RALEIGH - THE FUTURE OF DOWNTOWN RALEIGH - PART 5
Downtown Raleigh. Greg Hatem is President, owner, CEO and manager of Empire Properties. Greg was called a renaissance man in the Raleigh News and Observer where he was Tarheel of the Week. He speaks Chinese and is of Lebanese descent. He has, almost singlehandedly, transformed downtown. Some of his projects include the Capital Fitness building on North street, the Duck & Dumpling restaurant on North street, Nana’s Chop House on Davie street and the Times Bar on Hargett street. Dan calls Greg “His Highness of Hargett Street”.
Greg’s comments were as follows - We started twelve years ago. Our first project was Jillians. People thought we were crazy. Why would you want to take a warehouse building and re-develop it into something like a restaurant? It just wasn’t being done. I had to go to three banks to get the project done and it was actually a very small project. The only way we got it done was to agree to a personal guarantee. But, we did get it done and once they saw it they realized it was possible to make an impact on the downtown area. We plodded along for a few years and did the things we felt would be helpful to downtown. We didn’t see many people coming along to join us but then it started to become formalized when Dan came to town.
We have gone from a place where there was nothing going on at 5 o’clock in the afternoon and with a lot of empty buildings and only a restaurant or two, to a place where, over the last five years, it has become a neat, hip urban environment. People who come downtown to Memorial Auditorium so see a show, when they start their drive home at 11 p.m., see an active and vibrant downtown. Even in the last two years there has been a tremendous change.
I live above Raleigh Townes bar so I don’t sleep very much. A couple of years ago the Downtown Raleigh streets, on the weekends, were pretty empty. There was an occassional person going to work on Saturday or Sunday but not much more. Now, at 7:30 in the morning there are people sitting out in front of the Morning Times having coffee, walking their dogs, really excellent activity.
A lot of people have gotten together and strategized on how to bring activity and business downtown. A lot of people have invested a lot of money to open restaurants and retail shops and do things to activate the street level. Dan and Chris and their groups have basically said “We can’t mandate it but we are going to push you really hard to do those things because you are doing what is really needed.” People need to be encouraged to put new restaurants in with shops on the first floor as opposed to doing what we used to do which was either leave them vacant and do something upstairs or just put another office on the first floor. Now, we have this very active first floor enivronment; espcially on Hargett street. Now, as I said previously, people coming into downtown see life and activity. That gets the real estate agent community interested and puts them in a position to look their clients in the eye and recommend that they live or invest in Downtown. I wouldn’t live anywhere else.
I used to live near Lake Johnson. I would drive to work every day and look for things to do in the evening. There wasn’t much to do. Now, I will go a week or two without even driving a car because I don’t need to. My truck is sitting in the deck. Typically, I walk to work, I walk to a restaurant, and if I need to buy some groceries there are two Farmer’s Markets and a CVS drugstore as well as other shops around. You really can pretty much get everything you need and it continues to get better. A new grocery store has opened up on Peace street.
We need for the real estate broker community to believe in Downtown. Before now, when people asked agents about downtown they most likely told them there was little or nothing to see or do and that it was not a safe place to live. In many ways that was true. It is no longer that way. Now, there are many homes to choose from and much affordable housing. You can walk three blocks from here and get a house for $150,000.
John Fish (919) 696-3474 Email: marvmax@mindspring.com Website: wwwJohnFish.com
