Developers bet on downtown housing to carry Main Street Columbia’s revival. Will residents follow-suit?
For Frank Cason, turning the former Klondike Building on the 1300 block of Main Street into a boutique apartment complex was a no-brainer.
“Main Street has come such a long way. It continues to extend and improve block by block consistently,” said the president of Columbia’s Cason Development Group.
By September, roughly 28 new units will be available to rent at Cason’s 1813 Main apartments.
It’s only a small part of the growth in housing options downtown, which hovers around 3,000 units now, according to market research firm Colliers. In the next few years, the downtown stock is expected to double.
Longtime Columbia developers say it’s proof that a long-ago placed wager on downtown’s comeback is starting to seriously pay off.
As more developers line up for new projects, residents say there are still a few things Columbia needs for a true Main Street revival.
A long-awaited revival
Downtowns nationwide tend to experience a gradual ebb and flow of prosperity and hardship.
In the early 20th century, the availability of motorized transit pushed urban boundaries and moved people into new, peripheral communities.
The takeoff of suburbs by the mid-1950s further dispersed residents, and the rise and decline of shopping malls shuffled the community nucleus yet again.
Columbia’s story is no different. The Main Street corridor has had good decades and bad. At the turn of the 21st century, the district hadn’t seen any major housing or office space investments in more than a decade, according to Main Street District CEO Matt Kennell.
Tom Prioreschi and his son Jeff took the first big risk to reestablish Columbia’s downtown more than twenty years ago. The pair founded Capitol Places in 1998 and subsequently bought the former S.H. Kress & Company department store on Main Street. They turned it into market-rate housing, and the units “went fast,” Prioreschi said.
At the time, fellow developers told him he was crazy, but he was betting on the nationwide trend of downtown revitalization. In his eyes, what Main Street is now becoming was inevitable from the start.
Over the years, Prioreschi has been responsible for adding 400 units in the Main Street district by redeveloping historic properties.
Most development in the area has relied on a portion of downtown being designated as a historic district, which provides special tax incentives for historic reconstruction. Without that program, Kennell said development would be far too expensive, largely because of high property taxes for commercial projects in Columbia. He added that’s also the reason the district isn’t flush with high-rises.
A variety of developers followed Prioreschi’s lead. Now, historic buildings are being turned into apartments at a rapid pace.
Upcoming and recently finished projects in the district include 109 units at The Lady, which opened in 2021, and an estimated 85 units at the former Assembly Street Veterans Administration building, expected to be transformed in the next few years.
A vibrant downtown
To maintain downtown’s vibrancy the housing bet will have to pay off, particularly as the work-from-home movement threatens to rob downtown merchants of many of their would-be regular day-time customers, explained Kennell.
“It’s telling me that these residents are going to become more and more important to sustain the businesses,” he said.
Most developers agree there’s a chicken-egg effect with housing and retail. To have shops and restaurants, you need people living nearby. For people to want to live nearby, you need shops and restaurants.
And it’s not just getting more people downtown, but getting people who want what a downtown can offer. A new apartment means people living there will want a coffee shop to walk to; they’ll want an office close by.
“All of these things feed off each other,” Cason said.
No one can deny Main Street has come a long way in terms of having the kinds of businesses that appeal to downtown residents. But for some, the district has a ways to go.
Brian Olesnevich and his wife are “typical empty-nesters,” as he describes them. They’re both in their late 40s with a son in the military and a daughter and grandchild a few hours south in Savannah, Georgia.
Every year a few months before their lease at West Columbia’s Granby Oaks needs to be renewed, they go on the hunt for a downtown apartment. Every year after three to four tours they decide it’s just not what they’re looking for and re-sign at their beloved West Columbia abode.
“I work right on Pendleton and Pickens, so we would love to be walking distance from work,” he said. “But it just hasn’t happened yet. We haven’t found the right thing.”
He said part of the cost-benefit is that most of the apartments downtown are older buildings. For residents looking for newer infrastructure, there aren’t many options. But other driving factors include a lack of grocery options, and no easily accessible riverwalk.
“One of the primary reasons we’ve not made the move is we happen to live in an area that’s close enough, we can walk to a grocery store,” he said.
They have one car, and parking is an added cost as well, he said.
“The downtown area has plenty of restaurants and plenty of walking opportunities, you get the (Soda City) market every weekend … But I think the food desert item is definitely a big issue,” Olesnevich said.
Next week he and his wife will take a tour of the Babcock building, which is being redeveloped into apartments at the in-progress BullStreet district, but he’s already leaning toward staying where they’re at.
Rising rents
Prioreschi said one of the reasons housing is starting to boom on Main Street is that the market is now supporting high enough rents to make it economically viable for more developers to construct housing.
Rents are increasing city-wide. In the last quarter of 2020, the average monthly rent in Columbia was $986. In the final quarter of 2021, it was up to $1,069, according to Colliers.
It was highest downtown, with the average rent coming in at just over $1,400 and the highest average cost per square foot, according to the Colliers research.
And that’s just the average. Some rents downtown are more than twice that. About 1,500 square feet at The Lady runs up to $3,186 per month, for example.
Prioreschi believes the market will ensure rents don’t become exorbitant, but some worry downtown is already becoming prohibitively expensive for a lot of Columbia residents.
“I think we need good jobs to support that,” Kennell said. “But I am concerned about that, for the people who work in restaurants and hotels and so forth.”
He added, “We don’t want to be like Myrtle Beach where people have to take an hour bus ride to work.”
That’s the situation Andrea Fuhrman hoped to avoid when she got a new job last year at Hawthorne Pharmacy on Taylor Street. She wanted to live downtown so she would be close to work, but couldn’t find a place large enough for the price tag.
In her eyes, downtown just doesn’t offer enough yet to make it worth the slight premium.
“For a one-bedroom that was kind of basically a studio it was just not the amount of space that I was looking for,” she said. “It was really difficult for me to justify paying the extra money when I could just as easily be a little outside of the downtown area, but close enough to get to downtown.”
Elizabeth Marks said she thinks the area will get to the point where more residents think it’s worth the cost for added amenities.
Marks is vice chair of the city’s coalition of downtown neighborhoods, and she said residents have been bracing for a wave of new renters for a while.
“It’s what we expected to happen and it’s probably positive in the long-term,” she said.
But keeping the area vibrant will require that city leaders ensure people with a diversity of incomes can live there, she added.
“The long term issue is affordable housing, not market-rate,” she said.
Still, Kennell is encouraged that people are starting to look at downtown as a place to build their lives around, not just pop by on a Saturday morning.
This story was originally published May 14, 2022 at 1:00 AM.
