Town of Tarboro, North Carolina

6 CIVIL AND MUNICIPAL VOLUME 3, ISSUE 10 TOWN OF TARBORO, NORTH CAROL INA after they started building, we had about 200 other houses that were built that weren’t even part of the program. They saw the market was viable. They started building houses and now we’ve got another 250 in the pipeline.” The new homes have been a boon for the town, whose homes are typically decades, if not centuries, old. “We’re a historic downtown,” Mayo explains. “Everything in downtown Tarboro is largely a historic house. They don’t make new historic houses and you can only sell them so many times. So it’s been great to see the new growth to the old tree with all that housing coming in. Now, we’ve got more houses coming up faster than anyone in our town could imagine ever being put there. It’s really neat.” It’s not just industry that has been driving growth in Tarboro. The town has seen an influx of people moving from other parts of the state to take advantage of its quiet quaintness and plethora of recreational opportunities. “A lot of that has to do with teleworking, if they can work businesses to find homes for their employees. “That’s when it really became evident,” Lewis recalls of the 2016 hurricane. “Residents of Tarboro, as well as nearby communities were displaced because of flooding and the plan from FEMA and emergency management was to place those people in other housing where they could. That’s where we started to see the picture that all of our houses were almost full. We just didn’t have anything available, including multi- family apartments, single family. And then, as we started seeing some growth in the industrial sector and them wanting to bring in new people for our workforce for these jobs, it became urgent that we find somewhere for them to stay.” That was an impetus for the town to aggressively start looking at options to improve its housing stock. “We came up with an incentive program that would incentivize new housing by participating in half the infrastructure costs,” Lewis says. “The program was successful, and a 32-lot subdivision was quickly approved. Then,