out:

"Trustee Fennell asked Mr. Huggins about student pedestrian safety and if students were using the recently renovated tunnel under Assembly Street. Mr. Huggins responded that the tunnel was being used; however, with the new sidewalk/street safety improvements on Assembly there was still considerable pedestrian traffic on the street. Due to the new high density private student housing in the area, Mr. Huggins said that Pulaski Street was now a pedestrian concern. However, efforts were underway to address those concerns."

I think the school now recognizes that it needs to improve South Main as it is now right in the middle of main campus. Let's hope they start to prioritize redevelopment as the area is pretty disappointing at the moment. Creating something like the Downtown Mall in Charlottesville or Franklin Street in Chapel Hill over time would be revolutionary.

http://www.sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/board_of_trustees/documents/minutes_archive/2016/b-g_042216.pdf

slide_franklin_street.jpg

CVille-Mall.jpg

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Either would be amazing. Franklin Street would be the easiest to model. Closing off streets to cars requires that you have a lot of destinations on the street for people to walk to. First redevelop, get students/pedestrians out there, then talk about whether or not closing the street is a good idea.

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2 hours ago, Spartan said:

Either would be amazing. Franklin Street would be the easiest to model. Closing off streets to cars requires that you have a lot of destinations on the street for people to walk to. First redevelop, get students/pedestrians out there, then talk about whether or not closing the street is a good idea.

Yes, exactly. There are structural challenges to closing off the entire street: parking lots for the School of Education and the current (soon to be former) Law School, businesses and organizations that can only be accessed from Main Street, and of course the State House. I think that may be a great long-term strategy since Main Street is relatively low volume anyway. In the meantime, I would love for USC to buy the SCANA power plant parking lot, the buildings next to Immaculate Consumption, and negotiate with Cornell Arms and SCANA on how to build a consolidated parking structure. There's no need for all of the surface parking around Which Wich and next to the power plant. A parking structure would also free up room for another building in the parking lot of the School of Education.

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So I saw someone on City Data saying New Apartments were announced in downtown recently. I'm confused because I haven't heard anything in the past week. The only thing i see was the Landmark Bank Apartments thats it.

 

I wonder if anyone knows about this new "Announcement" of new apartments coming downtown.

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16 hours ago, growingup15 said:

So I saw someone on City Data saying New Apartments were announced in downtown recently. I'm confused because I haven't heard anything in the past week. The only thing i see was the Landmark Bank Apartments thats it.

 

I wonder if anyone knows about this new "Announcement" of new apartments coming downtown.

Yeah Mtnluver8956 has not clarified or provided a link, so I don't think it's anything.

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The university doesn't just want to control south main. They want to control everyone south of gervais except for the commercial vista. A new huger street master plan is supposedly going to be looked at soon and probably unveiled in the next year or two (kind of a 2030 vision). USC is going to be pushing hard towards the river. Their old master plan is to turn green street into a pedestrian street, not sure if that got mentioned here or not and it should be noted that USC has stuck pretty closely to their old master plan for the innovista area.

USC is looking at additional private-public partnerships to get things built more quickly. Similar to how 650 lincoln was funded. More research facilities and offices (and of course living spaces) will be the focus rather than classrooms. And that makes sense to me, it is already difficult enough to make it from far east to far west campus between classes. The fun thing about this is that USC will be doing this with urban planning and the whole "master plan" thing in mind so it will be smartly designed and also that the student housing market being saturated doesn't affect if USC builds too much. 

The rest of the Coliseum lots will likely be fully developed in the next 5 years. More apartments (yay...), greek houses, etc.

And lastly, the Carolina Coliseum is still very much so a candidate for a massive overhaul in design!

Edited by Nick2
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5 hours ago, Nick2 said:

More research facilities and offices (and of course living spaces) will be the focus rather than classrooms.

I would say "more so than" instead of "rather". The University has detailed the lack of classroom and lab space in its Board of Trustees meeting minutes. The focus on campus is shifting graduate, major-specific academic, and administrative space away from the Horseshoe and in turn filling that space with the largest undergraduate colleges. We've seen this with the Law School shifting north to Gervais, IT moving near the stadium (or to Holder?), some of the student services functions moving out of Petigru, Journalism moving to the Horseshoe, and now HRSM moving out of the basement of the Coliseum to the BA. There is plenty of pent up demand, but I think at this point much of the construction will be in the form of adaptive reuse. 

5 hours ago, Nick2 said:

And lastly, the Carolina Coliseum is still very much so a candidate for a massive overhaul in design!

Don't hold your breath. The university plans to request the $125M in redevelopment funds for FY 2019-2020 and I would expect that timeline to move right. 

http://www.sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/board_of_trustees/documents/minutes_archive/2016/b-g_021916.pdf

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Good point. More so than is a much better way to put it. What I meant by saying that is the university is already spread pretty far out. A major concern is having things too far apart so they'd like to try to avoid putting additional classroom buildings past the DMSB. But that's just what needs to be addressed. Maybe the school could purchase some of that land on south main and build another large classroom building to house some general undergrad classes political science/HRSM or something. It would be nice to see some of the schools moved out of gambrell and humanities into their own distinctive buildings.

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I'd like to see Carolina take the mixed-use approach to South Main. This link shows the type of facility I have in mind. This one is on Wofford's campus, which is much smaller and not quite as urban in nature, but the concept is well-executed. You have a student dining hall and book store (and maybe some other stuff) on the ground floor and office space above. What happens on the second floor and higher is really irrelevant so long as its occupied space. Doing something like this can create and activate an urban space immediately. It would also make a lot of sense to include Greene Street with this type of development pattern so that the walk between the Horseshoe/Russell House/Library area and the Congaree is a seamless, interesting, and vibrant urban environment.

USC is in a good position to positively influence South Main's future, and given the recent debacle with that proposed apartment tower it's probably in their best interest to start moving the pieces to make it happen.

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I can't see them completely approving it after looking at what the staff has recommended them do.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

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12 hours ago, carolinagarnet said:

Yes finally. i like this design a little better then the old one. i hope it gets approve quickly so they can start construction Asap.

6 hours ago, vicupstate said:

The parking situation seems totally unreasonable.  A variance of 259 cars, after 183 are already parking on the street?  

yeah I'm trying to figure out that one also.

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7 hours ago, vicupstate said:

The parking situation seems totally unreasonable.  A variance of 259 cars, after 183 are already parking on the street?  

A lot of developers in major cities are pushing for parking variances since garage parking is expensive to build (typically $30k/spot). I don't know that Columbia can really claim that it has the underlying factors necessary to avoid excessive parking requirements. Some students may be able to get around without cars, but virtually everyone in the city has at least one car. The average resident is going to need parking and most of the neighboring surface lots are restricted in their use (i.e. state government, company reserved) if I'm not mistaken.

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