The town of Renewville wants to improve the look of its downtown Main Street, which is pocked with poorly-maintained commercial buildings. The Mayor has had his eye on a few key properties on Main Street, which, if redeveloped, would transform the look and feel of downtown, perhaps spurring addition … Read more

Eastern North Carolina is home to the densest industrial swine farming activity in the world.  The pork production industry is foundational to the eastern North Carolina economy, accounting for 11,821 jobs and over $200 million in wages (UNC Chapel Hill, 2013).  This activity comes with a cost, howe … Read more

Downtown redevelopment to attract talented Millennials has become an important and popular economic development policy in many cities across the country. By now it is almost common knowledge what it takes to attract talented Millennials to your town or city: walkable, diverse and vibrant neighborhoo … Read more

It seems like everywhere you turn these days, someone is talking about climate change and the effects of high energy consumption. No matter what your stance on the subject matter, the data concerning energy consumption and the cost of supplying its demand throughout North Carolina is shocking. A 201 … Read more

The White House Council on Strong Cities, Strong Communities (SC2) initiative is a new approach to economic development support at the federal level that combines funding and hands-on technical assistance services for distressed communities across the country. Rocky Mount, NC was recently named as a … Read more

In our series on the Town of Hillsborough’s use of special assessments for project development financing we left by contrasting the tool with tax increment financing in Part I of this series. Part II reviews some of the unique aspects of the implementation process. The School of Government’s Kara Mi … Read more

The Community Development and Block Grant Program (CDBG) is one of the key public sources of funds for community water and sewer projects in North Carolina and across the country. While the amount of funds available for water and sewer projects is not as large as other federal programs such as joint … Read more

Imagine that the employer your community has depended on for decades shuts down unexpectedly. Suddenly, ten-thousand people are now out of work and the local economy is in flux as residents begin searching for employment in neighboring municipalities. How do you respond to the sudden uncertainty and … Read more

A series of posts last year profiled case studies for “How Counties Organize to Carry Out Economic Development.” Links to the series can be found here (parts I, II, III, IV, and V). The fifth case profiled Union County, NC, where—at the time—local leaders were considering a new multi-jurisdictional … Read more

Last week, I spent an afternoon “clamming” in a Massachusetts estuary with my family. After a few hours of futile “raking,” a local resident told my dad and me that a commercial fisherman swept the area just the week before, and we were unlikely to find very many clams. He directed us toward an area … Read more