Community planning process to create vision for Duncan Park improvements

Thousands of people experience homelessness throughout Spartanburg County over the course of a year, many of them within our city. However, most are never seen on a downtown bench or sidewalk. Many are living in cars, in motels, or couch surfing with a friend or family member. Some are single adults, but many are parents or children. The distance between what many people picture and what is actually happening is where this conversation begins. In this episode of the City Podcast, we sit down with Deputy City Manager Mitch Kennedy, A Place to Call Home Director Hannah Jarrett, and City Police Department's Maj. Art Littlejohn to walk through the City's response to homelessness. The City's approach goes back nearly a decade, moving through the initial Homeless Taskforce that kickstarted the effort Spartanburg has today, a partnership that has created efforts like the Homeless Court, the HEART team's dedicated street outreach, Workforce Heroes, and ultimately lead to the creation of A Place to Call Home. The conversation also takes on the questions residents ask most often. Why does someone remain on the streets when help is available? What can a city require of an adult, and what can it only offer? When does a situation become a matter that requires police assistance or enforcement? Our conversation is candid about the limits, discussing gaps beyond the City's control and what it means to work collaboratively to address a systemic issue far larger than any one organization's capacity. The centerline connecting it all is the balance the City must work to hold between the dignity and rights of people living unsheltered, the rights of property owners in our community, and ensuring that our public spaces remain accessible and work for everyone.

We've done City budget podcasts before, but this year we wanted to do something different. City Manager Chris Story joins us for a conversation less about what's in the budget and more about why it looks the way it does. How does the property tax revenue generated by growing commercial development take pressure off of city homeowners? What does a 48 percent jump in hospitality revenue over five years say about downtown? What are the City's greatest challenges around maintaining core services? What could future rising revenues allow the City to do to improve quality-of-life for our residents, invest in affordable housing, and advance community development efforts? On today's podcast, we're getting the story behind the numbers, and the thinking behind the choices.

While City Staff from across a wide swath of departments have always worked to keep Downtown Spartanburg humming, our recently added Downtown Manager, Jamie Smith, has brought a new level of coordination to those efforts. Coming to the role from his previous experience working with the Highland community, coordinating efforts between neighborhood leaders, partnering organizations, and the City team, Jamie is well-versed in what it takes to bring people together across sectors to create the shared focus needed to enable positive change. Today on the podcast, we're talking Jamie to get his first impressions of the Downtown Manager role, his work with downtown business owners and stakeholders, and his coordination with our City team.

In 2024, City Council allocated $5 million of the City's federal ARPA (American Recovery Plan Act) dollars to facilitate development of new affordable housing. The move served as both a recognition of an obvious need in our city, namely more quality housing that can serve Spartanburg's cost-burdened residents, and as a statement of our values. The City of Spartanburg doesn't just believe in the importance of affordable housing as a conceptual "nice to have," but as a priority worthy of nearly a third of all the ARPA funding our community received. What has that funding produced so far? Quite a lot. The $3.8 million distributed so far has been used to leverage more than $60 million in development either proposed or underway, representing around 200 units of affordable housing units for renters and homebuyers (reserved for residents with household incomes at or below 80 percent of area median income). How does all that work? What are the various housing types and projects that we've invested in? How have those ARPA funds been used to boost our usual affordable housing development efforts? Today on the podcast, we have Community Development Director Martin Livingston with us to share the details. For full specifics on how our ARPA affordable housing dollars have been spent so far, follow this link.

On this episode of the City Podcast, we're taking a peek behind the curtain of our marketing operations to talk about a campaign we put together last year in response to some big changes we knew were coming to the Downtown Spartanburg parking landscape. While it has been true for decades that the City's downtown parking garages have provided an affordable, convenient, and safe option for visitors and workers, several nearby surface lots meant that many folks may not have ever bothered using one. With over $800 million in new development set to take those lots offline at the same time it takes Downtown Spartanburg to the next level, our team knew we had to do some work helping to change some existing longtime parking behaviors. What we came up with was a broad-based information campaign, designed to highlight not only the garages, but to demonstrate all the ways our team has worked to make the transition to those garages as seamless as possible for our visitors, workers, and businesses.