Kinston, North Carolina

ments over first floor commercial enterprises. In addition, the city is changing its downtown traffic patterns - downsizing a four lane road to two and converting parallel parking to diagonal parking, in order to increase parking options for down- town shoppers. “We’re trying to offer traffic calm- ing measures to make downtown more walkable and safer,” he adds. “We’re also changing out the trees. Sometimes the older trees have a thicker canopy that makes it difficult to read the names of a business along our downtown area.” Another part of Kinston’s revitalization is the city’s Riverwalk Project, funded by the Depart- ment of Transportation, and recently designated as a section of the North Carolina’s “Mountains to Sea Trail,” a long-distance trail for hiking, biking, and backpacking that traverses the state from the Great Smoky Mountains to its Outer Banks. “It goes through one of the focal point parks in our downtown and connects a lot of locations: Mother Earth Brewing, the Chef & the Farmer, downtown shops, and several other locations,” says Short. “We see that as a great opportunity to build and develop in our downtown. It provides a multi-modal way for people to move across town without having to use their cars.” Because North Carolina prohibits municipal jurisdictions from offering tax credits to develop- ers unless the proposed development is directly associated with providing employment, Kinston has had to rely on several state and federal programs that allow it to offer tax incentives only for the rehabilitation of historic buildings or the repurposing of former industrial sites. “And since Kinston is almost 257 years old, we have a lot of buildings that qualify for those historic tax credits,” says Sears. For example, Hill’s O’Neil Boutique Hotel, which was formerly the Farmers & Merchants Bank building, completed in 1924, made use of those special tax credits. “Without those tax credits, we wouldn’t have access to the toolkit for revitalization; it’s very important