Former Price’s Chicken Coop land sold | WFAE 90.7

Last year, Price’s Chicken Coop and Zack’s Hamburgers closed after decades of being in business. Now, the sites those Charlotte restaurants sat on have been sold. Property records show that the former site of Price’s in South End sold in July for nearly $4 million. A little farther to the south along South Boulevard, the former site of Zack’s sold for almost $4.5 million in June. That’s according to the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter. For more, WFAE’s Marshall Terry talks to the Ledger’s Tony Mecia.

Marshall Terry: Tony, let’s start with the site formerly known as Price’s Chicken Coop. What’s being planned there?

Tony Mecia: Well, Marshall probably to the surprise of no one, it’s going to be apartments. The plan is to have a 30-story luxury apartment tower. Catalyst Capital Partners and Stiles are the two developers.

You’ll recall that when it went out of business last year, the owner had said, well, it’s not development pressure. It’s really that I’m frying chicken every day and there are labor shortages, supply shortages. He even said coin shortages. And so that those were really the forces. Now we know that he was able to sell that land. It’s four parcels there on Camden Road for $3.8 million. But yes, it’s going to be apartments like a lot of South End has been turned into apartments.

Terry: And, what are the plans with the site where Zack’s stood? The same?

Mecia: The same thing. More apartments. A company called Embrey out of Texas told us they were going to put apartments on that site, on the Zack’s site. The parcel that Zack’s was on sold for $4.5 million as part of a larger land deal in that area, Scaleybark at South Boulevard. But yes, they’re envisioning apartments for that area. Both of these are hot areas.

I’m sure I don’t have to tell your listeners, you know, one in the south and one in the area that’s becoming known as LoSo, a desirable place. A lot of things popping up and so apartments are going in above them.

Terry: Remind us if you will why did these two beloved restaurants called it quits?

Mecia: You know it’s usually when these restaurants close, it’s a combination of factors. Usually, you have owners that are getting older. They don’t want to show up at the restaurant necessarily every day and work as hard as they have been working for decades. And then, you know, they have developers that come and say, “Hey, here’s how much your land is worth. You know, we could write you a check and you could retire or move on to something else.” So, it’s really a combination of things.

People a lot of times want to lay it at the feet of development pressures only. But you have to look at the individual circumstances of these restaurants. You know, in this case, of Price’s, you know, the owners, they owned that land. They were able to sell it. In the case of Zack’s, they leased the land. I believe the owner was a family member. So it wasn’t like they were forced out by the landlord or anything like that. It was just a lot of different factors all rolled into one

Terry: OK, switching gears now, Charlotte-based online lender LendingTree is facing a federal lawsuit accusing it of failing to keep customers’ information safe. What can you tell us?

Mecia: In June, Lending Tree started sending out notices to customers related to a data breach. And around the same time, cybersecurity experts were noticing on the dark web, somebody was advertising a sale of what was identified as a Lending Tree database with Social Security numbers and details from mortgage loan applications.

Now, Lending Tree has said actually those are two separate things, that the information that appeared on the dark web, they say, is not connected to Lending Tree and not any data breach of their security systems, but that there was a code vulnerability that compromised the information of about 70,000 customers. That’s what they started notifying people about.

A Massachusetts man filed a lawsuit in July against Lending Tree, saying it should have done a better job taking care of sensitive financial information so that case is moving forward in the courts.

Terry: Let’s go to south Charlotte where you report some residents say they are fed up with weeds and trash on sidewalks and in road medians. Where are we talking about exactly?

Mecia: This is a stretch of Providence Road, south of I-485, between 485 and the Union County line. Anybody who’s been through there lately will know that it’s really been developed a lot in the last few years. You see it in the traffic. There’s more traffic in that section. A couple of big shopping centers, restaurants, grocery stores, a bunch of housing, townhouses, apartments and single-family houses.

A lot of the residents, though, are saying that the upkeep of Providence Road is not what it should be. They’re seeing a lot of overgrown weeds and trash in the area, and they’d like to see it cleaned up.

Terry: Whose responsibility is to keep those sidewalks and medians clean?

Mecia: Well, it’s a state road. So the North Carolina Department of Transportation has the responsibility for the median. NC DOT says they provide a basic level of service, which is mowing the grass once a month.

But residents say that doesn’t address their concerns of the trash and the weeds on the sidewalks. And, so they would like to see the developers of those areas, Lincoln Harris and Childress Klein, take a more active role in doing something. The developers told us, “Hey, it’s not our responsibility. It’s the state’s responsibility.”

But, it sounds like there are some meetings coming up in which they might be able to kind of solve some of these issues, get some of the homeowners’ associations involved, and maybe address it privately to sort of supplement what NC DOT does.