Business View Magazine | February 2020

209 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE FEBRUARY 2020 Trademark(s) are the property of BCI Burke Company. © BCI Burke Company 2020. All Rights Reserved. 919-781-4870 It’s time to make childhood an adventure again and we are on a mission. A mission to bring adventure, fun and play back to each playground in every community we serve. Join our Movement and see how play can move you! Join our Movement at barrsrec.com Exclusive Representative of Play That Moves You ® Kiwanis Family Park - Sanford, NC SANFORD , NORTH CAROL INA a Mayor’s Residential Task Force and brought developers and builders in from surrounding regions and talked to them about our process for doing business and what would incentivize them to look at Sanford as their next location. Once we told our economic development story and convinced some of them to take a risk and come, the doors opened, and we have just announced 1,800 new home sites with one national builder, over the next five or six years. And we have created more interest in other pieces of land for private, residential development.” Downey adds that in addition to attracting new businesses in order to create jobs, and then attracting developers to build new housing for the new workers, Sanford felt it equally important to reinvest in the city’s existing spaces and neighborhoods. “To that end, the council has taken on several initiatives,” he states. “Probably the most dominant is the East Sanford Initiative, which concerns a section of town that is one of the older sections and, though not in tremendous disrepair, needs some attention. The majority of that area is within an Opportunity Zone, so we are looking at a number of strategies to partner with the private sector, again, to solicit different ways to get reinvestment in that area, whether it’s through housing tax credits, or other low-income tax credits, or using the toolbox of the Opportunity Zone to generate interest in that community. So, we’re trying to look for new construction and new growth, but also trying to take care of, and promote reinvestment in, the older parts of town, as well.” “It’s a hundred-year-old neighborhood called East Sanford, that abuts downtown and has over a thousand properties in it that have come into some disrepair,” says Mann. “We brought in a consultant, DFI (Development Finance Initiative) from the UNC School of Government, to help us understand and address our challenges and opportunities and strengths there. And we found out that this might be a much more doable project than we ever dreamed it could be. And Rendering of Charlotte Avenue designed by the city working with the NC Dept.