SouthPark isn’t just a mall anymore
Big changes heading to SouthPark area:
– Demolition of Colony apartments starts in weeks
– Adding walking trails, possibly new park and theater
– Avoiding Eastland’s example: ‘evolve or die’
If you think of SouthPark mostly as a big regional mall, it’s time to change your thinking.
There’s a bunch of construction going on around the SouthPark area. In a few years, it will look and feel very different. It will have new hotels, apartments, shops, restaurants and office buildings, sure — but it also could have a new theater and a town center park. And it will have at least part of a three-mile circular pedestrian path completed — like a greenway or the rail trail — that will be known as “The Loop.”
Not just the mall: “You can say to your friends, ‘Hey, let’s just go to The Loop, and there will be things going on,” says Hilary Larsen, chairwoman of the SouthPark Association of Neighborhoods, a collection of nearby neighborhood groups. “When you get there, you’ll have ice cream, yoga, cool interactive art. What you really want is it to be some kind of an experience besides ‘Let’s go to the mall.’”
Some people don’t like all the construction and new apartments, she says. But it’s inevitable, so the best move for neighbors is to work with developers to make it palatable: “If you want things to be the way they were, then what you are really saying is you want SouthPark to become like Eastland Mall. You either evolve and allow the business mix to change, or you die.”
The next big step in SouthPark’s evolution starts at the end of this month, when the last residents of the Colony apartments move out. Demolition of the apartments, built in the 1970s on Colony Road between Sharon and Roxborough roads, starts almost immediately after. Expect bulldozers by January. In its place on the 27-acre site will be 340 apartments and 280,000 s.f. of retail in the first phase, anchored by a Publix and including a fitness center. Construction should last about 30 months, says Tim Hose, president of Synco Properties, which owns the Colony land and is developing it with Schlosser Development. Later plans call for a hotel, offices and more apartments.
Movie theater? There’s no lease signed yet, but developers are also hoping to land a small upscale movie theater with food and beverage service, Hose says. “This would be an experience focused on not just the movie screens but other types of entertainment like sports and things like that.”
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Developers are also planning to landscape the bunker-like culverts on Colony Road toward Runnymede Lane and to start building the section of The Loop by the Colony redevelopment.
Other projects underway in the area include:
- Apex SouthPark, a huge mixed-use development by Childress Klein at Sharon and Colony roads. (Slick video of what it will look like when finished here.)
- The AC Hotel by Marriott on Roxborough Road. It’s expected to be finished in a couple months.
- Hazel SouthPark, a 203-unit, five-story luxury apartment complex on Barclay Downs by the mall.
In addition, Lincoln Harris has rezoned land behind Piedmont Row for a third Capital Tower office building. It’s unclear when that might start. Maybe next year?
At the same time, the city and mall owner Simon Property Group are in talks to revamp Symphony Park — perhaps to make it more like a town center. Nearby residents sometimes joke that despite its name, SouthPark doesn’t actually have a park.
Ballantyne parallels: Ballantyne is trying to make a similar switch to become an area with higher-density housing, more shops and restaurants and walkable, lively public spaces. The Ballantyne redevelopment, though, has the benefit of a single owner, Northwood Office. Northwood is in the middle of a rezoning process for its project, called Ballantyne Reimagined. Redeveloping SouthPark requires more coordination between landowners.
Change is coming.
Says Hose: “It is going to get better and better, I think. It will be busier, for sure. But there will be some really neat things that will keep people from having to get in their cars to go everywhere, let people walk out of their apartments to work, to shop, to go to the doctor, to recreate, to take a 5K run on The Loop.”
