fbpx
University News

Carolina program helps revitalize NC towns

The demand was undeniable. Downtown streets were in desperate need of revitalization, historic buildings were wearing away with neglect and prime parcels of land sat empty without a purpose in many of North Carolina’s towns.

Tyler Mulligan leads a class.
Tyler Mulligan talks to seminar participants at the School of Government at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

They call them “wicked problems,” the complicated, long-term, seemingly impossible, hard-to-wrap-your-head-around issues for which solutions seem far away.

The team involved in the School of Government’s Development Finance Initiative (DFI) specializes in them, and they’re teaching students how to tackle them, too.

DFI partners with local governments across the state to attract the private investments they need to revitalize their communities. Community revitalization is one of those “wicked problems” said Tyler Mulligan, who teaches both public officials and graduate students about community development, finance and revitalization.

“You don’t always know from the start how you’re going to make it work, and that can be daunting,” said Mulligan.

DFI itself was borne from a perplexing problem: Local government officials often asked Mulligan to visit their towns and assist them with their communities’ needs. But, he couldn’t do it on his own.

“It’s part of my job to advise these officials and answer their calls and emails when they need me, but I couldn’t provide intensive assistance to every community, and the challenges they face require a multi-disciplinary approach,” he said. “It soon became clear that a team of professionals was needed to answer the call for assistance.”

The demand was undeniable. Downtown streets were in desperate need of revitalization, historic buildings were wearing away with neglect and prime parcels of land sat empty without a purpose in many of North Carolina’s towns.

Most of these towns have small administrative staffs and don’t employ someone with expertise in development or who has a strong familiarity with the private sector, but the School of Government does.

“I thought, what if we could build on the development expertise we already have here and deliver that to communities where it could have the most impact?” said Mulligan, who conceived DFI and now serves as the program’s faculty advisor. “Community leaders were telling us that they needed someone with technical expertise to provide intensive assistance with their community development challenges.”

In 2010, the Local Government Federal Credit Union (LGFCU) funded the creation of DFI for five years and this summer increased that support for an additional 10 years. The school promised to use that gift to create a self-sustaining program to help serve distressed communities across North Carolina.

Real clients, real challenges

To help turn this idea into practice, the school reached out to Michael Lemanski, a real estate expert who founded Greenfire Real Estate Holdings, one of the lead investment and master development firms behind the revitalization of Durham’s city center.

To keep reading this story, visit the University Gazette.