THE NEXT NEW COLUMBIA: Is Columbia ready for 1,600 more downtown residents?

It’s not often that Quinn Buss walks from her Main Street apartment to the Vista at night – and certainly not alone and not without her pepper spray and Taser.

The 19-year-old University of South Carolina junior has lived with nearly 850 other students at the Hub at Columbia apartments since they opened in the converted 21-story Palmetto Center a year ago. She generally feels safe downtown, she said, though sometimes feels nervous because of the homeless people she sees on the streets.

But Buss said the benefit of living in the newly revitalized Main Street area is that she’s never alone on the streets, and there’s a feeling of safety in numbers. But there is something she would like to see more of – police.

“I think they definitely need to increase police presence to accommodate for the amount of students moving to this side of campus,” Buss said.

Next month when school begins, downtown will get more than 1,600 new residents in one weekend – the vast majority USC students clustered along Pulaski and Lincoln Streets, and two blocks away, in Olympia.

It amounts to the biggest influx of new downtown residents in the city’s history, nearly doubling the area’s population.

Columbia has always been a “college town,” with a major university in its urban core. But with the number of USC students rising, more than a dozen private student apartments – replete with resort-like amenities – are going up, accommodating the larger student body and concentrating students downtown who were once scattered throughout the city’s neighborhoods.

They will change the tenor of what it means to live, work and have fun downtown, experts say, and put significant additional pressure on city services.

“In about 30 days, we’re going to become a real city,” said Fred Delk, executive director of the Columbia Development Corp., which encourages and guides investment in the Vista and other areas of downtown. “We’ve been waiting for this for a long time. I hope we’re ready.”

Next year, the number of people living downtown will double yet again. Another 3,500 or so more students and young professionals will arrive as six new student housing and apartment complexes pop up.

The students and their money will add vibrancy to the city’s core, paving the way for new downtown services, stores, restaurants and bars, experts say. That in turn will attract more people – this time, boosters hope, more empty nesters and young professionals in addition to students.

They also will present the city with some problems: How to protect the young people from predators and sometimes from themselves – they are college students, after all – and how to make sure they can safely navigate a more crowded downtown, often on foot, on bicycles or on mopeds, and frequently late at night, especially on the weekends.

“It’s totally creating a different dynamic,” said City Manager Teresa Wilson. “We want to make sure our services keep up with that.”

Six more projects on the way

In addition to The Hub on Main Street – which opened in last fall with 847 beds – two newly built student housing complexes and two traditional apartment complexes geared to students are opening just prior to the start of classes on Aug. 20.

They are:

▪  The 727-bed Greene Crossing and 120-bed Pulaski Square on Pulaski Street between Blossom and Gervais Streets, both built by private, out-of-town developers

▪  The 650 Lincoln development, which adds 584 beds on campus behind the Carolina Coliseum in a partnership between USC and an Atlanta developer

▪  And 612 Whaley in Olympia, which has 181 beds, built by the same Philadelphia developer who converted the Olympia and Whaley textile mills into apartments that the new project fronts

Green Crossing and 650 Lincoln are student housing developments; Pulaski Square and 612 Whaley are traditional “market rate” apartments. The difference is that student housing is leased by the bed and geared almost exclusively to students, while market rate is leased by the apartment and open to everyone with an emphasis on students.

Six more are in the works for 2016 or 2017.

The boom in these types of student housing developments is due to two actions taken by Columbia City Council. One lifted the city’s maximum limit of three unrelated people living in the same residence. The other was a partnership with Richland County that provided a 50 percent property tax credit for 10 years to large-scale student housing developments that include structured parking.

“All of the land sales have taken place after the tax credit,” said Ben Johnson, an analyst with CBRE commercial real estate. “Before that everyone was running their numbers, hit the taxes and bailed.”

Holbrook plans new region, ‘concierge’ cops

But is the city ready from a public safety standpoint?

Students can be easy targets for criminals. They tend to enjoy nightlife to the hilt, and many will walk back from the nearby Vista or Five Points on the other side of campus very late at night.

“It makes them easy targets,” Columbia Police Chief Skip Holbrook said.

They also present a set of self-induced problems: underage drinking, drug use, public intoxication, fighting and domestic issues.

Holbrook says he will ramp up patrols initially after the August move-in, with overtime officers as he assesses the needs, then probably add two or three officers to the metro region Thursday through Friday after that assessment.

Also, he wants to form a sixth patrol region, an entertainment region, to cover Five Points, Main Street and the Vista. It would be staffed by “concierge” cops trained for policing the hospitality/student districts and augmented by the existing Community Response Teams.

He said the new district – which could be established when the nearby Bull Street development comes online – would not reduce officers from other parts of the city and in particular, the Metro and South Regions, which contain most of the entertainment districts now.

Richard Burts, president of the Vista Guild merchants group, called Holbrook’s plan “astute.” He said the effort could be augmented by more unarmed civilian “yellow shirts” – private security guard/ambassadors funded by the city – to extend more protection to the student housing developments along Pulaski Street, where many of the new apartments are clustered.

“Entertainment districts offer a different type of challenge,” Burts said. “Police officers have to be part guide, part ambassador and part law-enforcement-with-a-smile.”

‘Now is the time for implementation’

Mayor Steve Benjamin and council members-at-large Tameika Isaac Devine and Cameron Ruynon said they support Holbrook’s plan and would back more funding for the police department, if needed, to make it happen.

Efforts to reach council member Brian DeQuincey Newman, who represents the downtown district but is not running for re-election, were unsuccessful.

“This is something new and different but nothing our officers aren’t up to,” said Benjamin. He said City Council has increased funding for the police department by nearly $10 million to nearly $36.5 million in the past five years.

Holbrook said he also will extend to the new developments education programs such as those initiated at The Hub to inform students about safety issues such as safe walking corridors and how to secure bicycles and mopeds.

Statics show the only increase in crime associated with The Hub has been larceny, the vast majority being moped and bicycle thefts from students leaving them unsecured in front of the building – a couple dozen.

Developer John Holder, who is building 650 Lincoln with USC, said the individual student housing developments will have in-house security as well, including on-site guards, key-activated security doors “and many, many cameras watching all of the property.”

Walking poses separate issues.

Devine said more pedestrian-friendly features would have to be added to the city’s wide streets – such as Huger, Gervais and Assembly, which in places stretch to five lanes wide.

“We have a walk-bike plan,” she said. Funding for key projects “needs to be bumped up because of the mass influx of residents in that area. Now is the time for implementation.”

But while it present challenges, everyone interviewed said the influx of new residents will be a positive.

“This is unprecedented,” Runyon said. “There are knowns and there are unknowns. We’ve never had this type of density before. We just have to be nimble as a city.”

This story was originally published July 25, 2015 at 9:41 PM with the headline "THE NEXT NEW COLUMBIA: Is Columbia ready for 1,600 more downtown residents?."