New residents in a growing city come with many needs that city leaders must find ways to meet. Residents also need places to purchase necessities and they often look for both variety and the ability to stay in town when doing it.
Several South Carolina municipalities are pursuing a variety of initiatives — and employing creativity — to help create the right mix of retail and livability for their residents.
The key steps to success are knowing what space is available and making connections with real estate agents and retail brokers to find the right fit. Some recent examples of success have come out of Greenwood, Fountain Inn and Cayce.
Greenwood
Relationship building has given the biggest boost to the City of Greenwood’s ongoing retail recruitment success, said Lara Hudson, Greenwood’s community development director. Greenwood participated in the Municipal Association of SC Retail Recruitment Training Program, which includes a visit to major retail trade shows.
“When I went to Las Vegas for a trade show, I made all these great connections with developers that are now calling me when they’re looking for a location,” Hudson said. “Those relationships that we've been able to build with the developers and the brokers that are making these deals happen, that's been one of the most beneficial pieces of it.”
Greenwood has landed several restaurant chains, including Starbucks, Eggs Up Grill and Chipotle, as well as service businesses and other retailers since city officials began their recruitment push.
Greenwood’s current initiative began about two years ago when city leaders saw that their growing population was traveling elsewhere to dine out, shop and buy services. The city had already been recruiting businesses to its central business district.
“We decided to start more actively recruiting for retail, not just in our downtown, but citywide,” Hudson said.
One area the city wanted to promote specifically was the corridor between the business district and Lander University.
“It needed some love,” Hudson said. “So, we started focusing more on that and we've already seen a lot of traction.”
For this broader outreach, the city needed a better idea of available properties in the area.
“One of the things that we noticed was in our downtown, we do a really good job of keeping inventory of what buildings are available and the information on those buildings,” Hudson said. “But when someone would call and need something outside the downtown and they said, ‘I need 4,000 square feet’ or ‘I need 12-foot ceilings’ and ‘I need 27 parking spaces,’ I had no clue. I would literally get in my car and drive around to see what I could find, or I would start seeking out commercial realtors to see if they had anything. We decided we needed to do a better job of inventorying our properties and kind of being the collective keeper of all the properties for retail.”
Fountain Inn
Creating a database of available properties has driven Fountain Inn’s successful retail recruitment efforts, said City Administrator Shawn Bell.
The city was already working on its retail recruitment when Bell arrived in 2017.
“I spent probably the first year or so here in Fountain Inn making sure that folks knew that Fountain Inn was open for business and that we were growing residentially — that the rooftops were coming and that we were excited to have retail,” Bell said. “When you're doing economic development for a municipality, it's important to know your vacant properties, whether they're buildings or just green fields knowing those owners, knowing their real estate agents. I can look at a vacant building and not just know it as ‘100 Main St.,’ but also that's the building that Bob Smith owns. And I've got his number and we've met.”
Like Greenwood, Fountain Inn sought to extend its recruitment efforts beyond downtown, and focused on the SC Highway 418 corridor from Interstate 385 to Main Street.
“My predecessors had the foresight to put an overlay district on that commercial corridor,” Bell said. “I worked with a developer that was able to bring in a Starbucks and a Dollar Tree, and that has now opened the floodgates for that commercial corridor.”
A Wendy’s and Dunkin’ are now planned for that same corridor. Next up, Bell said, is to find a grocery store.
“We've also done a lot of market analysis about our retail leakage, and we have a tremendous amount of grocery dollars in Fountain Inn that are being spent in Simpsonville,” he said. “So, I've really been working for a long time on trying to get an additional grocery store on the southern part of town, probably on that SC 418 corridor. That's what our citizens want. And I think the grocery store developers recognize that we are probably about ready for it.”
Cayce
The City of Cayce went about its retail recruitment a little differently — officials there threw a party.
They invited artists, property owners and potential business owners to Cayce’s historic business district at Frink and State streets. They wanted to show a community that was vibrant, even if it needed some investment.
Cayce Mayor Elise Partin developed the idea after attending the Mayors’ Institute on City Design, said City Manager Tracy Hegler.
“We were doing a lot of redevelopment efforts, but we just weren't getting anywhere,” Hegler said. “The buildings were boarded up and shuttered and the owners had them just full of stuff. And we'd go to the owners and say, ‘Wouldn't it be great if you could get a business in here? Wouldn't you like that?’ And they'd say ‘Yes, of course we want that.’ But nothing was happening. It was a stagnant process.”
So Partin took the problem to the Mayors’ Institute in 2015.
“It's a fantastic opportunity for mayors from across the country to get together and they bring with them a problem or a challenge,” Hegler said. “There's a group of experts there that help solve that. She took revitalizing our original downtown as her challenge.”
The expert advice, she said, was that Cayce was not quite ready for revitalization, and instead it needed to “pre-vitalize.”
“You need to show people what this could be to inspire that next step,” she said.
The city hosted its first “Soiree on State” in 2017 after convincing building owners to open up their spaces, coordinate with local artists and show off what was there in the hopes of inspiring potential business owners to see things a little differently.
“It was kind of a street party/artist fair,” Hegler said. “And it was just wildly successful. Almost instantly one of those buildings was rehabbed and leased out for Swatch Graphics.”
The Soiree on State has happened every year since — except for 2020 because of the pandemic — and new businesses have followed, including Dialed Bicycles, Piecewise Coffee Co. and in May 2023, Trini Lime Caribbean Café — all located in what is now called the River Arts District.
The event, Hegler said, has served as “a sneaky redevelopment tool.”