It’s the start of a new year, which means that across the media spectrum, overworked editors – in search of content that can be produced while half their staff is on vacation – pull a familiar, well-used tool out of the chest: the List of Predictions for the New Year and Beyond.
No doubt, as a tuned-in 21st-century media consumer, you’ve already seen several of these lists, whether in print, over the air or online. Maybe you’ve got a pile sitting next to you right now, or a few browser tabs open with prognostications for 2015.
Now: Close those browser tabs and erase your history. Take all those papers and throw them away. You’re not going to be needing them – not now that you have our list.
[break]
According to our own panel of seers and prophets, here’s what’s in store for the Upstate next year:
– A convention center will be brought downtown off Academy Street, with a welcome center located in the front corner of the building.
– Office product will continue to grow off Falls Street between the Greenville News site redevelopment and the Elliott Davis building. The old post office behind the News building will be sold and a new condo development will be built in its place.
– Two new large office users will come to downtown Greenville. One will be in the redeveloped Greenville News site, and one in the current CertusBank space.
– Plans will emerge for the redevelopment of Greenville County Square.
– The Preserve at Verdae golf course will be revamped into a multi-use master-planned development.
– After the passage of the Stone Bill in 2014, South Carolina and the Upstate will see an influx of breweries.
– The cities of Easley and Pickens will move forward at a rapid pace to develop the next economic engine greenway: the Doodle Rail Trail. In 2015, multiple businesses will spring up along the trail and spur talks of connecting Easley and Greenville with another greenway allowing two-wheeled travel all the way from Pickens to the Village of West Greenville.
– Greenville Health System (GHS) will announce construction of a 12-story facility located on a 45-acre tract near I-185 and I-85 to house health- or biotech-centered startup companies.
– The former Windstream/Nuvox building at the corner of Main and Washington streets will be razed, and in its place will appear a new high-rise office building.
– The Village of West Greenville will see more development, especially along Pendleton Street.
– Nikki Haley actually will bring back jobs after her trip to India, and Tata Motors of Mumbai will announce in January that it plans to establish a manufacturing facility in the Upstate and employ 200 people.
– A tunnel linking Verdae to the Millennium Campus, with a park placed on top of it, will be announced – as will a monorail that will take riders from downtown Greenville to the Millennium Campus.
[break]
Some of these ideas you’ve heard before – there’s nothing new about talk of redevelopment of County Square; in fact, we talked about it in our list of predictions this time last year, along with the sale and redevelopment of the Greenville News site. We got that one mostly right: The site is under contract, but our prediction that it would become a new downtown convention center looks to have missed the mark.
We also predicted “roads will be big on the state and local levels,” which in retrospect was kind of a gimme. That will continue to be true in 2015 and every year until we manage to get our crumbling roads fixed.
Greenville’s North Main area also has yet to see the grocery store we promised in 2014 – “perhaps a Trader Joe’s or a Fresh Market,” we said last January – but new developments in the area are now officially underway as residents wait to see what’s coming.
And we also predicted further growth in Spartanburg and throughout the Upstate – as we get ready for the new year, we’re looking forward to bringing you more of those stories.
Some of the above predictions are grounded in reality and history; others may seem impossibly pie-in-the-sky. But here’s one thing I’ve learned in just over two years with UBJ: Never count out the improbable.
Thanks for a (sometimes literally) unbelievable 2014, and let’s keep the conversation going on upstatebusinessjournal.com in 2015.
