Monday, Jan. 26, 2009

Innovista: USC seeking 385-acre rezoning downtown

Columbia to hold final two public meetings on plan this week

For a glimpse of downtown Columbia’s future, stand in the parking lot of the Publix grocery store between Gervais and Lady streets and look around.

The area surrounding the old Confederate Printing Plant and Trustus Theater — an industrial wasteland just a decade or so ago — is now an urbanist’s dream of condos, live-work units, town houses, apartments, stores, bars, restaurants and galleries.

It’s a big-city mix USC would like to see extend throughout an “innovation district” — a 500-acre area encompassing the school’s Innovista research campus and stretching from Assembly Street to the Congaree River, Gervais Street to Catawba Street.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, the city will hold the final two public meetings on new blanket zoning that could make that mix of homes, stores and offices possible for the city and profitable for developers.

“If we could just replicate that that (Publix) block three, seven, 11 times throughout the 500 acres,” USC president Harris Pastides said recently. “With a little bit of imagination, you can begin to see it today. In a decade, my hope and confidence is that that part of Columbia will be unrecognizable.”

USC wants the city of Columbia to rezone 385 acres in the Vista — mostly land the school doesn’t own — to speed up the growth of its downtown research campus and spawn those shops, restaurants and housing.

The 2005 Innovista master plan, developed by the Boston firm Sasaki Associates, calls for a walkable “live, work and play” district that will be attractive to the “creative class” of researchers, entrepreneurs and young, savvy professionals expected to be the backbone of Columbia’s future economy.

“The (innovation district) along with Innovista and Bull Street (redevelopment of the 185-acre State Hospital campus) are the most important projects we are doing and have the ability to transform our community,” Mayor Bob Coble said. “I certainly am supportive (of the rezoning plan), and I believe council will be very supportive.”

FLEXIBILITY IS KEY

The district is Innovista’s leg up over other research campuses across the country, Pastides said, most of which are in suburban office park settings.

The new zoning would give developers the flexibility to tailor a unique development compatible with the campus, Pastides said. It also cuts through much of the red tape it now takes to build a mixed-use development, he said.

“People around the country, and some from far away ... tell us what they would like to do here and ask if it can it be done,” Pastides said. “With this zoning, I can say ‘yes’ more than I can today.”

Other backers of USC’s plan say rezoning the land parcel by parcel could take years and cost plenty in legal fees. The largest landowner in the area, the Guignard family with 75 waterfront acres, is supportive.

“It is something that should have been done 20 years ago,” said Charlie Thompson, Guignard family point man. “It’s quite possibly the largest concentration of industrial land in the city. But times have changed, and growth trends have changed. I just don’t see that manufacturing uses have a future in that area.”

The type of rezoning USC wants is a move rarely used in Columbia. However, City Council has the power to enact blanket rezoning rather than require individual owners to apply.

USC and the Guignards are the largest landowners in the area. But they own only about 40 percent of the property.

City Council could rezone someone’s property without his or her consent, but probably wouldn’t for political reasons. So the city and the university would like to have buy-in from about 250 other property owners who control 60 percent of the land.

“So we’re trying to create excitement,” said Bill Boyd, chairman of the committee pushing for in the innovation district and its centerpiece, a 74-acre waterfront park. “This property has been underdeveloped for 100 years, and it’s got exciting possibilities.”

The steel fabrication yards that dotted the Vista landscape a decade ago are gone. Only a few light industrial, distribution and manufacturing businesses remain.

Existing businesses would be protected under the change, said Boyd, an attorney and partner in the Haynsworth Sinkler Boyd firm. Businesses that are considered “industrial” or “light industrial” could continue to operate, even under new ownership, as long as operations continue uninterrupted. But no new industrial uses could move in.

“We’re not going to take anyone’s business or property,” Boyd said.

PLAN’S FINAL DRAFT

The university and the city have held about a dozen public meetings since the rezoning plan was introduced in 2007. Tuesday’s and Wednesday’s meetings are the culmination of those meetings and a final draft of the zoning plan will be unveiled then.

Krista Hampton, a city planning and zoning administrator, said the response from landowners has been favorable. The new zoning would give them more options as to what they can build, would lower parking requirements and would streamline permitting, she said.

“It’s the tool they can use to bring people downtown, create jobs and fulfill the goals of the master plan,” she said.

The family of Lewis Caswell, president of W.O. Blackstone mechanical contractors, has owned about two acres of property on Williams Street across from the new USC baseball stadium.

Family members moved the business to Shop Road years ago and are leasing the light industrial to another firm.

Caswell said he has been waiting for the zoning to be decided before redeveloping it into some sort of mixed-use that would be compatible with the stadium.

“We don’t need that area to develop willy-nilly,” he said. “I hope everyone who owns property will buy into it. We want to build something that our grandchildren will look at and say, ‘They did a pretty good job.’”

Reach Wilkinson at (803) 771-8495.

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