GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) - Jamella Benson says she and her neighbors often see strangers with cameras and notebooks studying the houses on their street in the Judson community.
She says she knows what it means: Property values are rising in her community a mile and a half west of downtown Greenville, and rents like hers - less than $600 a month - are going to get harder to find.
“My husband came home one day and caught a lady taking pictures of the driveway,” Benson said. “I don’t know what that means, if they’re going to tear it up or put a new one down or what. But I know they’re not doing this for our benefit.”
Benson’s instincts about interest in her neighborhood are right. County records show investors buying up Judson homes, and a group of developers announced their purchase of the historic Judson Mill at the center of the community with plans to install 204 apartments there.
The mill’s developers stress they are not trying to displace anyone in the surrounding neighborhood. They point to plans to take down the mill site’s barbed-wire fence and to pay for a neighborhood cleanup. But their plans to install what they describe as affordable workforce housing for young professionals is part of a larger trend in the community that is already seeing rents creeping up to and beyond $1,000 a month
Leading the mill redevelopment is Chapel Hill, North Carolina, developer Ken Reiter, and joining him is Anthony Tiritilli, vice president of Chicago firm Three Corners Development.
The rents that Reiter and Tiritilli envision for apartments in the mill project, which local leaders fully endorse and have enabled, are double what Benson pays for her two-bedroom, one-bath house on Honour Street. The mill project’s leaders stress that their plan answer a critical need in the Greenville housing market by providing units that cost 50 percent less than those downtown.
“At the $1,000 to $1,500 range you get a great unit with tons of amenities and tons of parking,” Tiritilli said. “That’s really where the market at this location needs to be.”
The vast majority of units will be one- and two-bedroom, Tiritilli said, and while other mill rehabilitation projects around Greenville offer similar rents, Judson Mill is unique because of its sheer size and potential for mixed use. In addition to the apartments, another 600,000 square feet will be available for offices, light industrial, warehousing, retailers and restaurants.
Reiter and Tiritilli specialize in revitalization projects and old buildings, a niche in the development field that takes advantage of state and federal historic preservation credits to save structures from demolition. The two have been making weekly stays in Greenville for more than a year with an eye to rehabilitating Judson.
“Gentrification is not something we as developers can control,” Tiritilli said. “But if we can control 36 acres of land in the critical path of this gentrification, we ask ourselves, ’What can we do?’”
The Judson community, just off U.S. 123, is in the path of Greenville’s westward growth, and developers along with local leaders say the mill’s revitalization is perfect for a subset of the Greenville workforce that earns too little to rent an apartment downtown but too much to qualify for government assistance for housing.
“What’s often missing in the marketplace is that middle area for police officers, nurses, teachers who want to live close to work but can’t afford it,” Reiter said during a recent tour of the mill. “They get priced out.”
A county-approved incentive package for the Judson Mill project references the need for “workforce housing.” Tiritilli said HUD also calls this segment “attainable housing.”
“It’s a group that’s almost forgotten,” he said.
Deborah McKetty, president of CommunityWorks, said she has been impressed with the Judson Mill development team because they seemed genuinely concerned with and talk about avoiding gentrification in the area.
“We’d like to see them build houses for real people,” McKetty said. “That was part of the appeal of this project - that workforce housing group.”
Judson Mill, at 701 Easley Bridge Road, stands at the northern entrance of the 1,100-home Judson community. The 36.2-acre mill property includes an 850,000-square-foot building, a retention pond and room for hundreds of parking spaces.
Reiter and Tiritilli said they want to start the first phase of the mill’s redevelopment by the middle of 2018: converting about a quarter of the building into 204 apartments. The date of construction, Reiter said, hangs on when federal Housing and Urban Development financing gets finalized.
Reiter purchased the property through his new corporation, Judson Mill Ventures, from Milliken and Co. The $6 million deal came two and a half years after the Spartanburg-based textile giant shut the mill down and the put the site up for sale.
The mill employed between 100 and 200 people when it finally closed in early 2015. The apartments, offices, light industrial space, shops and restaurants planned for the campus will bring it roaring back to life, Tiritilli said.
The development, according to a site-cleanup application that Reiter filed with the state Department of Health and Environmental Control, could also add $75 million to the local tax base and provide 100 jobs.
