The Greensboro City Council unanimously approved the next stage of the Union Square redevelopment project at the Tuesday, April 6 meeting.

There was no discussion on the $51 million project in which Greensboro will invest $4 million.

The actual vote was to authorize the Greensboro Redevelopment Commission to sell the 2.5 acre site at the corner of South Elm Street and Gate City Boulevard to South Elm Development Group to contract with REA Ventures Group to build a mixed-use development on the site.

The approval of this sale was on the City Council agenda for the Feb. 16 meeting and was continued to the March 16 meeting.

At the March 16 meeting, Mayor Nancy Vaughan requested that the item be continued to the April 6 meeting so that the City Council could hold a work session on the proposed development.

That motion by Vaughan only passed by a 5-4 vote by the City Council.  City Councilmember Nancy Hoffmann said that she saw no reason to delay the development.

The work session on the redevelopment project was held on March 23 and it didn’t appear any additional information about the proposed development was presented.  The proposal is to build 250 apartments with 20 percent being affordable housing, 2,000 square feet of ground floor commercial space and a seven-level parking deck.

However, whatever questions Vaughan had about the development were apparently answered by the virtual presentation of the material that had been in the agenda packet for the March 16 meeting.

The mixed-use development is to be built on what is now the parking lot for the Union Square building.  The parking deck is to be built with the Union Square building to the north and apartments to the south and west.

It was revealed at the work session that construction on the site could not begin until the lease for a cell tower on the site expires in May 2022.  The developers said that their plan was to demolish the cell tower the day after lease expired and begin construction.

 

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