South Ridge (Church St. and University Ridge)

[gs3]

So it won't be required to comply with this corridor's master plan guidelines?!?

My question exactly.

From a possible Walmart, to a bank branch with parking in front. I'm not seeing the city truely push the corridor master plan the way I expected.

Edited April 12, 2012 by gsupstate

[GvilleSC]

My question exactly.

From a possible Walmart, to a bank branch with parking in front. I'm not seeing the city truely push the corridor master plan the way I expected.

I don't think it's unhealthy to be concerned, but I also don't think it's time to draw conclusions. We haven't seen plans for either site-- only rumors.

I might contact the City today and see what they say.

[vicupstate]

My question exactly.

From a possible Walmart, to a bank branch with parking in front. I'm not seeing the city truely push the corridor master plan the way I expected.

The city isn't 'pushing' a Walmart. Your dark-colored glasses need to come off. It really is getting old, and only reduces your credibility.

The Haynie-Sirrine plan ends at McKay Street, so this parcel is not included. It must conform to C-2 zoning restrictions only. Lets reserve judgement to when we know something. It will be a huge improvement from what was there. I do wish the house could have been moved, it seemed in great shape from the outside.

[gs3]

Vicupstate.....you may want to re-READ my post. I never said the city is pushing Walmart. I said the city is NOT pushing the master plan as expected. Your snips are old as well. Please drop them or feel free to put me on ignore.

No dark glasses here. When Greenville gets back to operating like the Greenville many fell in love with (including me), then great. Until then, the city will be called out on the current sloppy handling of issues and failures that are preventable with just a bit of proper planning.

Greenville set the bar high, Greenville needs to keep it high!

Edited April 12, 2012 by gsupstate

[vicupstate]

You are accusing the city of not 'pushing' the master plan when nothing contrary to the plan has been approved. You are putting blame where none belongs. What has the city handled 'sloppily' or failed to do? The city has done nothing to encourage the original Walmart design, in fact just the opposite.

I could propose a windowless, metal building warehouse in Haynie-Sirrine, but that doesn't mean the city supports it or isn't supporting the plan.

From your perspective, everything must be perceived negatively until it can be proven otherwise. Any unknown must be considered negative in the interim. Please re-read your own posts on any topic , if you doubt that assessment.

[gs3]

LOL at your post Vic. Not possible. Remember I'm the one who has been bashed and slammed as being a " Greenville CHEERLEADER". Amazing what happens when one speaks their mind in Greenville, calls out issues and goes against the approved talking points.

Greenville REALLY does have a long way to go. Reminding me more and more lately of an instate sister city.

[scgubers]

LOL at your post Vic. Not possible. Remember I'm the one who has been bashed and slammed as being a " Greenville CHEERLEADER". Amazing what happens when one speaks their mind in Greenville, calls out issues and goes against the approved talking points. Greenville REALLY does have a long way to go. Reminding me more and more lately of an instate sister city.

Stop posting. You are basing your argument that Greenville is falling behind on two projects that haven't even been approved by the city to built yet. Give me a concrete example of where the City is not following its master plans and do it in an appropriate thread, I'll even start one for you. Until you start basing your argument on things that have already been built, or are in the process of being built , I will not take you seriously. Do us all a favor and be quiet.

[erm1981]

Children....Children....

Edited April 14, 2012 by erm1981

[gs3]

Scgubers you have no right to tell anyone not to post. Your "shut up" attitude wreaks of an old Greenvillian attitude. You may want to go back and read some of my almost 9,000 post on this board, almost all positive. Until you own Urban Planet, you have no right to tell anyone to shut up because you disagree with what they post. K?

[scgubers]

I only told you to be quiet until you had a substantiative argument. As to who I am well -- I don't reek of old Greenville.

