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Feature Article, October 2005
Grand Project For The Grand Strand
McCaffery Interests plans to develop lifestyle and residential project for one of the nation's fastest growing areas.
Randall Shearin
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McCaffery Interests' The Market Common, Myrtle Beach, is creating a lifestyle and residential project for Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.
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On the heels of its successful The Market Common, Clarendon in Arlington, Virginia, Chicago-based McCaffery Interests is developing a new project that will raise the bar for retail in South Carolina. McCaffery plans to develop The Market Common, Myrtle Beach over the next 18 months. Located adjacent to the Myrtle Beach Airport on a former Air Force base, The Market Common, Myrtle Beach will be a true mixed-use project, creating a new offering for the greater Myrtle Beach market.
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The retail component of The Market Common, Myrtle Beach will have a theater and a grocery store as anchors, as well as several national and local white tablecloth restaurants.
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Tourism is a huge economic force in the Myrtle Beach area. The area receives more than 14.5 million visitors annually and that number is expected to grow to 20 million annually by 2008. Visitors stay in the Myrtle Beach area an average of 5 days and 84 percent of them shop during their visit while 70 percent dine at restaurants. Rather than create a project strictly oriented towards tourists, though, McCaffery Interests plans to develop a project slanted for the local market that tourists can also take advantage of. As the number of second homes and timeshares grow in the area, the full-time and part-time residents of Myrtle Beach are seeking some central sense of place. Complete with restaurants, rental apartments and plenty of retail, The Market Common, Myrtle Beach will create a town center for the area.
“One of the problems Myrtle Beach has is that you really don't know when you've gotten there, and you really don't know when you left,” says Dan McCaffery, president of Chicago-based McCaffery Interests. “The lay of the land there is such that all the municipalities blend into each other and create the ‘Grand Strand.' There is just a continuous strip of projects and golf courses for 60 miles.”
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A rendering of The Market Common, Myrtle Beach.
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Myrtle Beach is one of the fastest growing areas of the Southeast. The population boom there has spawned one of the newest regional malls in the country, and the redevelopment of the area's other regional mall in recent years. The Market Common, Myrtle Beach doesn't plan to compete with the regional centers, rather complement what they already offer the market. McCaffery has mandated that 25 percent of the retailers and restaurants will be regional or local. Restaurants and a sense of place are at the top of mind for McCaffery in creating The Market Common. “We're getting a huge demand for public amenities at the project,” says McCaffery. “One of those demands is that Myrtle Beach is crying out for a pedestrian community. To create such a community, we have to have apartments, a hotel and retail. We want this to be a village, not a place where people drive but rather, walk.”
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The Market Common, Myrtle Beach is being developed on the site of a former Air Force base.
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Developed on 114 acres, there will be plenty of room for walking. McCaffery is planning a lot of pedestrian areas, and a lot of easy access to and within the project. While The Market Common, Myrtle Beach will be developed on 120 acres, the former Air Force Base site is 3,790 acres, ensuring that future development is on the way. The city has invested $30 million in the site to put in place the entire infrastructure for the project, now it is anxious to have the project in place. Other amenities at the project include playgrounds so that children have a place to spend time and bicycle racks, so that those venturing to the project on two wheels have somewhere to park. While it will draw heavily on the local market, The Market Common, Myrtle Beach is creating its own immediate market — McCaffery Interests is planning 1,600 new townhomes, condominiums, timeshares and apartments as part of the project. The retail component of The Market Common, Myrtle Beach will have a theater and a grocery store as anchors, as well as several national and local white tablecloth restaurants. So far, anchors at the project are Piggly Wiggly Carolina Corp., who is expected to open its high-end Newton Farms concept grocery store at the center and Consolidated Theatres, who will open a 16-screen cinema at the project. Orvis is opening a 12,500-square-foot location at The Market Common, and P.F. Chang's and Claddagh Irish Pub will anchor the project's restaurant component. Other retailers are anticipated to be fashion/apparel tenants, soft goods, specialty lifestyle retailers, a bookstore and quick-service restaurants.
“We are not building a shopping center that looks like a town,” says McCaffery. “We are building a town that has a shopping center.”
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Dan McCaffery, president of Chicago-based McCaffery Interests.
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McCaffery is not looking to build just another lifestyle center for Myrtle Beach. With the success of the company's The Market Common, Clarendon — which has won prestigious awards from the Urban Land Institute and the International Council of Shopping Centers, among others — McCaffery is looking to develop a center that raises the bar for mixed-use development.
While McCaffery is busy with its project in Myrtle Beach, the company also has a new mixed-use development planned along the river in downtown Miami. The company also has a large site in South Chicago — the former U.S. Steel site — where it plans to develop parks, a marina, a shopping center and 5,000 homes. The company is also developing The Cork Factory, a former Armstrong flooring factory, into housing and retail in an urban area of Pittsburgh. The company has also recently opened The Bernardin, an Italian-inspired high-rise condominium building in Chicago that has had rave reviews and high demand from the market place.
©2005 France Publications, Inc. Duplication or reproduction of this article not permitted without authorization from France Publications, Inc. For information on reprints of this article contact Barbara Sherer at (630) 554-6054.
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