Will have about 1 million square feet of retail space

By Jennifer July Mitchell

Pooler, Port Wentworth and Effingham County residents won’t have to drive into Savannah for a lot of their major shopping needs when a mega-shopping center coming to a 100-acre tract on the southwest corner of Highway 21 and I-95 goes vertical. The shopping center will offer about 1 million square feet of retail and commercial shopping space with a variety of national retailers, possibly including grocery stores, fine dining, fast food restaurants, and “big box” retail, which refers to those retailers with major square footage, like the Target store in the Savannah Mall.

Developer Liberty Wentworth LLC expects to start signing tenants in next three or four months, with the first stores opening in about a year to a year-and-a-half. The City of Port Wentworth has given preliminary site plan approval to the project. As each retailer is signed, they will have to go back to Port Wentworth City Council for specific site plan approval before they can build.

The shopping center will have a lot of competition besides Savannah’s Abercorn Street shopping district. Major shopping centers are already cropping up on Pooler Parkway and at Godley Station, not to mention the shopping center planned for Rice Hope Plantation, a planned community that just broke ground in Port Wentworth about a mile north of the I-95/Highway 21 intersection, and whatever retail goes up in the Effingham Economic Development Authority’s 2,700-acre tract in Effingham County, formerly owned by International Paper.

Another major shopping center is also coming to Pooler’s Savannah Quarters that’s being billed as bigger than either the Oglethorpe or Savannah mall. Pooler Mayor Mike Lamb, though, says that with all the major residential developments going up in the area, there will probably be enough business for everybody. “I could see where they could do it and we could also because they’ve got Highway 21 traffic and we’ve got I-16 traffic, and there’s also all that traffic coming off I-95,” he said.

There will be plenty of new residents to shop at the shopping center. Planned communities are cropping up throughout the area, including Rice Hope Plantation, which is expected to include about 4,500 homes and New Hampstead, which will have about 10,000 new homes.

In fact, recent estimates from regional planners say that within 20 years, the population of the south Georgia and South Carolina area that includes Beaufort and Jasper counties will top 1 million people.