In 2014, the town of Pacolet thought it had finally solved the problem of its old Cloth Room and Warehouse. The plan was straightforward: convert the century-old textile building into a senior center, put it back to work, give the town something to point to. Then the contractor overseeing the project embezzled more than $568,000 in public funds. The building sat empty for another decade.
That history matters right now, because Pacolet is in the middle of a second attempt at the same building, and this time the numbers are bigger. If you are comparing Upstate submarkets and Pacolet's prices have caught your eye, the mill's track record is the thing to understand before the price tag.
A Second Try At The Same Building
The Pacolet Mills Cloth Room and Warehouse sits on the National Register of Historic Places, built around 1906 to inspect and store cloth for the Pacolet Manufacturing Company. The town bought the building in 2003 after Milliken and Company had used it for fabrication into the early 2000s. It sold it to North Carolina-based Liles Construction in late 2023.
The plan this time is a 60,000-square-foot mixed-use conversion: retail, restaurants, a brewery, and event space, designed by McMillan Pazdan Smith Architecture. Liles Construction president Paul Liles has put the shell cost at roughly $4.5 million, with tenant buildout to follow depending on interest. "We have an obligation to have it completed by 2028," Liles said, tying the project to a firm outer deadline rather than an open-ended vision statement.
Pacolet Mayor Ned Camby has framed the project as a turning point for a town still shaped by the mill that once employed most of its residents. "It's going to be a fresh start," Camby said when the sale was announced. The comprehensive plan the town adopted in 2024, its first in more than 20 years, backs that framing with a broader riverfront vision that includes zip lines, a boardwalk, and a restored 1924 amphitheater at a site called The Flats.
This is a real project with a named developer, a named architect, and a public deadline. It is also, by the developer's own account, a project competing with the ghost of the last one.
Six Months Before The Shovel Even Moved
Timelines are where a buyer's due diligence actually earns its keep, and this one has already moved once. Liles originally targeted summer 2025 for site work. By March 2025, that had slipped roughly six months, to early 2026, with Liles telling reporters he remained committed to the project despite the delay. Coordination with the State Historic Preservation Office and National Park Service, required to keep the building's historic designation intact, added time before final drawings were even ready.
A six-month slip on a multi-year adaptive reuse project is not unusual. Historic tax credit projects move slowly almost everywhere, and a shell budget that starts at $4.5 million tends to grow before ribbon cutting. What makes Pacolet different is that the reader evaluating this town already has a data point for what happens when this exact building's redevelopment goes wrong. One slip is normal risk. A second attempt at a project whose first attempt ended in a criminal embezzlement case is a pattern worth pricing in, not a coincidence worth ignoring.
The most recent public documentation of the project, from January 2026, still pointed to that same early-2026 start without confirming ground had actually broken. That doesn't mean the project has stalled again. It means that as of today, there is no public record yet of the shovel actually moving, which is exactly the kind of gap a buyer should ask a local agent to check on before assuming the timeline in a brochure is the timeline on the ground.
The Numbers You're Actually Comparing
Here is where the bargain narrative starts to bend. As of this summer, Pacolet's own ZIP code, 29372, shows a median list price around $181,000. Compare that to the city of Spartanburg, roughly 20 minutes west, where the median home value stood at $236,395 as of June 2026, up 2.2% year over year. Over the three months ending in May 2026, Spartanburg homes sold for a median of $230,000, moving in about 47 days.
That gap, roughly $50,000 to $55,000 between Pacolet and the county seat, is the number that makes Pacolet look like an opportunity on paper. But a gap that size on a town this small also means the sample behind it is thin. Different trackers pull slightly different medians for Pacolet depending on the month and the handful of homes that closed, which is itself a signal: when a handful of transactions can swing the median by tens of thousands of dollars, you are not pricing a market, you are pricing a small set of individual decisions. That is not a reason to avoid Pacolet. It is a reason to treat any single "median price" you see quoted for the town as a rough estimate rather than a settled fact, and to ask a local agent what actually closed in the last quarter before you anchor to a portal number.
