Metropolitan Creating a Flexible Live-Work-Play Environment

[ By Bo Jackson ]

The MetLofts offer floor plans ranging from 540 square feet to more than 1,500 square feet. Floor plans include an upstairs kitchen and living room that extend to an open-air roof deck.

Bringing the site of a once-beloved Charlotte, N.C., mall back to life — and addressing the unique challenges associated with creating a groundbreaking mixed-use development — required of its developers a unique strategy: “rigid flexibility.” “You have to be pretty thick-skinned in this process, and be able to bend,” said Kyle Collins, senior vice president of development for Colonial Properties Trust, one of the three companies involved in the Metropolitan development. “It’s a very complicated process, integrating residential, retail and office into a functional development. As a team we agreed to try to do what’s best in each of our individual disciplines and, at the end of the day, compromise to come up with the best solution.”

That solution was Metropolitan Plaza, a $225 million, nine-acre, urban in-fill, live-work-shop development that combined retail, residences and an office building in an area of Midtown Charlotte that overlooks the new Little Sugar Creek Greenway.

Along with the Class “A” office tower, the mixed-use community features 101 residential units and 190,000 square feet of lifestyle retail shops and restaurants.

Renovation Only Goes So Far
Metropolitan sits on what was a cow pasture and in 1959 became the site of Charlottetown Mall, a Rouse Company property that was the country’s third and the Southeast’s first enclosed shopping mall. The building was anchored by a department store, a supermarket, a five-and-dime and a drug store, and was the premier retail location in the Charlotte region for about 20 years.

Competitors soon hit the market, drawing shoppers away from the aging mall. In the 1980s the property was renovated and re-merchandised, changing its name to Outlet Square. Another renovation, in 1989, added parking garages but didn’t do much to raise the property’s profile to previous heights, and the decline continued into the 1990s.

The 155,000-square-foot corporate office tower will be 90 percent occupied by the end of the year.

In 2000, Pappas Properties teamed with The Home Depot to acquire the leasehold from the Rouse Company. Pappas and Home Depot spent the next year negotiating an acquisition of the fee. “Numerous meetings were held with key community stakeholders, planning staff and elected officials to garner support for the development,” said Peter A. Pappas, president of Pappas Properties. “Shortly after 9/11, the team decided to postpone the development due to the economic conditions and the lack of public funding for parking.”

Home Depot considered alternate plans for the site, including building a free-standing store. However, with interest from the Target Corporation, the team returned to the original plan for stacked anchor retailers on the northern portion of the site and a mixed-use development on the south end of Charlottetown Avenue.

Fighting the Good Fight
In 2004, Pappas Properties, Home Depot and Collett & Associates received a $17 million grant from the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County to construct the necessary parking spaces to support an urban re-development of the site. The city also provided the much-needed road and intersection improvements in the immediate area. In 2006 the old mall was razed and construction of the Home Depot Design Center, with Target on the second level and a 960-space parking deck, began. That same year, Pappas and Collett brought Colonial Properties into the development as a joint venture partner.

Admittedly, the three development teams did their share of head-butting. “Every decision made for the benefit of one use usually comes at the detriment of another use,” Collins said. “We gathered together all of our disciplines and took the attitude of fighting for what we believed was right to do with each discipline and then figured out the compromise position.”

Together they worked with Mecklenburg County Parks and Recreation and the greenway committee to ensure the mixed-use Metropolitan would be a good fit. “Countless meetings and discussions were held to ensure that Metropolitan would be a positive transition from the urban core to the existing neighborhoods,” Pappas said. Construction of the Metropolitan posed its own challenges. It was the first development in the Charlotte area to vertically stack two anchor tenants, Target and the Home Depot Design Center. Many discussions and meetings were necessary with the various code, planning and building standards representatives in order to move efficiently through the permitting and design process.

Many retailers chose to open in Metropolitan because of its urban, live-work-shop design. Both Target and The Home Depot also have locations within Metropolitan’s retail space.

