Ben Navarro bought four more pieces of downtown Charleston in July. Almost nobody noticed, which is roughly the point.
An LLC tied to Navarro paid $3.8 million for 2, 8, 10 and 12 N. Market St., public records show. Right now those parcels are a construction trailer and a parking lot.
That is not what they are for.
Why it matters
Stack these against what he already holds. Charleston Place. Credit One Stadium. The Cooper. A historic theater. The Carroll Building. The Post & Courier reports the recent additions likely make Navarro the owner of the largest amount of private property on the lower peninsula.
Not a developer with a project. One person holding the deed to a meaningful share of downtown.
He is also mid-purchase on Union Pier itself, the 65-acre former cruise terminal, in a $250 million deal with the S.C. State Ports Authority expected to close in 2027.
So: 65 acres of waterfront, and increasingly, the walk you take to reach it.
The word they keep using is gateway
Miller Harper, a developer with Navarro's investment firm Beemok, put it plainly. That block, which also includes the long-vacant Carroll Building, provides little incentive for residents or tourists to keep walking past the historic City Market toward the waterfront, he told the Post & Courier.
Translation: the City Market is where the foot traffic dies. North of it is surface parking and plywood. You cannot build a $250 million waterfront neighborhood that people have to actively decide to walk to.
So he is buying the connective tissue first.
The pieces already fit
Watch how these projects talk to each other. The Carroll Building, bought for $11.5 million, is being gifted to the College of Charleston for a new business school. In a Post & Courier commentary last October, Navarro called it one of the ugliest buildings in all of downtown at one of the most dangerous intersections. The Cooper opened just south of Market Street. The North Market parcels sit between them.
That is not a portfolio. That is a route.
What happens next
Nothing fast. Architect and planner Christian Sottile says the plan is to develop Union Pier in small increments over time, starting at the edges where the site butts up against the rest of the peninsula.
No specific plans have been proposed for the North Market parcels. They go through the city's review process like everything else.
The cruise ships are gone. The parking lots are spoken for. The rest gets decided one board meeting at a time.
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