Adaptive Reuse for Mixed-use Development

Today’s post originally appeared in VHDA’s Fall 2015 Community Outreach Report.

Vast natural resources and easy accessibility are just a few of the assets that Southern Virginia offers. Recognizing their collective strengths, in the past few years the region’s localities have developed greater regional partnerships to facilitate economic development.

Planters Brick Tobacco Sales Warehouse

This approach to economic development focuses on local communities and entrepreneurship, in addition to efforts to recruit large employers. As a part of this strategy, and building on years of effort to combat blight and declining investment in small towns, two Mecklenburg County towns partnered with the Southside Planning District Commission and VHDA to look at downtown residential development as an opportunity for economic growth.

The Town of South Hill used VHDA’s Mixed-use/Mixed-income (MUMI) planning grant to explore the potential for the adaptive reuse of four vacant downtown properties and to identify other potential properties.

The Town of Clarksville is using a MUMI planning grant to look at the opportunity for redevelopment of a significantly historic, but severely dilapidated, former tobacco warehouse. In addition to physical assessments of the buildings, the town is studying the market for affordable rental housing, and assembling potential designs for adapting the properties to include downtown rental housing.

Both studies will provide the municipalities with strategies to achieve their development priorities and help them identify potential developers with the interest and experience to take on these types of projects.

For more information on VHDA’s MUMI program, contact Director of Community Housing Beth Seward at 804-343-5615 or Elizabeth.Seward@vhda.com.

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