1736 Magazine - Fall 2018

HITS & MISSES
Provincial parking attitudes: It’s not 1997 anymore. You
shouldn’t expect to find empty parking spaces on the street
directly in front of the downtown businesses you frequent,
nor is it reasonable to think you can let your vehicle occupy
the space all day long. The parking shortage needs to be
addressed head on.
Big name, big impact: If there’s a better use for the longidle
Golf & Gardens property than the $100 million Georgia
Cyber Center, we’re hard pressed to think of it. The stateof-the-art
facility will provide the launchpad for Augusta
University’s Riverfront Campus and establish the Garden City
as Georgia’s center for cyber education.
Augusta Cyberworks investment: It takes more than
good ideas and bold vision to revitalize the urban core
– it takes courage and capital. Cape Augusta LLC and IT
firm EDTS LLC have stepped up on both fronts to invest
into a 32,000-square-foot space at the fledgling Augusta
Cyberworks tech complex at Sibley and King mills.
The Depot project: It wasn’t an easy public-private
partnership to forge, but the deal between BLOC Global Group
and the city of Augusta to redevelop the long-vacant “depot”
property will yield dividends for decades. The $94 million
development - a mix of office, residential and retail - could
have just as easily failed had principals at BLOC Global not
perservered through a much-too-laborious city approval
process. Both sides of the table are to be commended for
seeing it through.
MCG Foundation gateway: The Medical College of Georgia
Foundation, now at a quarter-billion dollars and fully
realigned with Augusta University, has big plans to redevelop
its substantial real estate holdings at the corner of 15th
Street and the John C. Calhoun Expressway into a “gateway”
development for the medical district. In an urban core that
has been labeled a “food desert,” the foundation’s mixed-use
project - which could include a supermarket - may very well
be a rainmaker.
HITS & MISSES
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