news-record.com

GREENSBORO — The developers of a proposed shopping center at West Friendly Avenue and Hobbs Road met with News & Record reporters and editorial writers today. Here is some of what the developers said:

• The center will have four buildings that encompass about 53,000 square feet on 6.7 acres. The two buildings on the north side of the property will be leased to small shops. On the south side along Friendly Avenue, there will be a grocery store and a drugstore.

• A representative for Regency Centers, the project's developer, declined to name any possible tenants. Residents who have been briefed on the project have said that Trader Joe's and CVS are the stores that will anchor this project.

• The square footage of the four proposed buildings is less than that of the Harris Teeter at The Shops at Friendly Center. That grocery store occupies 73,000 square feet.

• The shopping center will have two entrances, from Friendly Avenue and from Hobbs Road.

• There will be no loading docks behind the buildings. Instead, the developer is proposing to put one between the grocery store and drugstore. A gate and fence will screen the loading areas from public view.

• The drugstore will have a drive-through lane on the front of the building.

• The project will create 135 construction jobs and 160 permanent full- and part-time jobs. It will add roughly $200,000 to the city's property-tax base.

• The project might go to the Greensboro Zoning Commission for consideration as soon as March. The developer has not submitted a final zoning plan.

• As part of the rezoning request, the developer will prohibit certain stores from leasing space there. These stores include bingo parlors, arcades, laundromats and convenience stores.

• Christopher Widmayer, vice president of investments for Regency Centers, said the proposed center is an example of infill development. The north side of Friendly Avenue between North Holden Road and West Wendover Avenue, he said, is either commercial (Friendly Center, Shops at Friendly), institutional (First Lutheran Church) or office space (intersection of Friendly and Holden and along Green Valley Road). The exception are the six houses up for sale between Hobbs and Holden roads.

"This is not creep. This is not crawl," Widmayer said of the proposed project. "This is infill of an area that's already commercial."

• The developer, Regency Centers, owns 367 shopping centers nationwide that encompass 49.8 million square feet. Forty-two of those centers are in North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia. The publicly traded company owns Cameron Village in Raleigh.

• Regency will most likely manage the project after it is built. The company typically does not sell the shopping centers it builds, Widmayer said.

• Widmayer said he expects to have tenants in nearly every space when the shopping center opens. Demand for high-end retail space is high, he said, and the area around Friendly Center is particularly attractive to retail businesses.

"We're comfortable with the leasability of the project," he said. "We're not in the business of building empty shopping centers."