Business View Magazine | July 2019

364 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE JULY 2019 Today, many suburban malls are declining and business owners, residents, and visitors are once again interested in being downtown. City leaders who proactively promote downtown as a place to invest in, live in, work in, and play in are seeing success. “We had some plans in place, and there was a lot of organizing, planning, and strategizing but it wasn’t until we had a full-time staff in place that all that planning evolved into action,” said Braselton Downtown Manager, Amy Pinnell. The renovated department store is now fully occupied with nine tenants including the downtown office. Visitors saw the city’s efforts to revitalize downtown and wanted to be a part of it. GMA also reacted to what was happening in downtowns, creating the Georgia Cities Foundation in 1999. Originally, the Foundation served as a source of low-interest loans for downtown projects, often providing the last bit of funding a developer needed to make a project feasible. Today, the Foundation’s mission has grown to include training, strategic planning for downtown revitalization, and a place making initiative. The Foundation’s loans total $25 million over the past 20 years. These loans have resulted in over $133 million of private investment and over 1,500 new pictured above Executive Director, Larry Hanson