More changes are coming to uptown Charlotte. Duke Energy announced this week it’s found buyers for two of its buildings and those buyers have plans for the properties. For more, "Morning Edition" host Marshall Terry talks to Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter.
Terry: Toni, what buildings are we talking about here and what are the plans?
Mecia: Yeah, it's a couple different Duke buildings that are going to see some changes. The first one is 526 South Church Street, a developer from Washington called MRP Realty is buying that one. It's a duke's old headquarters, a 13-story tower, and convert that into 425 loft-style residential units and then build another 12 stories of apartments on top of that with some retail space on the bottom. And then the other one is a five-story building 401 South College that's being bought by a Berlin company called Millennium Venture Capital. And in there, they're going to build a mixed-use development that could knock the building down. It's going to be luxury apartments in a combination of offices, a hotel and some retail space.
Terry: So why did Duke sell these buildings to begin with?
Mecia: Yeah, it's a little bit of a time of transition for Duke. They're building a new tower uptown. They're also going to sort of downsize the amount of office space they need with people working in different places and working from home, that sort of thing. They're going to go from 2.5 million square feet of office space to a million square feet of office space, and they don't need these additional buildings.
Terry: Sticking with real estate news for a moment. Let's go to South End, where you recently reported there's a plot for sale that one real estate broker referred to as, quote, more rare than a unicorn. What makes it so rare?
Mecia: Yeah, it's unusual to have large plots of land come available in South End area. I mean, you have developers that are, you know, bidding on an acre, an acre and a half. There's a 46-acre property that's come in on the market. It's the South End Business Park. It's on Clanton Road between East 77 and South Tryon Street. That's not exactly in South End, but it's close to South End. It's maybe a little closer to the area that's becoming known as LoSo, where there's a lot of development, new apartments, restaurants coming in. So the opportunity to redevelop 46 acres in this really hot area of town is something that's pretty rare. And I imagine there are a lot of big developers out there sort of salivating at the prospects.
Terry: And what are the plans for it?
Mecia: Well, it's too early to say exactly. The most natural thing would be for it to become a sort of mixed-use development. Some of the plans said it could support as many as 1,500 apartments, 1.2 million square feet of commercial space, you know, some green space, you know, a bunch of different things potentially in there. But certainly a pretty large-scale potential redevelopment. And it's nothing that's going to happen any time soon. It would take probably months and probably years to fully redevelop it, but it's certainly on the radar.
Terry: Let's move on to a court battle now. You report that some residents of a south Charlotte neighborhood are divided over access to the Little Sugar Creek Greenway. So what's the fight about exactly?
Mecia: Well, Marshall, a lot of neighborhoods like to be connected to greenways, but there's a neighborhood in south Charlotte called Park Crossing, which is between South Mecklenburg High School and Pineville, about 600 homes. There's been a battle, a legal battle ongoing there for the last three years.
There are some residents that want the neighborhood to be connected to the Little Sugar Creek Greenway, which is right behind the neighborhood. But some of the residents who own property that is next to the Greenway aren't really too keen on the idea of a path in between their houses where people could walk and people would drive there and park on their street. So there's been an ongoing legal battle since 2019 over that issue. And they thought it was going to be resolved. Last year, a judge ruled in favor of the people wanting access to the greenway, but one of the residents is appealing, so it's still ongoing. Not a lot of people wanted to talk about it with me, but, you know, there's a court case. And so we were able to dig up some of the scoop on that.
Terry: Finally, Tony, the city of Belmont is turning to a creative solution to deal with kudzu and overgrown brush, goatscaping as in goats. The animals?
Mecia: Yes, goats. I guess you haven't really heard of this one, Marshall. You know, they've been employed by the city of Belmont to come in and eat kudzu and underbrush. So the city is paying them $58,000. They say it's an environmentally friendly way to make sure that the land that they have doesn't get overgrown.
They have even set up a website that tells about some of these goats. One, Casper who's been complimented on his horns. Noel, his name comes from being born on Christmas Eve. And then Oreo, who the city of Belmont says loves treats but doesn't necessarily like to be petted. So I guess that might be the future of landscaping. And I'm not kidding.
