Ryan Tinch, who is handling leasing for the 2001 Greenville development on the former Arcadia site, says his company, UCR, wants half the ground floor space of the "green" building to be retail. But he also acknowledges that won’t be easy to do.
"That’s in a perfect world," says Tinch, who was friendly and eager to talk about the project, which elicited quite a bit of discussion among Back Talk visitors last week. "But it will be challenging."
Still, he says, it’s worth the effort. "This is a fresh concept new to lower Greenville. That’s why we want retailer focused. We want to clean up the street and motivate cleaning up the street."
Specifics on UCR’s plans after the jump:
• The second floor of the two-story building will be office space.
• UCR wants to lease to national and local eco-friendly retailers like Birkenstock and Vitamin Cottage. As such, it’s cold calling on clients in Austin, Dallas Denver to find tenants. "We’re not looking for mainstream national retailers like the Gap," says Tinch, noting that UCR isn’t trying to duplicate the Mockingbird Station or West Village tenant mix.
• Rents around $35 a square foot. That compares to $17.50 for the one empty space in the Lakewood Shopping Center, and low 30s for the Pavilion on Lovers Lane, the two-story strip center next to Inwood Village.
• The proposal doesn’t require a zoning change, but it does have to be approved by the plan commission and the city council, says Tinch.
• Parking for the new building, he says, will come from a large parking lot next to the site, and directly across the street is a substantial surface lot. "The ownership owns a ton of immediate surrounding parking surface lots and the project is actually way over parked as per city code."
• Timetable: UCR expects council approval by late summer or early fall, with construction done by second quarter 2009.
