Publix will come to town

It really is official. Columbia Properties Inc. will build The Shoppes at Heritage Village which will include a Publix. Wouldn’t you want to place a well-loved, highly rated grocery store in a town growing every day, now 37,000-plus and estimated to hit 48,000 in ten years? Wouldn’t you want to build a Publix in an upscale planned subdivision with 19,607 people (6,975 homes) within a two-mile radius and 1,680 homes planned in three subdivisions in that two miles.

Then there is what Columbia Properties’ marketing brochure calls “the going home” corner, the corner where Rogers Road intersects with Forestvillle Road to the east and Heritage Lake Road to the west, one of the busiest in town aside from the Capital Boulevard intersections. As the brochure said, now that Heritage Wake Forest is nearly built out, “national builders are racing to acquire the last couple of surrounding parcels.

All that and more is why Columbia Properties purchased the 19 acres on “the going home corner” from Franklin Village LLC in late March for $3.5 million and plans a shopping center with a 49,000-square-foot Publix plus 22,500 in two flex buildings and three outparcels which are available.

Dan O’Neill, a managing partner in Columbia Properties, said the Wake Forest Publix will have “the identical floor plan of the Cary store as well as most of the other locations Publix is doing in North Carolina.” Publix currently has eight stores in the state; the rest are in and around Charlotte.

When the rezoning to conditional neighborhood business and the master plan were approved in November, the plan called for 40,200 square feet of retail space in four buildings in addition to Publix, but the plan that Columbia Properties is now building has cut that to 22,500. The town does have a cap of 50,000 square feet of retail space in a project, although the town can grant exemptions.

O’Neill said they had “maxed out the plan for zoning purposes. It’s easier to remove square footage than add square footage to a plan after it’s been approved by council. 22,500 is the square footage of shop space that we felt the market could bear.”

When asked if the planned reconstruction of the Smith Creek bridge on Rogers Road and the widening of Rogers at the same time right next to the shopping center site would complicate the plans to complete the shopping center next spring, O’Neill wrote in an email, “Unfortunately if we planned all of our projects around the planned schedule of the government and all of their last-minute delays we would never get anything done, so we just have to hope it doesn’t affect us too badly.” The brochure says completion is planned in the first quarter of 2016.

There will be two full access driveways into the center, one each on Rogers Road and Forestville Road with one right-in, right-out on Forestville. In addition, there can be a full access driveway from Foundation Drive, the entrance to Heritage High School.  There will be pylon signs for the shopping center and Publix at the full access driveways.