Now the property features three distinct parts:

• The Metropolitan Plaza, a 10-story, Class A office tower that was 90 percent pre-leased and includes clients such as NewDominion Bank, Carolinas HealthCare System, Cherry Bekaert & Holland and AON Insurance.
• Two types of residences: 41 MetTerrace luxury condominiums, ranging in price from $350,000 to $1.5 million; and 60 flats and two-story lofts in the MetLoft Building, where units go for between $159,000 and $660,000.
• A wide range of retail, including Target, The Home Depot Design Center, Best Buy, Trader Joe’s, a spa and several restaurants.

Meeting the Needs of Today’s Workers
To be sure, “mixed-use” has been an industry buzzword for some time, and some industry watchers have speculated its popularity could wane. But in Charlotte, where mixed-use became a zoning option in 1992, the number of mixed-use proposals continues to rise steadily, according to a July report in The Charlotte Observer.

The skyrocketing cost of gasoline is a big factor; residents don’t want to drive all over the metropolitan area for the goods and services they need on a daily basis. Increasingly, they want these all-in-one developments to be set up outside of, but in close proximity to, Uptown Charlotte. The neighborhood has become the city’s cultural center and with that increased popularity has come more density and traffic. Firms whose employees want easy access to upscale amenities and to be able to walk to work — all within a stone’s throw of Uptown — found the perfect solution in Metropolitan.

“The Metropolitan’s location sets it apart, with immediate access to the central business district, Charlotte’s major interstate systems, executive neighborhoods and major retail offerings,” said Chris Jonas, Colonial Properties’ vice president of leasing for the Metropolitan’s Office Tower. “The cost to park Uptown is growing more costly and available spaces are becoming increasingly scarce. When you evaluate the price tag of off-site parking Uptown for an employee, you realistically have to include an additional $4 to $5 per square foot to your occupancy costs. That is eye-opening to an employer and an instant value to a client’s bottom line.”

The 155,000-square-foot office tower is the second that Colonial Properties has opened in the Southeast in the past year fully pre-leased, validating the company’s brand of the High Performance Workplace®, a new generation of ecologically sustainable, healthy workplaces designed to enhance workforce productivity by:

• siting near high-growth employment centers and college campuses, and adjacent to amenity-rich environments;
• building in a category 6 fiber-optic backbone to improve technology and efficiency;
• creating smart building systems that customize energy use to each room;
• more efficiently using office space, workstations and client areas;
• incorporating large “third-place” collaborative areas with tables, sofas, wireless, coffee and television; and
• offering Wi-Fi in lobbies, hallways and outside patios.

The Little Sugar Creek Greenway (background of photo) is a reclamation project that, once completed, will stretch a total of 15 miles from Uptown Charlotte to the South Carolina state line.

These aren’t just icing-on-the-cake amenities; they position a company for greater success. Consider the 2006 survey of 2,000 U.S. workers from Gensler, a leading international architecture and design firm, commissioned to learn how employees in corporate America see the connection between workplace design and work performance. Ninety-two percent believe that better workplace design can make a company more competitive. This has taken on even more importance in today’s working world as the large generation of Baby Boomers faces retirement and Millennials — those born between 1985 and 1999 — take over the workforce, bringing with them new values, needs and evolving ideas about their workplace. Another plus for the Metropolitan development is its close proximity to the Little Sugar Creek Greenway. The brainchild of Mecklenburg County Commissioner Tom Ray more than 30 years ago, the greenway is now on its way to becoming a 15-mile swath of paths, habitats and flowing water that stretches from Cordelia Park north of Uptown, through the Midtown Square area and to the South Carolina line.

Mecklenburg County has committed about $48 million in funds to complete the greenway, creating “a perpetual park,” Collins said. “That means the skylines our clients and residents are looking at will never be impeded, because no one will ever be able to build next to us.

With a greenway as its neighbor, a new kind of office tower, top-quality residences within reach of Uptown, and a development team that embraces the kind of “rigid flexibility” needed to make mixed-use work on an ongoing basis, the Metropolitan is poised to achieve landmark status in the city of Charlotte.