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If mixed use is truly the future – the future is now.

November 16, 2007
By Jon W. Glass/The Virginian-Pilot

Less than two years after being announced, the first three buildings are up and construction crews are turning ground for more in Hampton Roads Crossing. The planned 148-acre development, which straddles the border of Portsmouth and Suffolk, is combining a high-tech research and education park with an urban-style mix of homes, shops and offices. There are also sites for two hotels.

Officials say the estimated $200 million project will bolster the region's efforts to become an East Coast hub in computer modeling and simulation and help spin off other economic growth.

"Now that buildings are up and occupied, it's generated a tremendous amount of new interest and activity," said Tom O'Grady, Suffolk's director of economic development. People can see it and touch it and understand what's to come.

Today, Old Dominion University will formally open two of the new buildings – the Tri-Cities Higher Education Center and the headquarters for the Virginia Modeling, Analysis and Simulation Center, known as VMASC. The two-story brick and glass buildings, visible to motorists along the north side of Va. 164 near the College Drive exit, now are in use.

Next to those facilities is a three-story, 60,000-square-foot office building that is nearly ready for occupancy. Offering "Class A" top-of-the-line space, the building is the first of its kind for Portsmouth, said Steven Lynch, the city's economic development director.

The Tri-Cities center also sits in Portsmouth, while the VMASC building is in Suffolk. "It's created a great energy for us," Lynch said. "It's demonstrated to the corporate world that the city of Portsmouth is going to be a player."

Elsewhere on the site, workers have started building four model homes, slated for opening in the spring. They will be used to market the development's residential section, a mix of townhouses and single-family detached dwellings. Plans call for building 600 units, phased in based on demand, said the developer.

On Thursday, crews were busy putting in infrastructure, including concrete storm-water pipes and roads, to serve the development's residential and retail components. "We're going forward full speed," said John Peterson III, senior vice president of Terry/Peterson Companies, the project's overall developer.

The three new buildings are in a 32-acre section of the development set aside as a research, technology and education park. It is known as The MAST Center – for Modeling, Analysis, Simulation and Technology.

Classes in ODU's $10.6 million, 53,000-square-foot Tri-Cities center are geared toward graduate and upper-level undergraduate students. They concentrate on engineering, health sciences, education, business administration and criminal justice.

The new $12.2 million, 60,000-square-foot VMASC building is nearly triple the size of its former space and is wired for high-speed, high-tech research. It will allow researchers to expand beyond the center's current work in defense, transportation, homeland security and medicine, said Mike McGinnis, the center's executive director.

Armed with around $1.2 million in new computers and visualization equipment, the center is aiming to conduct research in game-based learning, engineering, human behavior, and artificial intelligence and robotics. "It is really a very extraordinary technology center," McGinnis said.

So far, the office building, known as MAST One, does not have any signed leases, said Bill Hudgins, president of HL Development Group, an affiliate of Harvey Lindsay Commercial Real Estate and developer of the MAST Center in partnership with Terry/Peterson.

Leasing agents, Hudgins said, are talking to seven or eight serious prospects seeking a combined 120,000 square feet of space – twice what's available. About half of those, he said, are defense contractors doing modeling and simulation work associated with the military's Joint Forces Command experimentation and war­fighting complex, located about a half-mile away in northern Suffolk.

Preliminary engineering and architectural drawings have been done for two additional office buildings, Hudgins said. One is five stories and 100,000 square feet on the Portsmouth side, while the other is four stories and 80,000 square feet in Suffolk. Plans are to build a total 360,000 square feet of office space. "The demand is there," Hudgins said. "This market segment, the modeling and simulation field coupled with education, is probably the most important economic stimulus this region has had in some time."

O'Grady of Suffolk said VMASC officials recently told him that local workers are earning an average of about $80,000 a year in modeling and simulation jobs. This would represent a 33 percent hike in the average salary of $59,000 reported in a 2004 study of the industry in Hampton Roads. "We've got retailers salivating over those type of salaries," O'Grady said, adding that he's been talking to stores that cater to higher-income shoppers.

Peterson said his company is still in the planning stages on the development's retail side, now set for about 450,000 square feet. "The retail will really feed off the houses, and the houses and offices are a function of job growth," Peterson said. "The reason to do all of the uses on the same site is with transportation becoming more difficult, the opportunity to live where you work and shop is becoming almost as much a necessity as a desirability."