The Gazette editor checked this week to see if Sam’s East in Bentonville, Arkansas, has purchased the 13 acres where it plans to build a large Sam’s Club discount store. No; Weingarten Investments still owns all 35.8 acres along a private road behind Red Robin, Texas Steakhouse, Chili’s and a small retail building, land that was once slated to become the Shoppes at Caveness shopping center.
Since 2004, when the shopping center was approved the site has been one of three large tracts where developers wanted to see shopping centers.
Realticorp of Charlotte owned the land – or planned to purchase it – in 2004, but in 2006 sold it to Weingarten Investments. The land – former pastures for the Caveness dairy farm – was cleared and bulldozed flat, but in the intervening years a healthy stand of pines has grown. Wake County lists the property as worth $9.4 million.
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The second approved shopping center that went belly-up before construction is Quail Crossing at the intersection of Jones Dairy Road and the Dr. Calvin Jones Highway (N.C. 98 bypass). It was approved in 2008 for five buildings and one outparcel on 13.34 acres; the anchor store was to have been a Bloom grocery store, Food Lion’s chain of high-end grocery stores that were already open in Virginia and other states.
Clearing, grading, infrastructure and a retaining wall along the Smith Creek Greenway were almost complete when, reportedly, the grading company went into bankruptcy. The real cause of the stoppage was at least in large part because the then-owner, JDH Capital of Charlotte was suing Food Lion and its owner, Delhaize America. Food Lion purchase the property in July 2012 for $1.7 million.
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The largest empty tract is the 60 acres which were to become the Wake Union Place shopping center where Wake Union Road meets Capital Boulevard. After an appeal to Wake Superior Court and substantial changes in the traffic plan, the Wake Forest Board of Commissioners approved the project in January of 2011.
By the middle of 2012, WRI-Wake Union Place (Weingarten Retail Investments) and Interface Properties, the two closely related companies which were to develop the shopping center, walked away from the project before purchasing any of the land except 2.82 acres next to the Sleep Inn on Wake Union Road that was and is owned by WRI.
Jim Adams and his development company, St. Ives 220 Commercial LLC, which had purchased the 30.5 acres and the buildings that had once housed the Parker-Hannifin factory (originally Schrader) for $2.9 million in 2006, was left without a buyer for that property and the two other adjacent parcels he owned which would have been the shopping center.
(The 30 acres had been owned since 1964 by the Industrial Development Commission made up of local men who bought an old farm and built the original factory building for Schrader to offset the economic dislocation caused by Wake Forest College’s move to Winston-Salem in 1956 and the persistent poverty around Wake Forest. The IDC received $2.2 million from the sale and, after expenses, donated $2.1 million to the town, now the Futures Fund, and dissolved itself.
(One consideration about the old factory site was and is the contamination by trichloroethylene, a known carcinogen, caused by dumping of the cleaning agent in the 1960s and 1970s. Before he purchased the land, Adams, Parker-Hannifin and the State of North Carolina were in negotiations about a brown-fields agreement. As a result, Parker-Hannifin posted an $11-million bond as assurance it will complete the cleanup, which could take 20 more years. The contamination had migrated toward the St. Ives subdivision, developed by Adams, to the north and two subdivisions to the west.)
Adams lost control of the shopping center property to his bank but did continue to market it for use as a shopping center; the approved plan still stands.
In mid-summer of 2012 a Miami, Florida, firm – RREF BB NC SICP LLC – purchased three parcels totaling 50.42 acres for perhaps $3.53 million; Wake County’s appraised value for the is at just under $8 million.
The Miami company reportedly plans to hold the land for up to five years or until there is a significant uptick in the economy. One of the casualties in the changes of ownership is the two acres Adams had set aside as the future home for the Wake Forest Fire Department’s Station #4, now slated to be built nearby on Jenkins Road.
All the buildings were decontaminated and razed except for two remaining walls of one.
