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byline: Mark D. Robertson

Roanoke developer pivots from office space to downtown park

Sometimes the best decision a builder can make is not to build.

That’s the conclusion Lucas Thornton, managing partner at Hist:Re Partners in Roanoke, recently reached, although his plans for an office building may happen in the future.

Thornton’s downtown mixed-use development, The Bower, was set to open by late June with 90 one- and two-bedroom apartments atop first-floor retail space at 17 Campbell Ave. SW, the site of the former Campbell Court bus terminal. But he’s put the second phase — an 82,600-square-foot office building on Salem Avenue Southwest — on hold. Instead, Thornton intends to construct a $500,000 park where the office building would have gone. It should be ready later this summer, he says.

“The reality is that COVID has cast a long shadow over the office market. Multitenant office buildings now are difficult” to market, Thornton says, but demand for residential and retail remains solid. About 30% of the apartments in his $25 million project are pre-leased. He also has retail tenants lined up for three out of four spaces, though Thornton says he’s not ready to make those plans public.

As in the rest of the state, the office space market in Roanoke remains uncertain. In its 2023 annual survey, Poe & Cronk Real Estate Group estimated downtown Roanoke’s office occupancy rate at 86%, down a couple points from 2022 and below an ideal rate of 90%.

Poe & Cronk President Matt Huff has seen Roanoke’s occupancy numbers as low as 80% and as high as 94%.

“I think [Thornton] looked at the economic landscape and correctly decided it’s probably not the time,” Huff says, but both are confident offices have a future.

“As corporate America sort of settles on its priorities,” Thornton says, “a site like ours we believe will be very attractive because more traditional formats and footprints might not work as well.”

Making room for The Bower required the demolition of the Campbell Court Transportation Center, which Valley Metro, the Roanoke Valley’s public transportation provider, had operated out of since 1987. Third Street Station, an open-air bus station, opened in June 2023 and serves as Valley Metro’s central transfer hub.

Thornton hopes The Bower’s park will give Roanokers and visitors another place to spend time. “I can imagine everything from an ice rink in the winter … to concerts in the summer.”  

A practical plan for U.S. 220

Picture an hourglass: Flip the timer over, and the sand at the top funnels through a small opening to pool in the wider receptacle at its bottom.

Now imagine if that hole in the middle were wider; sand would flow more freely.

That’s how business leaders in Martinsville see the U.S. Route 220 corridor between Roanoke and the North Carolina border. The wider the gap — the more capacity 220 has — the more commerce can flow to destinations north and south.

The Blue Ridge Innovation Corridor, a group consisting of business leaders from Southern Virginia and the Roanoke and New River valleys, wants to grow commerce in the region and, specifically, would like to see improvements made to about seven miles of U.S Route 220 between U.S. Route 58 in Henry County and the North Carolina line. 

Virginia lawmakers seem to be on board. In 2023, the General Assembly instructed the Virginia Department of Transportation to develop a plan to improve the section of road by relocating and regrading southbound lanes, designing safer intersections and extending turn lanes. Expected to be completed this fall, the study will cost about $200,000, money that will come from VDOT’s state planning and research fund, according to an agency spokesperson.

Del. Eric Phillips, R-Henry, and Jim Frith, chair and co-owner of Martinsville-based Frith Construction, both stress that the area has seen significant economic activity in recent years. This includes Poland-based glass fabricator Press Glass, which invested $155 million to expand at Henry County’s Commonwealth Crossing Industrial Park in 2023.

“When you make stuff, you’ve got to transport it,” Phillips says.

In 1991, members of Congress made plans to establish Interstate 73 as a high-priority corridor that would run from South Carolina to Michigan, but it wound up as a 93.5-mile route limited to North Carolina. Later plans explored extending I-73 to Interstate 81 in Roanoke, but those proposals “just died,” Frith says. “There was just no way it would ever be funded.”

In 2020, VDOT released a study looking at a possible bypass from U.S. Route 58 to the North Carolina line. Building a new interstate and that project would both require more funding than improving the existing corridor.

And proponents say an improved road is better than the status quo.

“We’re just happy that there’s some forward momentum beginning to happen,” Phillips says.

Associate Editor Beth JoJack contributed to this article.