Amazing Place leadership teams fall into Greenville, SC
During the first half of the Amazing Place Ideas Forum in Denver, CO, the leadership teams learned why cities should adopt the new recipe for economic development. This time in Greenville, they learned how a city with limited resources can turn itself around and invest in itself.
Thanks to the generosity of the City of Greenville, Mayor Knox White participated in nearly every aspect of the program. Beginning in 1995, Mayor White’s leadership and dedication to supporting Greenville’s investment in itself has been at the forefront of the City’s revitalization.
“Good urban planning doesn’t need to be partisan. Nor does it need to be political,” explained Mayor White during a welcome at City Hall.
Before-and-after photos of downtown provided perspective on just how far Greenville has come and emphasized the importance of the City’s catalytic anchor projects, which kicked off downtown reinvestment. “It’s not luck that this downtown is what it is,” explains Mayor White. “There’s a method to Greenville’s success.” So much of the City’s success is due to long-term thinking and dedicated leadership.
Amazing Places should be affordable and engage diverse communities
Successful downtown revitalization can create new economic opportunities for communities, but can also lead to displacement and exclusion. To deal with these unintended consequences, Greenville is working with developers to create affordable, quality housing options. The leadership teams toured a neighborhood of newly constructed affordable housing units, and remarked that it was difficult to tell the difference between affordable properties and market rate properties—affordable properties were mixed into the neighborhood and were just as attractive and well-designed as the market-rate ones.
At Fluor Field, the home of the Greenville Drive, Mayor White, team owner Craig Brown, and local pastor James Speed told the story of how the City attracted the team and transformed the West End neighborhood with a baseball stadium that’s activated year-round and built into the existing neighborhood. Reverend Speed, whose congregation once spearheaded the ardent opposition of the project, expressed the great importance of community collaboration. The City told the community the baseball stadium would be built despite their opposition, so the community opted to embrace the development process and support sustained growth in their neighborhood.
Beyond the Forum: putting ideas into practice
On the last day of the Forum, each team presented on the action plan for their downtowns that they’ve been developing since the Denver visit. These action plans will support their teams’ goals to revitalize their downtowns and attract talent. Mayor White, Councilmember Ryberg Doyle, and the City’s Director of Public Information and Events, Angie Prosser, listened to each presentation and offered feedback and advice on each team’s ideas.
To one team trying to improve their bus system, Prosser emphasized, “If you’re trying to fix transit without first actually riding it, you’re doing it wrong.” She, along with other City employees, spent some time on the buses and talking to regular bus riders when Greenville was working to overhaul its bus system, although she admits they’ve still got a long way to go. Mayor White also offered up some advice to make public meetings accessible to all, which may not be intuitive to most people—“When you’re hosting neighborhood meetings, you must have babysitting services or the average age will be 70 or older.”
Teams were thankful for the valuable advice these leaders of Greenville had to offer. Next, each team will take the action plans that they drafted, the lessons they’ve learned from Denver and Greenville, and the feedback from the panel and their fellow participants and finalize their action plans. They’ll begin working to implement these plans in the coming year, with help from the Knight Foundation and SGA; stay tuned for updates on these efforts.