Charleston leaders cut the ribbon Monday on the Charleston Tech Center, a six-story office building on the upper peninsula built to draw startups and high-wage technology employers.
The $54 million building at 997 Morrison Drive, between Conroy and Romney streets, took its first tenants in February and is already nearly full, The Post and Courier reported.
Mayor John Tecklenburg called it a “new future” for Charleston.
“It’s the future economy of our city,” he said, according to the newspaper.
State Sen. Marlon Kimpson described the site as the next “epicenter” of South Carolina’s tech industry. College of Charleston President Andrew Hsu said the building will offer jobs to graduates of the engineering programs the school is adding and help build “a talent pipeline.”
Two decades in the making
The Charleston Digital Corridor, an independent nonprofit that began inside city government, led the project. It developed the building with the city and Charleston-based Iron Bridge Capital, which lined up most of the private financing, the newspaper reported.
Ernest Andrade, the corridor’s executive director, said he first pitched a self-contained tech hub about 21 years ago, when he worked for then-Mayor Joe Riley.
“We just worked at it, not knowing where we’d end up,” Andrade said.
The city paid $1.8 million in 2013 for the site, a former parking lot. The Digital Corridor holds a 99-year lease on the land at $1 a year. The property is in a federally designated Opportunity Zone, which offers tax breaks to developers who invest in areas in need of revitalization, The Post and Courier has reported. Charleston County and the S.C. Department of Commerce also supported the project.
“It has participation from every level of government,” Andrade said. He added that he could instantly “think of five near-death experiences” for the deal.
Officials once hoped the building would open by the summer of 2016, the newspaper reported last year. Construction began in July 2019. Andrade said the work finished on time and on budget this spring despite COVID-19 restrictions and the recession that followed.
The lease limits tenants to “technology-based businesses,” The Post and Courier reported last August.
Who moved in
Andrade said 36 businesses with direct or indirect ties to technology have moved into the roughly 92,000-square-foot building over the past few months, along with about 265 workers.
“That’s pretty substantial,” he said.
Tenants include Atlatl, PlanSource, Palmetto Digital Marketing Group, Conrex, Cloud on Tap, Zeriscope, Annata, QuicksortRX and Surety Bonds Direct, according to the newspaper.
The Digital Corridor’s own Flagship workspace for startups, which offers flexible rents, opened in the building in April. It takes up the entire third floor and has 33 private offices.
Other features include a special ventilation system, nap nooks, a podcast studio, restaurant-style meeting booths and an outdoor ping-pong table.
Andrade said tenants’ response shows workers are willing to return to a traditional office, though he is seeing some “hybrid rotation” among them.
The garage and what’s next
The project includes an 816-space parking garage. The city bought it for about $26.9 million late last year as part of the development agreement, The Post and Courier reported.
“Today, we’re proud to see another puzzle piece of our vision to build an economically resilient community come to fruition,” Andrade said at the time.
The building is the first of two planned for the 1.8-acre property. The Digital Corridor has started to “model up” a second building of similar size on a vacant lot at the corner of Romney Street and hopes to start construction within the next year, Andrade said.
The area around the site, once industrial, has drawn a number of software companies and other tech employers in recent years, according to the newspaper.
