From Real Estate Bisnow – Charlotte

During ULI’s Spring Meeting next week in Charlotte, one of the featured tours and a location for various council meetings is the Metropolitan at Midtown. It isn’t quite built out yet, but it’s an outstanding example of public-private cooperation in the 2000s to reinvent part of an urban area. Cooper Carry CEO Kevin Cantley spoke to us about the development’s impact on Charlotte.

The property was the outgrowth of a very deliberate public-private planning process, Kevin tells us. It dates from the late ’90s as part of the City Center Vision Plan for 2010 and was built on the site of a failed mall and cinema (they had to be careful not to disturb the ghost of Auntie Anne), with the goals of encouraging urban density, walkability, and transforming Little Sugar Creek into a linear park system. The city laid the groundwork for a mixed-use development on the site—the public part of the partnership—by improving the surrounding infrastructure and creating the Little Sugar Creek greenway. “Few cities undertake such specific planning for their downtown core,” Kevin says. Then it was up to private enterprise to make it work as a development, with the city stipulation that it include some workforce housing. Both aesthetically and financially, the property has succeeded, he says.

Developer Pappas Properties hired Cooper Carry to realize the design. “We worked with Peter Pappas to create a streetscape— and an architecture to support that streetscape—that’s 21st century, which also has elements that create a human scale,” Kevin says. So there’s a lot of metalwork and projecting cornices that cast interesting shadows and the idea of texture and color isn’t ignored by the precast concrete used in the structures. The project’s retail components are part of a new urban model with a focus on convenience and efficiency, and the results are unusual: A Target sits over an a Home Depot, while a Marshalls is stacked over a Best Buy. These retail pairings are served by a single parking ramp each to make the area more compact and walkable. (So you can read the Kindle you get at Best Buy as you walk to your car.) Office space is integrated in the eight floors over the two levels of street retail.

Apartments are also part of the mix (some of which have fine views of downtown Charlotte, as seen here).There’s one more undeveloped site at the end of Metropolitan Avenue, the property’s main street, and Kevin says that an apartment tower will go there. “We’ve been talking to developers about the design of that tower,” he tells us. “That’s just getting started, but the city has the desire to have apartments built on that site, so it’s going to happen.” The Metropolitan at Midtown will not be the last of the firm’s projects in greater Charlotte, however: It has master plans under development for at least four tracts from 50 to 100 acres. They’re still in the entitlement phase, so no details are available yet.