The town that time remembered

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FORT MILL, S.C. – Don’t forget the homemade peach ice cream from Springs Farm PeachStand.

When James Martin, vice president of Crescent Communities’ residential group, gets to going on about why the long-dormant town of Fort Mill is in the middle of a post-recession boom – and specifically about why his company’s Springfield subdivision has helped lead that boom – homemade peach ice cream has a place on the list.

“You did yourself a disservice if you drove past and didn’t go in,” Martin said. “It’s phenomenal.”

The PeachStand, a Fort Mill institution on a prominent Springfield Parkway corner, is an icon, a constant in the fast-changing northern tier of York County
– and an actual selling-point for Springfield. The 618-lot subdivision wraps around the farmer’s market, and a well-worn path installed by the developer runs from the subdivision’s amenities center to the market.

And the PeachStand is also a metaphor for why and how Fort Mill, a homespun village on the verge that is a little over a mile from the N.C. state line, is becoming what town planning director Joe Cronin only half-jokingly called “ground zero for Charlotte development.”

For one thing, the stand’s name links it to the powerful and prominent Springs-Close family, which owns thousands of acres in the Fort Mill area.

That’s Springs as in the Springs Industries textile giant that essentially built Fort Mill. As in the Clear Springs Development Co., which has left and continues to leave its name on projects throughout the area. And as in Leroy Springs & Co., a recreational and educational nonprofit that operates the Ann Springs Close Greenway, 2,100 acres that serves as Fort Mill’s Central Park and draws more visitors annually than Charlotte’s Mint Museum or McDowell Nature Preserve.

For another thing, the PeachStand is emblematic of that small-town feel that has been preserved in Fort Mill.

Unlike the high-growth unincorporated areas of northeastern York County and Lancaster County’s Indian Land just to the east, Fort Mill has a real, and active, little downtown of upscale shops in renovated buildings that creates a sense of place.

And it has a local government responsive to the needs of its residents instead of leaving everything up to a county government based miles away.

The town of Fort Mill is part of an area that is called Fort Mill township, in the corner of York County north and east of the Catawba River, and split in half by I-77.

The unincorporated, northernmost area of the township, which is a geographical designation but not a political one, is no stranger to growth, pre- and post-recession.

Home to around 50,000 people – as well as Carowinds amusement park and corporate offices for Continental Tire, Domtar, Muzak Holdings, Springs Industries, URS Corp.’s Nuclear Center and, most recently, Shutterfly – northeastern York County has long been where south Charlotte has pushed further south.

But as post-recession development has pushed just a little bit further south, it has now hit the town itself, bringing what Fort Mill-based developer Faison Kuester calls “a renaissance.”

“We’ve been a very sleepy town for years and years,” said Kuester, CEO of the Kuester Cos.

“We just woke up.”

A town on a roll

Figures from the U.S. Census Bureau and those kept by Cronin – a self-described “numbers nerd” – back up Kuester’s assertion.

Fort Mill was the third fastest-growing municipality in S.C. between the 2010 Census and the bureau’s 2013 estimate, swelling by 27 percent to nearly 14,000.

Cronin says his “very conservative” forecast for future growth – which takes into account seven active, six approved and three pending residential projects, but doesn’t factor in any future ones that could be announced – puts the town at more than 28,350 by 2030, “or, more likely, five years earlier,” depending on the economy. That population growth will likely continue boosting the town’s median household income, which at nearly $70,000 annually is about $25,000 higher than the state median.

After bottoming out at 39 in 2009, residential building permits issued for projects in the town were back up to pre-bust levels last year, according to records. In 2013, the town recorded 255 residential permits, compared with 269 as the bubble swelled in 2007.

“But you have to remember that 76 of those 269 back in ’07 were for town houses; last year they were all single-family detached,” Cronin said.

At $420,000 last year, the average value of those permits has surpassed pre-recessionary levels, which were in the $300,000s. Six months into 2014, “95 percent of those (houses) are sold and on the tax rolls,” Cronin said.

With the exception of Springfield, which accounted for up to half of all Fort Mill building permits in the years immediately after the bust, construction and development all but ceased in the existing subdivisions.

The Estates of Massey became the town’s “first super-subdivision” when it was approved for 923 lots in 2005, Cronin said. It stalled after only about 50 homes had been built.

“Not only did the developer go under and the property was foreclosed on, but the bank that financed it went under, too,” Cronin said. “Everything went into receivership, and Massey was a mess for a couple of years.”

“The town went out and put up gates; people were going out there and dumping stuff, doing stuff they weren’t supposed to be doing. An LLC formed by Gibraltar Capital (& Asset Management) out of Philly bought it, and 120 to 130 homes have been built out there in the past couple of years.”

The approved and pending projects include two contiguous ones – Sutton Road and Kanawha – with a total of 1,365 residential lots that will be developed by Crescent, which wants to expand its footprint in Fort Mill.

In addition to the approved projects and those now in the town’s approval process, Cronin said he expects more to be on the way, particularly along the Fort Mill Southern Bypass that is nearly halfway complete.