[Gville2012]

Construction crews were out working through the night last night on the road... possibly starting to repave soon? Also, all landcapeing/gass is in... rocks were used in the median instead of mulch which is a nice look and will eliminate all the mulch getting washed away within a few months.. They also finished putting up all the lighting (there was still a few missing until mid week last week) and started working on the universitry ridge traffic lights (put up the light holders, put up some of the cross walk lights, and put up the last arm).

Still curious to see what they are going to do with the areas of road where there is no median... my guess is just yellow paint but it seems like they could have made the medians bigger instead of just painting.

~45 more days if there going to hit their deadline.. which it seems like they will.

[GvilleSC]

Awesome! I can't wait to check it out during the day and at night!

[Gville2012]

Awesome! I can't wait to check it out during the day and at night!

Should have mentioned... lights are all up, but not on. So night isnt going to look much different yet.

[Gville2012]

Lights were on last night... looked like a runway. Beauiful thing to see. The lights are the whitish/blueish tint like they said they were going to use so they really do a nice job lighting up the street. They also worked on the road through the night pulling up the old pavement.

[gs3]

I drove through around 9:00 PM. Runway is a good term, as you can clearly see both dark ends. It is quite odd that you have these very few blocks of intense lighting and then dark on either end. Had the light continued on into downtown over the viaduct and in the other direction continue on to Mills Mill, it would have the feeling of a true game changing project. As is, it looks like tax money dumped into one tiny pocket.

[GvilleSC]

We have to start somewhere, do we not? I don't think Max Heller got it wrong when he started with a concentrated set of blocks of Main Street. We've seen that grow north, south east AND west since then. There is no instant gratification with an undertaking the size of the Haynie-Sirrine revitalization.

[gman430]

Coming soon signage for CertusBank is now up on the site.

[vicupstate]

From today's Greenville News:

You wouldn’t know it just driving by, but inside the Next Innovation Center downtown, scientists can analyze your DNA.

The molecular diagnostics lab is operated by Lab 21, a British medical diagnostics company on the cusp of a megatrend called personalized medicine.

The company’s U.S. branch, launched in Greenville two and a half years ago, is “moving from a period of cash burn to cash generation” as it sells services to pharmaceutical companies, diagnostic firms, hospitals and clinics, said Michael Bolick, chief executive. It has 10 employees so far, including a Harvard-educated geneticist.

Lab 21 is just one of the high-tech concerns clustered in the Next Innovation Center, a former warehouse turned into office space at the corner of Church Street and University Ridge.

Greenville developer Bob Hughes refurbished the building after Next, the Greenville Chamber’s program for technology entrepreneurs, pulled together a core group of tenants from its membership.

The facility is one of several developments enhancing downtown’s role as a center of high-level business activity.

Other developments include Clemson University’s decision to move its MBA program next to Falls Park and the arrival of CertusBank, whose headquarters helped make possible the massive One development taking shape in the middle of Main Street.

The Next Innovation Center is one of several moves the Chamber’s Next program has made to develop an ecosystem for nurturing high-impact ventures.

Next was also instrumental in organizing the Upstate Carolina Angel Network, a group of affluent individuals willing to fund start-up companies. The investor group, based at the Innovation Center, has put money into 22 companies, 13 of them in the Upstate, said Matt Dunbar, its managing director.

Next also helped organize the local version of California’s TED conference to showcase Greenville as an innovative city.

More recently, it scraped together seed money for The Iron Yard Labs, a startup acceleration program that will bring entrepreneurs and investors from around the country to Greenville beginning this month.

Now Next is helping to organize a new charter school that would pair high school students with businesses for special projects. It’s also working with Greenville Tech to develop space where manufacturing entrepreneurs can cluster together.

Before NextNone of it might have happened were it not for the turmoil that resulted from an unexpected vote of Greenville County Council more than a decade ago.

For years, the Chamber was the county’s agent for recruiting industry, drawing plaudits every time it announced jobs from companies such as Hitachi, Caterpillar and W.W. Grainger.

In 2001, however, County Council suddenly ended the arrangement and formed its own economic development organization, the Greenville Area Development Corp.

