Developer to reveal plans for Cardinal Newman site on Monday

The Beach Co. of Charleston on Monday will show the public its plans to develop the soon-to-be vacant Cardinal Newman School site on Forest Drive.

Plans are for apartments and commercial development at the site on 4701 Forest Drive, said Forest Acres City Administrator Mark Williams. He said he didn’t know how many apartments the plans would include.

That information and more could be presented at the public meeting 6:30 p.m. Monday at Cardinal Newman School.

Williams said he expects any concerns from Forest Acres residents will center on traffic.

The highly traveled, shop-lined stretch of Forest Drive between Beltline Boulevard and Trenholm Road has been maligned for its traffic issues, including speeding cars, dangerous left turns and badly timed traffic lights. An 81-year-old man died earlier this year after a crash on Forest Drive near the Cardinal Newman site.

About 27,000 vehicles travel Forest Drive daily, close to the road’s capacity of roughly 30,000, according to a months-long traffic data analysis completed this year.

Cardinal Newman will leave its current location when the current semester ends and move to a new, 50-acre campus on Alpine Road in northeast Richland County.

The Beach Co. also developed the Canalside Lofts apartment complex in Columbia’s Vista. Efforts to reach the Beach Co. on Friday were unsuccessful.

This story was originally published November 6, 2015 at 4:14 PM with the headline "Developer to reveal plans for Cardinal Newman site on Monday."