What happened to the student apartments planned for BullStreet?

The first plan for residences at Columbia’s closely eyed BullStreet development appears to be on hold, at best.

Haven Campus Communities, an Atlanta student housing developer, had planned to invest some $55 million in building 234 apartments near the Spirit Communications ballpark at BullStreet, The State newspaper reported more than a year ago.

Haven was asking the city and Richland County for a 50 percent property tax break for 10 years, which the city and county were offering for a time to student housing projects that met a certain investment threshold.

But in October of last year, Richland County Council, in a 6-5 vote, denied the tax break to Haven after approving it for four other student housing developers.

Now, the project does not seem to show any signs of movement.

“The land is still under contract to Haven Campus Communities, but they are evaluating their plans,” said Robert Hughes of Greenville’s Hughes Development Corp., which serves as the master developer for the 181-acre BullStreet campus.

Efforts by The State newspaper to reach Haven representatives were unsuccessful last week.

Haven has not applied for any permits that would indicate it is moving forward with construction after its site plan was approved by the city in January 2016, said Johnathan Chambers, the city’s land development administrator.

Columbia’s economic development director, Ryan Coleman, when asked if he knew whether Haven is still pursuing its BullStreet plans, said, “Not to my knowledge.”

But “you can’t rule it out until they close the contract (on the land) out,” he said. “I think they were really hinging on getting the tax break.”

If Haven were reevaluating its concept at BullStreet, Coleman said, it might make sense to develop a market-rate, mixed-use complex, as opposed to student apartments.

Haven’s plans were the first sign of residential development coming to BullStreet.

Since those plans were reported in December 2015, three other residential development plans have surfaced there:

▪ 28 luxury town homes to be built by Greenville’s Terranova Group, expected to be priced from the low $300,000s to the low $400,000s.

▪ An active-senior-living development on property already purchased by Merrill Gardens.

▪ Apartments at the historic Babcock building.

Hughes has continued to reiterate that the BullStreet project is only in the early portion of its expected 20-year build-out.

“We are here to do this the right way,” he said at a recent roundtable meeting, where critics, supporters and stakeholders discussed the state of the development. “We’re here for the long haul. ... We’re in year three. We’ve got until 2034 until we think the site’s finished.”

This story was originally published May 21, 2017 at 6:14 PM with the headline "What happened to the student apartments planned for BullStreet?."