GREENVILLE — A dilapidated shopping center on Augusta Road has been demolished, pushing essential businesses out while renewing questions about the area’s future as home values rise in the surrounding Black, lower-income community. The former Potomac Square Shopping Center housed vital businesses like a laundromat, dollar store and barbershop at the intersection of Augusta and Mauldin Roads just inside Greenville’s city limits. After most of the building was demolished, all that remained was a furniture store and a chain link fence surrounding piles of rubble left by the demolition.
A Dollar General and nail salon that were part of the same complex also remain, but they have a different owner and sit in unincorporated Greenville County. Email Sign Up! The property’s future remains murky, with no public plans for redevelopment of the site, previously called the Terrace Shopping Center. The empty footprint of the Potomac Square Shopping Center represents the change that residents feel is spilling into District 25, a majority-Black area that has begun to see development pressure spread from the city center, stoking fears of racial displacement .
The demolition comes less than a year after a Starbucks drive-thru was approved nearby — the first sign of new development at the intersection after 20 years of no real estate activity. It was approved by the city’s zoning board over ardent disagreement between residents over what the high-end coffee shop would mean for the c.