Given the fact that this immediate area is surrounded primarily by college students, new retail spaces built here should only be micro retail. I’ve visited probably 10 colleges within my lifetime, and the schools with small retail spaces were almost always filled. The schools with large retail near dorms were almost always empty.
This is probably because business owners are worried that they won’t be able to appease enough people within this age group, with $30 dining options and $200 clothing, in order to pay their bills. Also, NC State has 4 cafeterias so that could be another issue.
I agree with them on this, but I also think that having thousands and thousands of potential customers in the immediate walk-shed. This is especially true for urban storefronts where parking is neither automatically presumed nor free.
A model
I’m very anxiously awaiting to see how this will actually turn out. The renders didn’t really give much aesthetic preview, so as of right now I’m just anticipating a giant ugly brick and beige wall. Hoping it turns out better than my extremely low expectations!
Yeah Student Housing construction timelines are super time sensitive for obvious reasons (student move-ins that can’t be adjusted, for those whom it’s not obvious). So we should see some aggressive completion activity on this one - exciting! Wish we had an actual render on the finished product available - there’s got to be one floating around, a colored final version is required by the municipality…
