After years of roads and utilities, the County Square site just south of downtown Greenville has reached the part people can see. Greenville County says vertical construction is underway, and the first phase is 10 mixed-use buildings and three parking decks on about 40 acres along University Ridge and Church Street, built out over roughly the next three years. RocaPoint Partners, the Atlanta developer working with the county, is carrying a project of more than $1 billion.
The approved list reads like a small downtown. A seven-story apartment building with shops on the ground floor along University Ridge, the new street through the middle of the site. A six-story residential building with ground-floor retail across from the county administration building. A three-story and a two-story building for retail and offices. Two restaurant buildings, one of them built for entertainment. And a single-story Whole Foods, the anchor.
The tenant list is the part worth reading slowly. Williams Sonoma and Pottery Barn signed on in December 2023, when the site was still road and utility work. Nearly three years later they are still on it, next to Whole Foods. L.L. Bean has confirmed a store here too; The Post and Courier reported on September 30 that it is planned for spring 2028. The Upstate Business Journal puts the retail space leased so far at about 200,000 square feet.
National retailers do not pick a downtown corner on charm. They pick it on who lives within a short drive and what those households spend. Read together, this roster is a report on downtown Greenville written by companies with real money on the line, and the customer it describes furnishes a house, buys good gear for the mountains and shops for groceries on foot.
The pieces a buyer cares about most have not been named yet. RocaPoint has active letters of intent for a 155-room hotel, a condominium project and a build-to-suit office building, according to the Upstate Business Journal, with the users expected to be announced this fall if contracts are signed. The condominiums are the line to watch. Until that project is named and priced, nobody can honestly tell you what a home at County Square will cost. The first for-sale homes on the site are already spoken for: according to the city, 16 of the 21 townhomes in the first phase of Copper Builders' Solaire community had pre-sold by late August.
Two cautions keep this honest. Whole Foods is not first in line. County Administrator Joe Kernell told the Upstate Business Journal the grocer is waiting to start construction until some of the other buildings are underway. And three of the planned buildings will be redesigned for new tenants and design changes. RocaPoint is also building a four-story public garage of about 380 spaces on Howe Street for the city, due by May 2027. A phase that has started is not a phase that has opened, and three years is the county's own estimate.
For a buyer weighing downtown Greenville, the read matches what Bolden Street and the Falls Park district are already saying: the next decade of investment around Main Street is committed and specific. County Square will not tell you what a house on Augusta Road trades for. It tells you that the stores most interested in the household you are about to become have already signed the lease.
Rendering courtesy of RocaPoint Partners.
If downtown Greenville is on your list, the advisory conversation is complimentary, and we will bring the County Square condominium announcement to it when it lands.
All Field Notes