Demographics and booming center city create vibrant housing market
Architect David Furman develops center city condominiums and lives in one:
The Observer's Doug Smith wrote an informative piece Oct. 9 about happenings among the condo projects downtown without the ever-lurking negative spin ("Uptown towers: A question of timing"). Of course the editors led this business section story with a front-page headline, "Are city's high rise projects at risk?" -- adding to the negative housing hype that's sweeping the country.
I believe this local story is distorted into an illusion of overbuilding the market by the practice of totaling the numbers of units of any project that has been talked about, as if they are all available today. It's important to put these stories in the context of what's actually happening in our vibrant city. Here is a breakdown:
• Two condo towers are finished and fully sold out, 230 S. Tryon St. and Courtside. Two more, TradeMark and The Avenue, are finishing up. Of their total 588 units, about 60 are unsold; yes, some "flippers" will immediately put their units up for sale, adding to the inventory.
• Three more projects well underway to be complete in the next 12 months -- Garrison at Graham, The Park and The Tower. In these, approximately 80 units remain unsold.
Add it all up, and that means there are only about 140 new units (plus flippers) available for purchase over the next 2½ years.
• Four more projects have just broken ground -- The Vue, 210 Trade, Catalyst and 300 S. Tryon -- and will be delivered two to three years from now, totaling another 1,438 units.
About 500 units are already sold in the Vue and 210. The Catalyst and 300 S. Tryon are not offered for sale yet.
The Wachovia tower (Stonewall and Tryon) is building on top of a 10-story unbuilt underground garage and a new Mint Museum atop the garage. This building is five years from delivery.
Two other projects are in the marketplace with start dates directly related to absorption. All other projects at this time are hypothetical and therefore have no part in an over-built story.
So the question is: Are there 400 households per year that will want to be a part of our incredible downtown story enough to live there?
Consider these facts. The Charlotte metro population, now approximately 1.5 million, is growing by about 70,000 a year. (About 12,000 people now live downtown.) We only need about 1 percent of this growth to choose downtown to absorb everything that's real.
What are the prospects? Some 65,000 people work downtown every day. More than 4 million sq. ft. of new office is under construction in center city, responding to the country's tightest vacancy rates. Jobs, services and people are pouring into Charlotte to be a part of the ever-expanding center city, home to a NASCAR museum, the new arts and crafts museums, the new Ritz Carlton, the Epicenter entertainment complex, Bobcats Arena, Panthers football, on and on. Combine those attractions with the fact that 67 percent of U.S. households have no kids living at home, and you can see a booming population of potential urban dwellers.
Given this juxtaposition of societal shift and emerging uptown energy, can we attract several hundred people a year who are ready to make this trade: Watch the sunset over the distant mountain ridges from the seventh-floor terrace with a heated pool, instead of gazing at a backyard on some cul-de-sac, feeling guilty that they should be mowing it? Walk to Bobcats, Panthers or performing arts events, rather than sit in stalled freeway traffic? Decide which of dozens of restaurants or bars to stroll to from your front door, rather than jockey with other cars to the suburban shopping plaza?
We expect the growing number of urbanites in our community will continue to move downtown to fill these homes as they become available. We who are on the ground downtown see this story unfolding. We live in it and we love it.
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