Big news today and a great win for the City of Greenville. I believe this is the first big one for Sam Konduros, CEO of the Greenville City Economic Development Corp (GCEDC) who recently took on this position and will no doubt do some great things!
300 East McBee is one very large building for downtown Greenville. The fact that Prisma is going to keep its HQ’s here is a very big deal indead. The deal includes the City of Greenville investing $650,000 in public improvements at Falls Street and East McBee Avenue. Private investors have $38MM in the building and other investments there. There will be new tenants and other very nice improvements to the space. The outside street scape will see some very notable improvements according to this post by the City of Greenville on LinkedIn.
There have been many times that I will park in the public parking garage behind this building and this is the view I see on the 3rd level of the parking garage. I think this is such a cool looking building. It reminds me of a spaceship. I can’t wait to see the improvements they are doing on the back side of this as well.
The City of Greenville passed it’s budget for the year weighing in at $272,500,000.
There’s an endless list of projects for the city to work on and they are tackling a number of them. Affordable Housing continues to be a high priority for everyone in the city and they’ve allocated more than $10MM to help provide housing. I’m a skeptic so I don’t really know what the $10MM brings other than it’s generally a great tax deal for the developers and investors in such projects with the city.
Call this part of the charm of living in the South…if you’ve ever tried to figure out if you are actually within the city limits of the City of Greenville, SC, you’ll understand how challenging it can be at times. Above is a screen shot I took from the city’s GIS system. It’s a fantastic system and I’ll link it below. Part of the challenge here is you’ll have an address that says Greenville, SC but it won’t be in the city. It will just be part of Greenville County. It’s helpful to know this as a property owner as you’ll be subject to more scrutiny of course if you live within the city limits.
The City of Greenville has a facade improvement program whereby they will reimburse some of the expense building owners incur when they are improving the facades of their buildings.
Key items from the the City of Greenville’s Facade Improvement Program presentation.
- REIMBURSEMENT GRANT PROGRAM FUNDED BY THE CITY OF
GREENVILLE - PROVIDES FINANCIAL AND TECHNICAL DESIGN ASSISTANCE TO
COMMERCIAL PROPERTY OWNERS AND BUSINESS OWNERS IN
TARGETED COMMERCIAL CORRIDORS FOR QUALIFIED FACADE
IMPROVEMENTS - SUPPORTS THE REVITALIZATION OF THE CITY’S COMMERCIAL
CORRIDORS BY STIMULATING PRIVATE INVESTMENT IN HIGHQUALITY IMPROVEMENTS - HELPS OWNERS ENHANCE THE APPEARANCE OF BUILDINGS AND
PROPERTIES AND ELIMINATE BLIGHT AND NON-CONFORMING
DESIGN STANDARDS - THE PROGRAM IS NOT RETROACTIVE. APPLICATIONS MUST BE
APPROVED IN WRITING BY THE COMMERCIAL CORRIDOR FAÇADE
REVIEW COMMITTEE PRIOR TO COMMENCEMENT OF WORK - $10,000 PER PROPERTY, FOR ELIGIBLE IMPROVEMENTS
- CITY WILL REIMBURSE UP TO 50% OF EXPENSES EQUAL TO OR LESS THAN $10,000. FOR ADDITIONAL EXPENSES ABOVE $10,000 THE CITY WILL REIMBURSE 20% OF ELIGIBLE EXPENSES NOT TO EXCEED THE MAXIMUM AWARD AMOUNT OF $10,000
- EXAMPLE: IF THE APPLICANT’S ELIGIBLE EXPENSES EQUAL $25,000, HE/SHE WOULD BE ELIGIBLE FOR AN $8,000 REIMBURSEMENT GRANT
- [($10,000 X50%) + ($15,000 X 20%)] = $8,000
For questions, be sure to reach out to the City of Greenville. All projects must be approved first before you will receive any kind of reimbursement.
Well it appears the City of Greenville has once again decided to embrace the mask 🙂 Yesterday it was announced that effective today, there is a mask mandate for all City of Greenville offices and buildings. This is not a citywide mask mandate and appears to be much more limited than the new mask mandate for Columbia, SC. Here is the official statement from the City of Greenville regarding their new mask mandate for August 2021.
If I’m not mistaken, I believe the City of Greenville is limited now in what it can require in terms of mask mandates across the city so they have gone with the limited edition – city buildings only. I do expect we’ll see a pick up in some mask wearing particularly downtown. We might even see some businesses decide to once again require masks to enter their stores, buildings, and offices. However, there has been a lot of push back against the masks. It’s hard to imagine that this latest round of government overreach makes it very far with the populace. Lots of people are getting tired of government telling them what they have to do. The Greenville area is generally considered a conservative bastion and they aren’t too fond of the masks or the vaccines.
If you want to follow along with how well South Carolina is doing with Covid, you’ll have no shortage of Facebook posts to read through at the SC DHEC Facebook Page. According to SC DHEC, Covid-19 – or the Delta Variant – is raging out of control across the state. That said, it appears that the number of Covid-19 Delta positives has dropped by about 50% in the past few days. I believe we were around 3,200-3,500 per day last week. Today’s report shows 2,220.