Downtown Salisbury is moving in the right direction, but there is plenty of room for improvement, according to the person in charge of building downtown’s appeal.
Downtown has about 165,000 square feet of space available for redevelopment in the upper levels of buildings, according to Paula Bohland, executive director of Downtown Salisbury Inc.
The goal, Bohland said, is to get people living in that space.
“The idea … is to get as much of that space as possible to be residential,” she said.
Currently, there are about 80 residential units in the downtown area. Bohland said she’d like to see that figure grow to about 130. But how many people could end up living downtown isn’t set at an exact number.
It’s “really dependent on the how the space can be developed, and what the owners want,” she said.
Bohland said her group did an “exhaustive” inventory of the available space in the upper floors of downtown in April and March. There are 360 buildings in the downtown area including churches and government buildings, she said. Most buildings have a single owner, she added.
Bohland didn’t have a figure for how many of the residential units are currently vacant, but she said the retail spaces at the street level have about an 8 percent vacancy rate — down from 11 percent in March.
Salisbury City Council, last week, passed grant incentives to help promote development of downtown. Establishing those grants, which could total up to $200,000 for an individual project, was a goal council set in the spring.
Bohland said the incentives approved by City Council are very important because the state Legislature decided to stop the state’s historic preservation tax credit, but that the vast majority of investment toward development needs to come from the private sector.
Bohland said statistics show two groups are filling urban spaces, millennials and empty-nesters — older folks whose children have left home. Also, the Associated Press reported last week that apartment construction increased 19.2 percent in the past 12 months while single-family home construction had risen just 4.2 percent.
“We’re all in a great learning experiment of taking these statistics and learning how to take action based on them,” Bohland said.
She said she feels good about the direction downtown Salisbury is heading, but that it will need to continue to evolve to meet the needs of the economy and people.