None of that gap is guaranteed to close because of the mill. It could close because the town's population is already growing, up an estimated 18% since the 2020 census according to recent population estimates, which suggests people are choosing Pacolet now, independent of whether the Cloth Room ever opens a brewery. If you're mapping Pacolet against other small Spartanburg County towns, our look at Wellford walks through the same underlying question: how much of a town's future value is demand that already exists versus a project that hasn't broken ground yet.
The Park And The Mill Are Not The Same Clock
One detail that gets flattened in casual conversation about Pacolet: The Flats riverfront park and the Cloth Room mixed-use building are two separate projects with two separate sets of obstacles, even though they sit across from each other.
The Cloth Room redevelopment is privately owned and driven, funded by Liles Construction with its own construction timeline and its own historic preservation requirements. The Flats park, by contrast, sits on land owned by Norfolk Southern. Town Administrator Patrick Kay has described the goal plainly. "You don't ever see the river until you cross the bridge and we're looking to change that," Kay told a local television station. Norfolk Southern has given a verbal commitment to help fund the park, but a design still has to be presented to the railroad for approval, and volunteers have been doing the debris clearing in the meantime.
If you are underwriting a purchase near Pacolet's downtown on the assumption that "the redevelopment" is one coordinated project with one finish line, you are underwriting the wrong thing. One half depends on a private developer hitting a construction deadline. The other depends on a railroad signing off on a park design on land it still owns. Either could move faster or slower than the other, and neither one's completion guarantees the other follows.
How To Actually Read A Small Town's Pipeline
If you're weighing Pacolet, the useful exercise is not asking whether the renderings look good. It's checking whether the project has cleared the specific milestones that mill town redevelopments tend to stall on:
- Has the historic preservation review actually concluded, or is it still "a few months out," the same phrase used in the original 2024 reporting on this project?
- Is there a signed construction contract, or a stated intention to build?
- Who owns the land the amenity sits on, and does that owner have to approve anything before work starts?
- Has this specific building had a prior redevelopment attempt, and if so, what stopped it?
Pacolet answers all four of those questions today, and the answers are mixed. There is a signed developer and a firm 2028 deadline. There is also a six-month slip already on the books, a park still waiting on a railroad's sign-off, and a building whose last redevelopment ended in a criminal case. That combination doesn't make Pacolet a bad bet. It makes it a bet on execution, on a specific developer and a specific timeline, and buyers who understand that distinction are the ones who won't be surprised in 2027 if the brewery isn't open yet.
A Few Questions Worth Asking Before You Move On Pacolet
Is the Cloth Room project the same thing as The Flats? No. The Cloth Room is a private mixed-use conversion led by Liles Construction. The Flats is a separate riverfront park initiative on land owned by Norfolk Southern, tied to the town's 2024 comprehensive plan.
When is the mixed-use building actually supposed to open? Liles Construction has stated an obligation to complete the project by 2028, with construction originally slated for summer 2025 and pushed to early 2026 as of the most recent public reporting.
Does the building's historic designation limit what gets built there? Yes. Because the Cloth Room and Warehouse is on the National Register of Historic Places, the developer has had to coordinate with the State Historic Preservation Office and National Park Service on what alterations are permitted, which is part of why the timeline has moved.
What This Means If You're Looking At Pacolet
A cheap median price in a town with an active redevelopment story is not automatically a discount. Sometimes it's a discount for risk that hasn't resolved yet, and the resolution date matters as much as the price. Pacolet has real momentum this time, a named developer with a deadline, an architect, and a broader town plan behind it. It also has a documented history of this exact building disappointing the people counting on it.
If you want a clear read on what a specific Pacolet property is actually worth today, separate from what it might be worth once a brewery opens across the river, that's a conversation worth having before you write an offer. The Tim Elder Team tracks Upstate submarkets like this one closely, including which redevelopment timelines are holding and which have already slipped. Start with a free home valuation to see where your target property actually sits against what's closed nearby, not just what the portals are estimating.
