How Greensboro’s 2025 Comprehensive Plan is Affecting Real Estate Development

In 2003, the City of Greensboro developed a vision for the future of the city, addressing the current and projected future needs to make Greensboro a more prosperous place. We are far closer to 2025 now than to 2003, so many of their goals have come to fruition, or are well on their way to doing so.

Part of the Plan was to create an Economic Development Investment Fund (EDIF) to boost locally-owned businesses through incentivizing real estate development. Their incentives included increasing the flexibility of codes allowing for easier construction processes, designing a faster process to review and approve development proposals, abating taxes, and waiving fees for property developers.

The City of Greensboro also planned to fund the expansion of infrastructures such as water and sewer lines and roads to allow for construction in places which at that point were undeveloped.

These actions to incentivize real estate development have shown much fruit, especially in the 2010s. Greensboro has grown with dozens of new businesses of all kinds. There exist numerous restaurants and companies now thriving in the city which did not exist seventeen years ago. Greensboro and its surrounding communities had been losing manufacturing and light industrial jobs, but in recent years has been gaining thousands of them.

Last year, Amazon.com announced its plans to open a fulfillment center in Kernersville, saying it would bring over 1000 full-time jobs to the community, starting at $15 per hour. The construction of the more than 1-million-sq-ft center has been a massive undertaking, between obtaining land and permits to building a humongous warehouse with a large parking lot for employees and space for dozens of trucks.

Also in 2019, HondaJet announced the construction of an 80,000 sq foot addition to their assembly facility at the PTI airport, where they make all of their planes, adding likely hundreds of jobs. Such an addition likely took a lot of work on the land development side.

These examples are a couple of many that show how Greensboro’s 2025 Comprehensive Plan has been boosting business by expanding the ability to develop real estate.