“There will be 2,000 people a day on that site,” Tiritilli said.
Judson is among this former textile town’s more affordable communities, both for homeowners and renters. Most of the one- and two-bedroom houses rent for less than $1,000 a month.
But that is changing.
CommunityWorks’ McKetty said the lack of middle-income, workforce housing is already pushing young lower-middle-income professionals into low-rent areas such as Judson, which is driving up rates with or without the help of the mill’s redevelopment.
“They are going into these neighborhoods and buying these two-bedroom bungalows and fixing them up,” McKetty said.
Benson said investment buyers are also up-fitting 70- and 80-year-old mill houses all over the neighborhood and raising rents.
A 2011 county plan for Judson found about half the homes there were owner occupied, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 survey of the community reported that more than half were built before 1960. A 2015 Census report listed unemployment in the community at about 10.7 percent and median household income at $18,333.
Benson, who works full-time at the MM liquor store on Easley Bridge Road, said her landlord has hinted he will sell her house. She is looking for another place to live, but the closest area in her price range is in Piedmont, 10 miles south in Anderson County.
“It’s stressful,” said Benson, whose job is walking distance from her Judson home.
Fellow Judson resident Nicole Watkins said she is excited at the prospect of the mill developers bringing in new retail, possibly a pharmacy or a grocery store.
“That would be awesome,” said Watkins, who works at the MM food mart.
“I guess that’ll be good for the neighborhood,” said one of the food mart’s customers, Alex Brown. “But if the rents are going to be $900, you need to raise the minimum wage.”
Watkins said she pays about $600 a month but her neighbor pays $800.
“The main problem is they’re raising the prices of houses,” Watkins said.
In answer to the fears of Benson and others who feel pushed out, McKetty said she hopes to pull together a team from organizations like Habitat for Humanity, Homes for Hope and the Greenville County Redevelopment Authority to help them stay put.
But a look at rising property values in the area show how hard that will be.
A nearly 100-year-old home at 229 Goodrich St. in Judson is on the market now for $67,900, according to Zillow.com. The house, whose first recorded owner dates back to 1924, sold four years ago for $28,000.
Meanwhile, several out-of-state investors have snapped up rental properties there.
Mill House One LLC, which has a Chandler, Arizona, address, bought four homes in Judson in September 2016 for a total of $30,000. Those homes, since fixed up, are now listed in county property records with a combined fair market value of more than $160,000.
Carol and Ronald Davis, whose listed address is a home on a golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida, bought six houses in Judson between June 2008 and February 2009. Most of the homes have a county-assessment value now that is about twice what they paid.
Attempts to reach the investors were unsuccessful.
Stephanie Knobel, director of the Judson YMCA, said she spotted profanity spray-painted weeks ago in front of a home across from the mill’s Second Avenue entrance. She called the real estate agent listed on a sign in front of the house to try to get the words - displayed in full view of the children she serves at the Y - removed.
“I leave messages, and I don’t hear back,” Knobel said.
Property management companies handle many of the homes for out-of-state owners, Knobel said, and getting answers when problems arise has been a habitual problem for residents.
“They’ve been made to feel they have no stake,” she said.
Some of the property owners in Judson seem eager for the project to break ground.
Melvin Allen operates an upholstery business across Easley Bridge Road from the old mill. He paid off his 100-year-old building, a former pharmacy, a few years ago.
“I can’t imagine anything better,” Allen said. “Somebody might offer me something for the place. I just love it.”
Tina Sitton, who owns a home on E Street, said bullets pierced the walls of her home three years ago.
“I’ve never been afraid here until that night,” Sitton said. “I look forward to the upgrades. I just hope it’s an affordable upgrade. Will my taxes go up?”
Kyle Willis, the son in Willis and Son Heating and Air on Easley Bridge Road, agreed with his father, Jerry, that apartments and offices across the street would only help.
“Downtown is not doing nothing but getting closer to us,” Kyle Willis said.
This is part of an ongoing series about the Upstate’s rapid growth and the challenges and benefits it brings. Greenville, frequently named one of the best places to live in the country, is the fourth-fastest growing city in the country and that growth is fueling rapid change throughout the Upstate. Our coverage looks at how those changes affect your life, livelihood and quality of living in the metropolitan area that is anchored by Greenville.
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