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Harbor Heights will bring downtown Norfolk its first urban grocery store
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by Rob Walker
for Virginia Business
March 2007
THE DEAL: A $33 million mixed-used project that will bring the first urban grocery store to downtown Norfolk’s growing residential community. Harbor Heights will combine residential, office, retail and parking in a 15-story, 450,000-square-foot tower offering views of the Elizabeth River. The project — about 50 percent complete — will occupy half a city block. The 40,000-square-foot market and café will be located on the street level, below 100 condominiums and lofts and 72,000 square feet of office space for the administrative offices of Tidewater Community College.
Catering to the lifestyle of city dwellers, the Farm Fresh-operated market plans an on-site chef, wine steward, coffee shop, bakery, florist and butcher. “The city wanted something grand for this site, and we gave it to them,” says Chris Sanders, vice president of Robinson Development Group in Norfolk.
KEY PLAYERS: Robinson Development Group Inc., owner and developer; CMSS Architects PC in Virginia Beach; SB Ballard, construction, Virginia Beach; Pace Collaborative PC, mechanical, electrical and plumbing engineers, Virginia Beach; Stroud, Pence and Associates Ltd., structural engineers, Virginia Beach; WPL, civil engineers, Virginia Beach; Norfolk Office of Development; and Farm Fresh Supermarkets, Virginia Beach.
HOW THE DEAL UNFOLDED: In 2004, Robinson Development’s longtime client Farm Fresh approached Robinson with an idea for a downtown market, recalls Burrell Saunders, CEO and founder of CMSS. “They saw all this development and realized there was a need for a specialty market for the businesspeople who wanted catering and a place to stop on the way home as well as for all the people living there.” About the same time, the city sent out a request for proposals for the development of a parcel it owned near the business district, MacArthur Center and a growing residential area. “The city took several proposals and chose ours,” says Saunders. Construction on Harbor Heights began in 2005. Tidewater Community College came looking for space to consolidate administrative offices and the initial plan was expanded to make room for them. Many of the condos — ranging in price from $300,000 on up — have been presold. When the project opens this summer, TCC will occupy most of the office space.
MAJOR HURDLES: Finding a way to combine four uses into one tower so they don’t interfere with one another was a challenge, says John Bernard, CMSS’ lead architect on the project. “The residents need to be able to come and go without getting caught in the grocery crowd. The parking needs to be accessible to different users. The market needed to be a large, open floor.”
Also, as different parties such as TCC opted in after the project was under way, plans had to be changed. Originally, the building was planned with 10 stories but was redesigned, with additional parking, to be 15.
After work began, engineers were forced to alter pile driving methods on one side of the building when they found their original plans threatened to crack the walls and possibly topple old buildings nearby. Reformulating the plans delayed the project 60 days, says David Hackbirth, Robinson’s vice president for construction, “but we got it done.”
ECONOMIC SIGNIFICANCE: The multimillion-dollar project is another link in a chain of downtown development that amounts to $1.5 billion in the last five years, says Chuck Rigney, assistant director of Norfolk’s Department of Development. During that period, the assessed value of real estate downtown has increased 97 percent. Rod Woolard, Norfolk’s director of development, says Harbor Heights “marks for us a new era of development. It allows us to generate quality residential development at a higher density than we’ve had before moving to this vertical regime.”
In addition, the location of TCC, a tax-exempt state entity, in the space brings 280 employees downtown without occupying land elsewhere that might be used for a taxable development.
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