Open for business: Chapel Hill focuses on economic development

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill has always been the Town of Chapel Hill's claim to fame. Thomas Wolfe, class of 1920, famously said his years of study there were "as close to magic" as he'd ever been.

While many graduates only return for homecoming or a brief stroll down Franklin Street, there are plenty of people who call Chapel Hill their permanent home and the town continues to paint a robust picture for its guests and citizens alike. It's not just a backdrop to the university; Chapel Hill is "open for business" and has become a breeding ground for companies in a variety of sectors.

Dwight Bassett, the town's economic development officer since 2007, has spearheaded much of the change.

"When I first arrived here, Chapel Hill had never spent any time on economic development," Bassett said. "We spent a year on strategy. In the end, the nutshell of it was to grow the tax base and create jobs."

As Bassett was gearing up, the financial downturn of 2008 hit. His team redirected, leveraging the period to perform benchmark studies on key areas like retail, housing and office space.

"We came to the realization that we didn't have market opportunity to support any growth in those sectors. Our entitlement process to allow development to occur was cumbersome, so we spent the next three years creating opportunities for markets so that we could compete in the Triangle," he said.

The town has been building out of the recession ever since. By 2014, 1 million feet of office space and 1 million feet of retail space were authorized for building, allowing Bassett and his team to respond when inquiries came their way.

However, building permits only dealt with one side of the coin. In a retrospective study examining the town's office market, Bassett realized it had been seven years since office space had actually been developed — the longest gap in the town's history.

"We'd been giving out a regional perception that we're not open to business," Basset pointed out. "Developers saw us as an irrelevant market."

To shift the reputation from a college town to a community ready to absorb new developments, promoting policy shifts and advocating for existing opportunities were essential. For example, the town council passed a zoning amendment for the Blue Hill district to incentivize commercial growth, just one of many actions with growth in mind.

"In 2011, we championed a master plan for what's now Carraway Village," Bassett said. "We were vocal advocates for the Obey Creek and Glen Lennox agreements. Council adopted an incentive policy, which we'd been aggressively working for a decade."

These helped level the playing field with Raleigh and Durham, and today, the momentum in Chapel Hill is evident. The town recently incentivized the developers of the Glen Lennox community to add an additional 500,000 square feet of office space. And at The Station at East 54 and Carolina Square, 200,000 square feet of office space are currently on the table.

"We're on a path to begin to rebuild the office market so that every year we're having fresh new space available for companies that want to do business in Chapel Hill," Bassett said.

Cultivating a welcoming environment for the entrepreneurial community has been another focus for the town. In 2010, Bassett, aware of the blooming startup cultures elsewhere in the region, toured Durham's largest (at the time) startup hub and co-working space, American Underground. He noticed an irony: Many of the individuals working there were UNC graduates or commuted from Chapel Hill.

"I thought to myself, 'We need to respond to this,'" Bassett recalled.

In 2013, Launch Chapel Hill, a business accelerator on Franklin Street, was created through a joint effort from the town, county and university. The accelerator trains and mentors 20 to 30 teams in its cohorts every year with the goal of helping them successfully launch.

"It was one way we began to capture some of what was lost to Durham," Bassett said.

Other efforts to attract a workforce to Chapel Hill include advocating for the development of more coworking spaces, like Carolina Coworking and 1789 Venture Lab, both of which are on Franklin Street. This intersection of Franklin Street usually associated with students looking for lunch or a drink, with business, serves as a metaphor for what's happening in the town on a larger scale.

However, as Chapel Hill's vision expands, some worry that growth will muddy the city's classic, small-town charm. Bassett has a different perspective.

"It's a difficult balancing act to maintain the character," Bassett said. "In reality, Chapel Hill is a mid-sized American city, but most people want to think of it in village terms."

Bassett and his team work hard to maintain Chapel Hill's classic persona and reflect it in new development. For example, the name of the Blue Hill district is a play on Chapel Hill.

"I think it's looking at who we've been in the past and who we may be in the future, which may be slightly different. Instead of downtown being the only place we think of as the village, there are opportunities for new districts to create growth without detracting from downtown," he explained.

At the end of the day, Bassett said the economic development plan is really about the town's residents.

"We're really a micropolitan city, but we have the quality-of-life standards you expect to find in Raleigh or Charlotte," he said, "In the longer term, we want to provide more opportunities for children, nieces, nephews and grandchildren of Chapel Hill residents to find internships and jobs here. And we want to maintain some of the workforce that comes off of UNC's campus."