By Betsy Kane, Senior Planner, Community Planning Division of the NC Department of Commerce
North Carolina’s downtowns are among the favorite places that Tarheels and visitors cherish in our state. A healthy, vibrant downtown promotes economic development as well as a community identity. Active downtowns create a more enjoyable place to live and do business.
To help downtowns thrive, the Community Planning Division in the N.C. Department of Commerce is developing a new toolkit for “Downtown Zoning Repair.” The diagnostic tool will help Main Street communities align their zoning regulations to better support their economic goals for downtown.
Sometimes zoning regulations can be at cross-purposes with downtown goals. In my work, I kept running into situations where a town had zoning regulations on the books that were more suited to a suburban setting.
For example, some regulations prohibited the creation of housing in the upper floors of downtown commercial buildings. There’s a lot of demand for downtown lofts and apartments, even in smaller communities.
I saw similar problems in multiple communities. So I began to think it would be helpful to catalog all the ways that zoning should be helping, not hindering, downtown goals, and refer to that list when we provide technical assistance to our communities.
Working with staff members in the Urban Development Division (North Carolina Main Street and Small Town Main Street programs) and other planners in the Community Planning Division, we created a diagnostic checklist that can be used to make sure towns are doing all they can to remove unnecessary regulatory barriers to downtown revitalization.
In coming months, I’ll be working with Burnsville in the mountains, Waxhaw in the southern piedmont, and Goldsboro in the coastal plain as pilot communities. Their participation will help me refine and develop the advice we give to other towns that may use this toolkit in the future.
Downtown revitalization is a job-creator. Downtown businesses are often family-owned, and they have strong local connections. When you create jobs in downtowns, they are ‘sticky’– they can’t be lured away, because they are so strongly linked to place. The money spent in downtown enterprises also re-circulates in the community at a higher rate, and this high multiplier effect tends to make the whole community more prosperous.
One of the features of ‘Zoning Repair’ for downtown is that it costs almost nothing, yet the upside can be huge. In these budget times, we are always looking for ideas that have a good cost-benefit ratio.