“I can go out there and look at almost every piece of land and tell you which have (recently) sold and which are under contract,” Cronin said. “If they haven’t been snatched up, they’re going to be snatched up. The bypass will open up the whole southeastern part of town.”

Finding a balance

All that is pretty impressive, said Mark Farris, economic services director of York County.

But in the next breath, he cautioned that residential development alone is not such a good thing, especially considering that South Carolina has the lowest residential property taxes in the country, according to the Cambridge, Mass.-based Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

“You have to have (commercial development) or you become that dreaded bedroom community,” Farris said. “Under the state’s illogical property tax restrictions, you end up literally subsidizing residential development.”

Farris said that under S.C. law – which restricts when, how, and by how much property tax rates can be raised on owner-occupied homes – local governments wind up spending $1.70 for every $1 raised by the construction of new houses.

“Conversely, for office, for every $1 you get in taxes, you spend only 37 cents. You have to have the right balance.”

Most of the recently publicized big commercial development projects going up in the Fort Mill area are outside the town limits, in the township.

Those projects include Clear Springs Development’s newly announced 650-home development that will have 300,000 square feet of commercial space, and that has been dubbed the “the next Baxter Village,” the massive and recently built-out mixed-use development that is also outside the town.

Other projects outside the town include Kingsley, where the mix will be more heavily commercial – 1.5 million square feet with 1,000 housing units.

Meanwhile, the Cato Corp, the Charlotte-based fashion retailer, has bought about 300 acres under and around the former Knights Stadium for a distribution center that Farris said could generate $400 million in investments in a wide array of commercial real estate.

“That’s going to be class-A,” Farris said. “They’ve been bombarded with calls. Everybody wants a piece of that. There is so much opportunity – hotel, commercial, retail and office.”

Kuester acknowledges that the unincorporated areas closer to Charlotte have a commercial advantage on the town.

But he and Cronin also pointed to several projects indicating that Fort Mill is starting to see something other than houses.

They include two of Kuester’s projects: a four-story, boutique multifamily project called the Greens at Fort Mill that will bring 64 apartment units to the historic downtown; and a 13,000-square-foot office building to match an existing Kuester building near downtown.

“When we got the rezoning for the Greens, there was exactly one apartment downtown and one (single-family) residence off Main Street,” Kuester said. “We’ve got 25 units pre-leased, which is very good.”

Other commercial projects in town include the long-delayed, 290,000-square-foot Springfield Town Center that will be anchored by a Harris Teeter; a Hampton Inn and Suites near S.C. 160 and I-77 that will become the town’s first hotel; and a Walmart Neighborhood Market on the site of a Food Lion.

“That’s basically taking an old eyesore-type building for 15 years and demolishing it for something new,” Cronin said.

Staying ahead of growth

All this growth, commercial and residential, is putting pressure on the infrastructure that helps make it so attractive, but both Kuester and Crescent’s Martin praised the town and the township-wide Fort Mill School District for “being proactive instead of reactive,” Martin said.

Although Interstate 77’s eight lanes all the way from the state line to Fort Mill’s front door made a recent rush-hour trip from Uptown an easy 15-minute drive, the town’s primary surface arteries are another story, as Martin and Cronin acknowledged.

“It’s not all Fort Mill” drivers, Cronin said. “A lot of people hoping to avoid (Interstate 485) cut through Fort Mill from Waxhaw and Lancaster County to get to I-77.”

But York County’s 1-cent “Pennies for Progress” sales tax, which has raised more than a half billion dollars for new roads and road improvements since its inception in 1997, gives the town a better chance at mitigating traffic with projects like the Southern Bypass, Martin and Cronin said.

The tax has a track record for success, Farris said. Those pennies helped pay for those eight lanes of interstate.

The Fort Mill School District, which the S.C. Department of Education says has the highest average SAT score in the state, stays ahead of the curve.

That’s partly because it is one of the few districts in the state to impose impact fees on residential development, and because officials often work out deals with landowners and developers for acreage on which to build new schools before they’re actually needed.

“The school district owns land for a third high school, three elementary schools and a new middle school, and they’re expanding the two existing high schools,” Cronin said. “You don’t see (temporary classroom) trailers; you don’t see overcrowding.

“The school under construction at Massey and the one planned at Kanawha are both on land donated” by or bought at discounts from property owners.

The impact fees, which were extremely unpopular among real estate professionals when they were first proposed, have served to preserve something that real estate professionals like to tout about a community to potential buyers: school quality.

“A lot of residential Realtors said it would kill residential development, that no one would want to buy here,” Farris said. “You gotta give credit to people 20 to 25 years ago. The trick is to stay ahead of the pressures.”

For Kuester, it all comes down to the preservation of Fort Mill’s historic character – which he largely attributes to the land stewardship of the Springs-Close family – and at the same the town’s anticipation that the spread of development from Charlotte would inevitably come.

For Martin, it’s also about fresh produce.

“I’m not kidding,” Martin said. “We’re at the tail end of the strawberry season. But the peach season is coming.”