County Council gave the new organization the exclusive authority to negotiate property tax breaks with economic development prospects.

That left the Chamber without a direct role in economic development, so it decided to get into aspects of job creation that no one else was doing — such as fostering high-impact entrepreneurship.

Instead of recruiting another branch plant or call center, the Chamber would try to set the conditions that could lead to the next Microsoft, Google or Dell computer.

Or at least the next Texize, Datastream or ScanSource.

County Council’s decision was painful at the time, but it gave the Chamber a “white sheet of paper” to craft a new economic development program, said John Moore, an executive vice president at the Chamber who runs Next.

“We weren’t encumbered by any existing organizations or strategies,” he said.

The 48-year-old Greenville native with an MBA from the University of Minnesota has been the Chamber’s point man for economic development for a decade, except for a brief stint as its interim president and two years when he left to market a local company’s consumer electronics product.

Moore worked in marketing for Kimberly-Clarke and Coca-Cola and launched three Smoothie Zone outlets before joining the Chamber.

In running Next, he gets help from Brenda Laakso, the organization’s vice president.

Making it tangibleThe roots of Next go back to a pivotal 2004 meeting in Charleston, where Moore recalled sitting in a rented conference room at the Courtyard by Marriott hotel.

Beside him was Jeff Papenfus, the Greenville software entrepreneur who died last year while training for a bicycle race in the North Carolina mountains.

They were listening to Ernest Andrade, a Charleston economic development official, talk about Digital Corridor, that city’s program for high-tech entrepreneurs.

Moore recalls Papenfus scribbling a message on a bar napkin and pushing it his way: “Why aren’t we doing this in Greenville?”

After that, the Chamber went “from thinking to action,” Moore recalled.

He began by meeting monthly with a handful of local software entrepreneurs, including Papenfus, Andy Kurtz of Vigilix and Scott Millwood of Customer Effective.

They talked business and shared ideas — something Next members still do.

The Next brand was officially unveiled in 2006, but according to Moore, the program didn’t get much notice from the wider public until 2009, when the Next Innovation Center opened downtown.

The idea of developing the office space was to give Next members a place to collaborate under a single roof.

The building is designed to appeal to techies, with skylights illuminating a center atrium, a 50-megabit Internet pipe and plastic walls that you can write on.

More said the space, more than anything, brought community attention to Next.

“It made it tangible,” he said.

The building won an Innovator Award from the Southern Growth Policies Board in 2010.

It’s been used for politics as well as business.

Presidential candidate Herman Cain, gubernatorial candidates Nikki Haley and Vincent Sheheen and state Senate candidate Joe Swann have all held press events at the Next Innovation Center.

The building’s 28 tenants range in size from 37 employees in 10,000 square feet of space to a single entrepreneur in a single cubicle.

Most are software and Web entrepreneurs, but the Next Innovation Center also houses manufacturers of molecular analysis instrumentation and synthetic diamonds as well as Lab 21.

Next up: ManufacturingWith the Next Innovation Center largely full, Moore is talking with real estate developers about building more “cool” office space where software and Web entrepreneurs can cluster.

It would go downtown because that’s “where they want to work,” Moore said. “It’s where they can attract talent to.”

He’s also developing a “bull pen” of seasoned executives to support Next entrepreneurs and inviting venture capital firms to visit Greenville so they can learn about investment opportunities in the area.

Next is also helping to plan an industry-focused charter school and trying to boost startup activity in a part of the economy with a long history in the Upstate — manufacturing.

Moore said manufacturing entrepreneurs need their own space for co-locating because their needs differ from those of the software and Web entrepreneurs who make up the bulk of Next membership.

Manufacturers typically need more floor space, he said, as well as loading docks and access to heavy machinery for making prototypes.

“They can’t just start a company in a cubicle or two,” Moore said.

He hopes to create specialized space for manufacturing start-ups as part of a so-called “enterprise campus” planned by Greenville Tech.

