N&O/Durham News covers Greenfire

A heads-up in case you didn't see it: Saturday's edition of The Durham News, the N&O's weekly Durham supplement, had a feature story on Greenfire Development's swallowing-up of wide swaths of downtown properties.  The three articles are worth a read: check out this main article and its companion, along with a sidebar on other developers in downtown.

The article demonstrates what a bargain downtown Durham properties were when Greenfire got started a couple of years ago -- they were able to buy properties at a per-square-foot cost ($24/sf) that only slightly higher than the going annual rate for leasing market-performing Class A real estate in parts of the Triangle.  (Which shows you, if downtown Durham hits its mark and Greenfire performs well, what the rewards are.)

Still, the articles bring us no closer to a real answer on exactly what Greenfire's up to, a subject of an earlier post here at BCR.  Not a criticism of the N&O, which did a fine job with the series -- just a reminder that, until Greenfire releases their master plan this spring, we won't really know exactly what's up with downtown.

Comments

[KeepDurhamDifferent!]

Can we get some speculation on what their "master plan" is?:

-more surface parking?
-theme park for the black wall st.?
-land assembly for new UNC-Durham campus?
-Southpoint analogue?
-Am. Tobacco analogue?

[Bull City Rising]

Ooh, David -- I like that idea! Let's speculate away (and, dear readers, please feel free to join in.) Of course, surface parking is *exactly* what downtown Durham needs more of!

In all seriousness, I think that becoming another American Tobacco isn't in the cards. The ATHD has had success in part by being able to attract fairly significant employment centers -- Duke, McKinney, Glaxo, Motricity -- which means employers who are looking for space that will work for hundreds of employees. The old AT warehouses were perfect for this.

This is a tough thing for downtown Durham; just in the last couple of years, the American Inst. of Certified Public Accountants wanted space downtown, but even the Durham Centre (note pretentious British spelling) didn't have enough contiguous space for them, so they ended up in south Durham.

Looking at their website, Greenfire can meet that on the new skyscraper they want to build at the Woolworth site at 119 W. Parrish, with 225,000 sq. ft. listed as available. Besides that and to some extent the Trust Building, however, everything's in the order of 3,000-7,000 sq. ft. That's about enough space, probably, for 10-25 person organizations.

Add to this their stated desire to preserve Durham's architecture, and I don't think we're going to see wholesale tear-downs of old buildings, so they're pretty much limited to the footprints of the existing spaces (unless they can connect adjoining buildings, which sounds like a major headache.)

So from a commercial perspective... I'd think that they could try to go after the startups and after creative class businesses -- more design/web/multimedia firms (which already have staked out Durham), perhaps some small consulting firms, knowledge-based organizations? Their website already provides clues in this direction.

I think the key to their success will be some kind of phased-in execution, trying to fill up clusters of spaces simultaneously -- again, something that American Tobacco did well. If they can program residential, retail and commercial in the right mixes within each of a few clusters, they can bring the inside-the-loop downtown alive block by block.

Of course, if this all falls apart, I vote for your Black Wall Street theme park idea!

So enough babbling from me. What do others think?

[dteah]

Regarding one of the other development companies putting their money downtown, I ran across the name Scientific Properties/Andrew Rothschild in an unexpected place: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalano_House. I was not aware that he was involved with the development of the "McMansion" style homes on the property of the historic Eduardo Catalano House.