Chapel Hill’s new downtown innovation district set to open in mid-2023
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The Triangle is growing up and out
Construction crews should again be busy in 2023, in the heart of RTP and across the mushrooming Triangle region. We’ve identified five spots you’ll want to keep an eye on for the rest of year, places where the region’s continuing growth will be easily visible.
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Google already calls Chapel Hill home with an office on West Franklin Street. Promising tech startups like Well Dot and Quantworks have headquarters there as well.
Now, a new innovation district is set to launch.
A partnership between the town of Chapel Hill and the University of North Carolina, the innovation district has been 10 years in the making and is part of a strategy to attract more businesses and talent to this corner of the Triangle.
The district’s first phase is slated to open in the middle of 2023, Dwight Bassett, Chapel Hill’s director of economic development & parking services, told the N&O.
It encompasses two buildings, 136 East Rosemary Street and the adjoining 137 East Franklin Street, and occupies seven floors and roughly 118,000 square feet of space. It’s currently being redeveloped by Cary-based Grubb Properties. By 2025, it’s expected to include a visitor center, life science center, downtown parking lot, apartments, hotel and conference center.
“This is a big step forward and part of a long-term effort to capture innovation and entrepreneurship in Chapel Hill,” Bassett said. “There will be numerous opportunities for doing business whereas before it was a lot more limited.”
Among its first tenants: Innovate Carolina, the university’s central team for innovation and entrepreneurship; and Launch Chapel Hill, the business and venture lab accelerator created in 2013 through another joint effort by the town, university and county.
California-based BioLabs, a coworking space for life science startups, is leasing the entire third floor, over 23,000 square feet, for shared wet labs and office facilities for new research-based startups.
“For years, we’d lose companies to the Research Triangle and Durham because we didn’t have wet lab space,” Bassett said. “Now faculty-founded startups have an easy path to find shared lab environments. It will create a stronger pipeline of startups based on UNC-Chapel Hill faculty research.”
An opportunity zone in Chapel Hill
The district is in a designated opportunity zone — the town’s first. The aim is to spur economic development by providing tax benefits to investors. Those range from deferring tax on prior gains to sheltering future gains for 10-year investments in the zone.
Separately, the town recently approved Grubb Properties’ 238,000-square-foot, seven-story office building and wet lab facility on the 1.5-acre parcel at 150 East Rosemary for inclusion in the district. It will replace the Wallace parking deck and include three levels of underground parking and dedicated street-level space for retail stores, restaurants and a public plaza.
A few blocks down, Longfellow Real Estate Partners is proposing a life sciences building in the 300 block of West Franklin Street.
Details are still being worked out, its managing director Gregg Capps said in November. The project is not expected to include housing, and potential retail space is “in flux.”
Read next: Triangle poised to expand in all directions in 2023. Here are 5 places to watch.
This story was originally published February 3, 2023 at 1:00 AM with the headline "Chapel Hill’s new downtown innovation district set to open in mid-2023."
