NC Main Street Housing Report

A look at Downtown Housing and Commercial Vacancy in North Carolina Main Street Communities

Completed by PlaceEconomics for North Carolina Main Street

Introduction

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.

To try to answer these questions, PlaceEconomics consulted multiple data sources, conducted a survey of Main Street Directors, and created analytical models to measure potential impacts and opportunities. Tables in the Appendices are an important part of this report and contain localized data on rents, Airbnb data, affordable rents for workforce housing and other information.

The pages that follow present the findings of this analysis. The intent is to provide the information and tools that will allow already successful Main Street programs to fine tune their efforts to maintain their 4+ decades of success as an economic and community development strategy.

Download the full Impact and Opportunity Report

NC Main Street Housing Report-final.pdf

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