The handful of projects that it is hoped will soon transform downtown Spartanburg are relatively few in number, but the scale of their impact is something residents and local leaders are still trying to fathom.
For City Manager Chris Story, the act of tallying the projects and the investment they represent is a bit breathtaking: scarcely half a dozen projects totaling more than $700 million.
That’s “a sentence I don’t think I’d ever thought I’d say,” Story said. “It’s an incredible number to get your head around.”
One of the most striking things about that investment — aside from the dollar amount — is the incredibly compact area in which those projects are taking shape. Using Morgan Square as the center point, most of the projects are within about four blocks.
The latest and most ambitious project within that footprint is a mixed-use development centered on a 3,500-seat minor league baseball stadium. The plan is still in the early design stages but could represent an investment totaling about $425 million and include:
- 375 apartments
- 200,000 square feet of new office space
- A 150-room hotel
- 1,500 new parking spaces
The project will sprawl across 16 acres adjacent to the AC Hotel Spartanburg on West Main Street and within a block of a planned $150 million joint city and county administrative complex on property now occupied by the aging Spartanburg City Hall.
The new joint administration building will join several other capital projects funded by a penny sales tax approved by Spartanburg County voters in 2017 and set to expire in April of next year.
Besides the joint administration building, the penny projects include a new $120 million Spartanburg County courthouse and adjacent $12.6 million parking garage, a $13.1 million Spartanburg city police headquarters, and a nearly $6 million county emergency operations center.
Spartanburg County Administrator Cole Alverson said the county intentionally invested so much capital in downtown because it was good for the community as a whole. The investments also signaled to the private sector across the region that local leaders were putting significant skin in the game.
“Momentum begets momentum,” Alverson said.
Story said the combination of public and private investment downtown is not only about transforming the city’s appearance but creating opportunities for all city residents. He’s particularly focused on what the baseball project could mean for children growing up in some of the surrounding neighborhoods where endemic poverty persists.
“I hope kids who come to watch a baseball game lift their gazes to look at the surrounding offices and say, ‘I’m going to sit in that corner office some day,’” he said.
