Buildings spring up in The Park: Huntersville mixed use center revived following recession

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HUNTERSVILLE – Rooftops+Recovery+Recent Hospital Expansion=Commercial Real Estate Revival.

That appears to be formula at work in The Park-Huntersville – and its joined-at-the hip spin-off, the Gilead Center – where seven new construction projects are underway or in the pipeline.

Of Rooftops there are plenty in Huntersville, the fastest-growing municipality in the state, where plenteous new home construction is a sign of a growing Recovery in the housing market.

The Recent Hospital Expansion came courtesy of Novant Health, which last fall finished a major expansion of the Huntersville Medical Center at Gilead Road and Interstate 77, adjacent to the northeast corner of The Park-Huntersville.

That’s where the Commercial Real Estate Revival is taking place: the 673-acre, Bank of America-owned mixed used center – the biggest of its kind in the six Mecklenburg County municipalities outside Charlotte – a kidney stone’s throw away from downtown Huntersville.

The proof of the formula lies in the projects. In The Park-Huntersville proper:

•  Construction is now underway on a 78,318-square-foot flex building called the Caldwell, on the park’s Herbert Wayne Court, where multinational conveyor belt and flooring manufacturer Forbo Siegling has pre-leased 58,670 square feet. Occupancy is expected by April.

• Workers are busy on 14 acres in the southeast corner of the park, near its Mount Holly-Huntersville Road entrance, constructing the Waterford, a $30 million, 226-unit apartment complex. It was approved by the town in 2008, delayed by the recession and revitalized by the boom in multifamily construction.

• And the Waterford’s developer, Silver Florida Properties of Boca Raton, Fla., on Monday got the go-ahead from the Huntersville Board of Commissioners to build another apartment complex, The Park-Huntersville, on another 14-acre tract in the northwest corner of the mixed-used center. This one will cost $40 million and have 335 units.

Four more projects are up-and-going or planned for the Gilead Center, a smaller-amenities complex in the northwest corner of the park that BofA broke off the The Park-Huntersville as a separate enterprise in the mid-2000s and still owns.

• Construction has begun on the Forrestal Academy, a $3.5 million, 13,314-square-foot day care facility at Boren Street and Kincey Avenue.

• Primrose School, an Atlanta-based preschool chain, has applied for a commercial site-plan review with the town of Huntersville to build another preschool facility nearby on 1.7 acres on Kincey. This one will be slightly smaller at 11,950 square feet and will have a build-out cost in the $2 million range.

• And on a 6.53-acre tract on the west side of Boren, just south of Kincey, work has begun on what will be a 75,000-square-foot, 120-inpatient skilled-nursing facility called Huntersville Health and Rehabilitation, owned by a company in Roanoke, Va. The first phase will be 58,000 square feet with 90 beds and a planned addition will house 30 more patients in 18,500 square feet.

• Finally, Truliant Federal Credit Union of Winston-Salem has submitted a site plan to the town planning department for a 3,875-square-foot branch on 1.15 acres at Gilead and Boren.

And Huntersville planning department staffer Brad Priest, who has helped shepherd many of those projects through the town of Huntersville planning process, says he expects to see “a lot more new construction proposals in the next year.”

The attraction for the town is obvious: The taxes generated by new residential development do not pay for the municipal infrastructure required, local politicians are often quoted as saying.

But concentrations of commercial development, especially those centered on business and light industrial uses, help make up for the residential loss, making them attractive to local government entities.

That’s why Tamara Lynch, vice president of sales and marketing for M/I Homes Charlotte – which is building in only one Huntersville subdivision, Bellington, after losing a rezoning battle for another – says she would “love to have another presence in Huntersville.”

But, she said, subdivisions requiring rezoning “will be few and far-between” because of political opposition, especially to the higher-density subdivisions now in demand.

Despite those fewer opportunities for new subdivisions, new houses are going up as fast as the builders can pop nail guns in existing and already approved residential developments.

“You can just drive around and see all single-family building,” said John Boylan, president of Charlotte-based Spectrum Properties, which manages The Park.