The campus, not yet funded, could also help existing manufacturers with their work force needs by training students in computer-controlled machining and other skills that are in high demand on the factory floor, said Moore and Greenville Tech President Keith Miller.

The students would interact with entrepreneurs and help them make prototypes.

Miller said he envisions the activities housed in a 50,000- to 60,000-square-foot building that would be somewhere in Greenville County, though not on any of Greenville Tech’s four campuses.

“We would have the same equipment that you would see on any advanced manufacturing floor,” he said.

Miller said he’s found strong interest for the idea in preliminary talks with BMW, Michelin, General Electric, and Bosch Rexroth.

He’s also talked with Burke Royster, the new superintendent of Greenville County schools, about including high school students in the training.

Jason Premo, a local businessman who co-founded Adex Machining Technologies, a manufacturer of exotic metal parts for major corporations such as Boeing and Siemens, said he sees a big need for prototyping services in the Upstate.

Premo, who is helping Next plan new locations, said Adex regularly turns away requests to make prototypes because it’s too busy with its own orders.

“We don’t even have time to do these small prototype jobs,” he said. “Most of our customers are Fortune 500, so we end up turning people away that come all the time asking, ‘Hey, can you guys help manufacture this?’ ”

The Next SchoolThe tentatively named Next School would pair high school students with area businesses to work on special projects in four industry clusters: automotive, advanced manufacturing, information technology and biomedicine.

The organizers, including Moore and several Next members, say they’ll emphasize science, technology, engineering and math.

Participating businesses would help design the student projects, and students would graduate with industry certifications as well as diplomas.

“In order to continue to supply the workforce necessary for existing industry, and to attract additional high-tech companies, bold steps must be taken to restructure high school education in a way that more closely aligns curriculum with ‘life after school,’ ” organizers of the school wrote in an application filed with the state Department of Education.

They’re modeling The Next School on a successful program in Fresno, Calif., where the student projects include designing video games and simple robotics.

Zach Eikenberry, a 27-year-old Next member who is planning coordinator for the proposed school, said he’s motivated by more than simply developing “human capital.”

“I’m involved because I love the classroom,” said Eikenberry, who moved to Greenville from Indiana and taught school before launching a software company to manage federal contracts. “This is one way to help contribute.

[Gville2012]

Finished paving the roads this weekend and removed some of the equiptment. Looks like they are getting close: main things that still need to be done is removal of old traffic lights at University, turning the University and Peral traffic lights on, and removing the old street lights from the utility polls. Also still need to put the bottom caps on the smaller street lights.

[GvilleSC]

Finished paving the roads this weekend and removed some of the equiptment. Looks like they are getting close: main things that still need to be done is removal of old traffic lights at University, turning the University and Peral traffic lights on, and removing the old street lights from the utility polls. Also still need to put the bottom caps on the smaller street lights.

And, stripe the bike lane.

[gs3]

Finished paving the roads this weekend and removed some of the equiptment. Looks like they are getting close: main things that still need to be done is removal of old traffic lights at University, turning the University and Peral traffic lights on, and removing the old street lights from the utility polls. Also still need to put the bottom caps on the smaller street lights.

I was down Church last night and still all kinds of details to be done (if they are done). Certainly hope this was not a waste of dollars. The area still leaves me cold.....not feeling this project.

[gman430]

Construction starting up on CertusBank:

[gman430]

Didn't realize this until today but Holder is building CertusBank: I know a lot of us have wanted them to come to Greenville for a long time and build a highrise/mixed use development downtown so hopefully this is a sign of things to come.

[vicupstate]

http://www.gsabusiness.com/news/44877-iron-yard-accelerates-startup-companies?rss=0

Interesting article on an initiative at the Next Center.

[vicupstate]

Walmart has officially dropped their plans to build at Church & University. They ARE looking at other sites, specifically Haywood Road is one area that is under consideration.