Impact and Opportunity: A look at Downtown Vacancy in North Carolina Main Street Communities
By any measure, the North Carolina Main Street program is an extraordinary success story. Since starting with five communities in 1980, the program today includes 50 accredited communities and 22 affiliated programs. Over the past 46 years these communities have seen hundreds of new businesses, thousands of new jobs, and billions of dollars in private investment. But one of the reasons for the success of North Carolina Main Street is its commitment to identifying and quantifying its opportunities, challenges, and impacts. This study is a continuation of that tradition.
This analysis was commissioned to answer four questions:
1. When a unit of housing is created in the upper level of a downtown building, or in a close-in neighborhood, how much buying power does the new resident bring to the local economy?
2. When a downtown storefront sits empty for a year, what is the cost in lost opportunity to the community?
3. What are the differences, both to the property owner and to the community, of a housing unit being developed as a full-time apartment as compared to use as a short-term rental unit?
4. What is the economic condition of Main Street downtowns in terms of housing, rent levels, and the types of businesses that are operating and closing.