For developers and businesses, the attractions of The Park-Huntersville are just as obvious: Pre-entitled, developed pads and ready-to-develop land surrounded by a relatively well-do-do suburban population that is growing.

“It’s just a high-quality development, and our client is developing a high-end preschool,” said John Allen, vice president of Fort Mill-based Kuester Development, explaining why the The Park attracted the Primrose School, which is expected to open its doors in fall 2014.

“It has the right kind of restrictions, which drive good quality buildings in the development, all brick. Classy is the right word. It’s easy to get in and out of, with good access to transportation and amenities. But the biggest reason was probably the rooftops, the residential growth.”

Huntersville had a major business presence in northern Mecklenburg County long before its housing boom; the town is home to the 1779-1785-1805 Torrence House and Store, the oldest standing business building in the state.

A couple of centuries later, Bank of America, then called NCNB, anticipating the future Huntersville population explosion, started assembling land for what was to become The Park in the 1980s.

The 673 acres looks small next to University Research Park’s 3,200-acre campus, and it is even farther from being the massive Arrowood-Westinghouse industrial area, the county’s highest employment center outside uptown. But The Park is bigger in land area than some of the county’s other better-known office centers; Ballantyne Corporate Park, for instance, is 535 acres.

BofA spokesmen would not talk in detail about the park, and Boylan was tight-lipped. But with the help of a source long involved in the park and town of Huntersville and bank records, the developmental ups and downs of the park can be pieced together.

Once assembled, the land was zoned by the town as an office and light-industrial center called the Huntersville Business Park in 1991, the year NCNB became NationsBank. That was the decade that Huntersville celebrated its 700 percent population growth to 28,000 inhabitants as of the 2000 census.

The business park was an immediate hit and continued to grow as Huntersville’s population more than doubled to today’s 60,000-plus, a number expected to grow to 78,000 by the end of this decade and 100,000 by 2030, according to estimates by the Lake Norman Economic Development Commission.

The Park-Huntersville now has more than 900,000 square feet of leased area, and tenants and owners in the park include Joe Gibbs Racing, Daetwyler Clean Energy, Keller Technology global engineering and manufacturing services and Swiss-based Forbo Siegling.

But by the mid-2000s, the growth was not fast enough for what is now Bank of America and its subsidiary U.S. Trust, a wealth-management private bank that owns the business park.

In 2006, the business park diversified and changed its name and logos to the current ones, and the town agreed to let The Park add two apartment complexes. BofA spun off the Gilead Center, and installed infrastructure for smaller projects along busy Gilead Road.

“Which I read as, ‘They can’t sell what they have,’” Bruce Andersen, chairman of the Huntersville Planning Board told The Mecklenburg Times recently.

Boylan said it slightly differently: “The Gilead Center was positioned to do smaller things and is doing very well, providing needed amenities for Huntersville and that part of the county.”

But 2006 was the eve of real estate bust and the following financial crisis and recession, slowing the anticipated interest in the newly configured park.

The town approved the sketch plan for the Waterford apartment project in 2008, for instance, but the developer let the project lay fallow for nearly five years.

“Well, yeah, when the economy hit in the Charlotte region and Huntersville, things slowed down dramatically for everybody,” Boylan said.

All that began to change in 2012 with the completion of the Novant Huntersville Medical Center, known colloquially by its former name, Presbyterian Hospital Huntersville. Novant added two stories over its surgical center to create a new hospital tower with 13 medical-surgical beds and two intensive care beds, bringing the inpatient capacity to 75, and expanded its women’s support services.

Priest, the Huntersville planner, and Boylan said they believe the expansion was a catalyst for the flood of projects that have followed.

Boylan said he is bullish about the future of the remaining 250 developable acres in The Park.

“The Park has always been a great part of the Huntersville story,” Boylan said.

“The Park is now getting its fair share of the growth in that quadrant. There are a lot of amenities coming up in and around The Park; The Park is adapting to what the community wants, which is very good for The Park and its future.”