An 18-Story Winston-Salem Fixture Gets New Lease On Life

A large construction project is being added to an already busy building and renovation agenda in downtown Winston-Salem, and one of the city's most recognizable skyline fixtures is getting a new lease on life.

On Thursday, city leaders announced that the former GMAC Tower building will soon undergo a major facelift. Business magnate Don Flow and Charlotte-based developer Grubb Properties will be repurposing the tower, creating a new, consolidated corporate services hub for Flow, and opening the remaining roughly 200,000 square feet to other companies. About 35,000 square feet of space will be set aside for an entrepreneurial center specifically designed for start-up and early stage growth companies.

Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines says he's thrilled that the downtown skyline will be preserved—there had been plans to demolish the tower—and this public-private development project connects a lot of dots for the city.

“We've been working for some time to try and create an innovation and entrepreneurial ecosystem here in Forsyth County, and we're taking a number of steps," Joines says, "creating venture capital firms, training opportunities—we were selected as one of five cities in the world to have a Venture Café that will begin operating this week—and one of the things that we've been missing from this whole ecosystem is incubation space.”

Joines says the city currently has approximately 10,000 square feet of start-up incubator space available, while cities like St. Louis have closer to 200,000.  

In the second planned project, a six-story building just south of the 18-story GMAC Tower will be torn down with the city's help. In its place, 240 residential units and storefronts along Fourth Street will be constructed. According to Joines, the project will do much to alleviate current housing needs across the board while enhancing the look of downtown.

“We wanted to make sure that there was a good supply of workplace housing in that project so that we could have folks with all types of incomes who could afford to live in it,” he says. “And we also wanted to make sure that we created a kind of storefront feel along Fourth Street, with retail and restaurants and services along there that would make it an exciting and inviting front.”

According to Joines, the $48 million development project will essentially pay for itself with the city netting roughly $500,000 in new taxes from the Grubb project over ten years. Work on that site is expected to begin within 12 months of the City Council's approval of the financial assistance proposal.