By Dennis Quick

– Delightful designs. For about a decade, James Island’s Cross Creek Square shopping plaza on Folly Road has been largely deserted. A huge, empty space still remains where the Harris Teeter supermarket used to be. When Athens restaurant, the plaza’s premiere tenant, moves to its new Maybank Highway location, Cross Creek Square will be just a couple of tenants away from becoming a ghost plaza.

Few things are more aesthetically or economically depressing than a great big slab of concrete- and asphalt-covered real estate just sitting there doing nothing.

That’s why I have high hopes for the city of Charleston’s proposed makeover of Cross Creek Square and the nearby intersection of Folly Road and Maybank Highway.

McLeod Village, as the project is called, has been on the city’s drawing board for a couple of years. It would transform the near-dead plaza into a lively enclave of retail shops, offices and housing, including townhouses, condominiums, apartments and single-family homes. The neighboring James Island Shopping Center, thriving at the Folly Road-Maybank Highway intersection, would be incorporated into the overall scheme and probably would thrive even more in this new community.

To make it easy to access McLeod Village, the Folly Road-Maybank Highway intersection would have to be revamped by installing a roundabout. As it stands, you can’t make a left turn from Folly Road onto Maybank or a right turn from Maybank onto Folly. You have to use a two-lane, traffic-crossing, lane-merging, often nerve-wracking offshoot connecting the two thoroughfares. (Judging from the road systems I’ve driven on here and elsewhere, I sometimes think civil engineers truly dislike us.) The roundabout will make that intersection safer and more convenient.

This means an area that happens to be a primary entrance to James Island will get an aesthetic upgrade. More important, small businesses will have a place in which to set up shop and knowledge-based companies a place to locate their offices. Charleston-area residents and new arrivals will have additional housing options.

What’s needed to turn McLeod Village from a dream to reality is funding, which is something the half-cent sales tax would provide. Had the state Supreme Court not overturned Charleston County voters’ 2002 approval of the sales tax proposal, chances are the project would be underway already.

Incredibly, the half-cent sales tax proposal is again being challenged, even though voters approved it overwhelmingly this past November. I won’t go into the madness of this effort (I addressed it in my Nov. 29 column, “Courts should let half-cent sales tax stand.”) I’ll only repeat that we need the half-cent sales tax to support our region’s growth.

And make no mistake: Our region is growing like gangbusters. Just about everybody is fleeing states like Ohio, Illinois and New York and coming here for our sunshine, scenery and kinder, gentler winters.

That’s why we need makeover projects like McLeod Village. These projects offer people places to live, work, play and shop within one self-contained geographic area. It’s a good way to reduce automobile traffic along our main roads and, because such developments tend to be designed with pedestrians and bicycle riders in mind, a healthful environment results. And because no new territory is being conquered for development, anti-sprawl folks needn’t holler about these projects. Finally, those who want to maintain the region’s beauty by transforming eyesores into attractive sights ought to support McLeod Village and other such efforts.

– Building buy. Last month a Florida developer purchased 200 Meeting St., the building housing Bank of America, for $43 million. Supposedly that’s one of the largest building sales in Charleston’s history. Local commercial real estate firm Batten & Moore inked the deal. Yes, we have a lot of what developers in other states want.

SUBSCRIBE | REPRINTS | CONTACT US

Phone: 843-849-3100    Fax: 843-849-3122