The Pig Never Penciled

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When I wrote about Ashley Landing in September 2024, I told y'all it was time to stop calling the corner of Sam Rittenberg and Old Towne Road "the old Piggly Wiggly." That lasted about two years. It's still the Pig. Sorry.

The Pig closed more than a decade ago, and the lot on Sumar Street has been a bare slab for most of the time since. The city bought it in 2017 for just over $3 million, largely to keep a gas station off it.

Then came the first plan. The city's development partner, Landmark Enterprises, designed a mixed-use project for that one lot: shops, restaurants, city offices and an underground parking garage. The garage version needed about $45 million from the city, and close to half of that money was for the garage alone. In June 2023, City Council split 6 to 6. A tie fails, and that was the end of it.

I did commercial retail leasing and redevelopment for 31 years, and that plan was a hard one to make work from day one. Digging parking underground is about the most expensive way there is to store a car. On a big site you spread that cost across a lot of rentable space. On roughly three acres there's very little to spread it over, so every shop and office ends up carrying the garage. One council member put the cost at around $1,700 a square foot. No West Ashley storefront rents for anything close to what that number demands. It never penciled.

The fix was more land. The city coordinated putting the Pig parcel together with the 33-acre Ashley Landing shopping center next door and brought in Edens, a very experienced retail developer and a good one. The Post & Courier reports Edens paid the city about $1.1 million for the Pig parcel, roughly $2 million less than the city paid for it.

With about 35 acres in play, the heavy costs, including nine acres of underground stormwater storage, get spread across roughly 285 apartments, close to 100 townhomes and about 240,000 square feet of shops and restaurants. Edens is putting in about $300 million and the city about $45 million. Demolition kicked off in May 2025, which I covered at the time.

Now the Publix. The new, bigger store is not going on the Pig site. It's going up as its own building across the parking lot from the Publix you shop at now, about 50,000 square feet on the Old Towne Road side, and Edens is aiming for late summer 2027. So call it another year or so before you're pushing a cart through it. The current store stays open until then. Woodfield's apartment building gets its own ground floor of shops, roughly 40,000 square feet, a year after that.

Woodfield and its partner, PGIM Real Estate, closed on their piece of the site July 1. According to the Post & Courier, they paid $9.75 million for the land and borrowed $68.3 million to build the 285 units, branded Westbourne Ashley Landing.

As for the slab itself, the Pig's old corner, the triangle where Sam Rittenberg meets Old Towne Road, is going residential. Edens' current leasing plan shows 95 townhomes on that point, built by Material Capital Partners. Earlier public reports put the count at 100. They're planned as rentals, and the first ones are expected near the end of 2028, about when Woodfield's apartments open. A stretch of Sumar Street the city is closing gets folded in too.

Sources: Live 5 News (Landmark deal, 2023 tie vote, garage cost) and a 2024 Live 5 report (parcel size), SC Biz News (underground option, per-square-foot estimate, 2017 purchase motive), the City of Charleston (2017 purchase price, combined site), ABC News 4 (investment split, stormwater, unit counts, Publix timing), REBusiness (Westbourne Ashley Landing, PGIM, 2028 timeline), Edens (leasing plan, townhome count and builder, rendering), What's Going On in Charleston (rental townhomes, late 2028 timing) and the Post & Courier (land prices, loan, closing date)