Business View Magazine | November 2019

290 BUSINESS VIEW MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 2019 ATLANTA REAL ESTATE AND PLANNING CONSULTING SERVICES 1447 Peachtree Street NE, Suite 610, Atlanta GA 30309 404.845.3550 | www.blagroup.com Market Analysis • Economic Impacts and Feasibility Development Financing • Transit-Oriented Redevelopment Redevelopment Strategies • Housing Policy & Market Analysis to invest and reinvest.” “The biggest we have for our downtown and midtown areas is a Tax Allocation District (TAD) designation,” Ligon remarks. “We have that in place for those 50 acres and in our midtown area, and south of downtown, for about 250 acres. We’ve seen several people take advantage of that incentive and we anticipate some of the larger projects will also take advantage of it. If that TAD, that financial tool, were not in place, I don’t know that those projects would happen. We also have, just recently, adopted another TAD on the western side of town to help promote some redevelopment there in some of our older retail areas. We also have a Federal Opportunity Zone designation as well as a State Opportunity Zone designation. The federal Opportunity Zone is very new across the country; we think that we’ll have some folks taking advantage of that in our downtown, midtown, and other areas, but we haven’t seen that, yet.” Apart from downtown redevelopment, Gainesville also promotes its industrial parkland. “A firm that’s in the process of relocating is a company called Fox Factory,” Lackey reveals. “They’re California- based, right now, but they have announced that they’re moving their manufacturing and their headquarters to Georgia and they’re moving here with a thousand jobs. They make high-end racing shocks and parts, and they have a relationship with the racetrack, Road Atlanta. While it’s not in Gainesville, it is located in Hall County, and they want to be close by. They bought one of our last industrial park sites within the city. Gainesville has a rich history of developing industrial parks – we have seven – and because we’re now out of space, the city is now in the process of developing our next business park. We’re calling it the Gainesville 85 Business Park. It’s 1,300 acres that the city has owned for many years and it’s been sitting vacant for some time. We saw the opportunity, now that we’re out of industrial space, and it’s been met with rave reviews. We’re still in the environmental approval stage, working through the Corps of Engineers process, yet we already have businesses that are trying to claim their spot in that park,