Controversial student housing near USC gets new life after city board rescinds vote
A city of Columbia design board on Friday agreed to reconsider whether a massive student housing complex can be built near the University of South Carolina.
The city’s Design/Development Review Commission voted 3-2 to rescind a Jan. 9 vote that denied a design permit for the eight-story student housing tower planned for the corner of Pickens and Gervais streets.
The issue will be taken up again at the board’s March meeting.
“I just think we needed more time to consider the issue before us,” member Harris Cohn said.
The building was opposed by USC, Historic Columbia and the University Hill Neighborhood Association. They argued the building’s height, while allowed under city zoning laws, would overshadow the adjoining neighborhood and nearby historic buildings.
The board’s decision Friday again drew the ire of the neighbors.
“The applicant gets a mulligan?” state Sen. Dick Harpootlian said after the meeting. “That doesn’t seem fair or just. Why didn’t you do your job the first time?”
Harpootlian both lives and represents the neighborhoods around USC. And he is currently representing the same neighbors as they are fighting to keep several late night college bars from renewing their liquor licenses.
The neighbors are squaring off against iconic dive bar Group Therapy next week. Group is owned by legendary former Gamecock quarterback Steve Taneyhill.
.Despite a large crowd at the Friday’s DDRC meeting, the public was not allowed to speak on the merits of or objections to the project. Board members noted a public hearing was held Jan. 9, and another may be held at the March meeting.
The building proposed by Indiana-based Trinitas Ventures would have 276 apartments and 540 beds. It would be marketed to students by the bed rather than the unit.
Neighborhood leaders at the time said they feared the 540 students would cut through University Hill on the weekends to get to Five Points and back, causing mischief.
“We already have a lot of problems,” Kathryn Fenner, the neighborhood association’s vice president, said at the Jan. 9 meeting. “We’re really not happy in a zillion ways.”
A university spokesman said before the Jan. 9 vote that USC opposed the project because of an agreement with University Hill to discourage more student housing near the neighborhood.
The argument had resonance with the DDRC, which then voted unanimously to turn back the project.
Cohn said before the Jan. 9 vote that he was troubled by the size of the project because it was “dancing on the fringes of the guidelines.”
Members of the Trinitas team have noted that the project met all zoning guidelines, and that it was in proportion with adjacent buildings, such as the new USC School of Law across Pickens Street and Hilton Garden Inn/Home 2 Suites across Gervais Street.
DDRC members Cohn, Sanford Dinkins and Robert Broom voted to rescind. Paul Bouknight and Angi Fuller Wildt voted against. Chairman Tom Savory, who didn’t attend the Jan. 9 meeting, abstained.
This story was originally published February 7, 2020 at 1:22 PM.