Spartanburg City News

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.

On our last episode, we took a look back at the recent history of Downtown Spartanburg growth and development, examining the pivotal moments and projects that set the stage for the headline-grabbing, precedent-setting investments we're seeing take shape in our city's core today. But why is all that growth meaningful to city residents? How does the projected $1.77 billion economic impact our community will see actually translate into increased opportunities for Spartanburg's people? What makes our story deeper than a simple embrace of growth for its own sake? Today on the podcast, we get City Manager Chris Story's take on those questions. Along the way we revisit his decades of experience working in the downtown development space, getting a sense of how that work has changed over the years and what we can learn about where Downtown Spartanburg is headed based on where it has been. Also crashing the party for this conversation is former City Communications Manager, Will Rothschild. Serving from 2011 to 2017, Will provides context for how messaging downtown's growth and development helped shape today's landscape.

It's tough to miss the signs of dramatic change in Downtown Spartanburg these days. With $800 million of development underway on a handful of blocks west of Church Street, the landscape looks a lot different than it did a few years ago and the skyline will soon look much different than it does today. But how did we get here? What were the moments in Downtown Spartanburg's recent history that built momentum for the current record-breaking investment we're seeing today. Today on the podcast, we're looking back at that recent history to provide context for the changes underway in our city's core, from streetscaping projects that improved the pedestrian landscape, to historic redevelopment projects that breathed new life into long vacant icons.

When we first launched the Spartanburg City Podcast in 2012, things were a bit different in our city. Having recently emerged from the worst effects of the Great Recession, downtown's redevelopment was just starting to regain some its lost momentum, the Northside had only recently approved its transformation plan, and while work the leadership in City Hall was working diligently to move Spartanburg forward, the local landscape didn't provide the kinds of obvious signs of progress we all see today. Moreover, local media hadn't picked up on a turnaround that was too early in its evolution to bear much tangible fruit. The people in the trenches sensed what was coming, but getting people to pay attention was another matter. The City Podcast was part of our attempt to fill the information void in those days, telling the story of Spartanburg's transformation and talking with the people within local government and beyond who were making that transformation possible. We cast a wide net, discussing not just downtown and neighborhood redevelopment, but also history, arts and culture, the nonprofit community, health and wellness, trail development and active living, and just about anything else we felt wasn't getting the attention it might deserve. For years, that model was successful, and many episodes became reference points for residents looking for information about a specific local topic or development. Also over those years, we got some company in sharing the good news. Partnering organizations beefed up their own marketing, local media began to pick up the story of Spartanburg's rise, and what had been a kind of information vacuum was filled with the buzz around our city's trajectory and its bright future. Recognizing this, late last year we put the City Podcast on hiatus until we could commit the staff time and energy into figuring out a viable path forward for it, and now we think we've done that. Put plainly, we're taking the City podcast back to its information gap-filling roots, refocusing the show on local government specifically, doing deep dives on topics that are meant to equip listeners with the tools they need to become more engaged residents and participants in their community's future. For this first episode, we're exploring the basics of local government structure in the City of Spartanburg, looking at how the Council-Manager form of government works in South Carolina. We'll discuss how this structure functions, the responsibilities of City Council, the Mayor, and the City Manager, and what the advantages of this system are for you as a resident.

In 2014, Pastor Nannie Jefferies saw a need in Spartanburg that no other organization was filling. After visiting with and ministering to incarcerated relatives of her parishioners, Pastor Jefferies was struck by the lack of assistance and hope those women had once they were released. Many of the women were often left with no alternative but to return to the same environments that had led them down the path to incarceration in the first place, putting them at much higher risk of recidivism. Recognizing the need to offer a better solution, Pastor Jefferies founded Angels Charge, which has been working to provide that solution for recently incarcerated women in Spartanburg ever since. Today on the podcast, we're talking with Pastor Jefferies about the work Angels Charge does and the impact that work has on the women served and the larger community they call home.

It was a storm unlike any in living memory in Spartanburg, and while the damage our region experienced from Hurricane Helene far exceeded everyone's estimates, the City and the community came together to put us on the road to recovery. Today on the podcast, we're talking with City Manager Chris Story, Fire Chief Pierre Brewton, and Public Works Director Jay Squires about the City's response to Hurricane Helene and the road ahead for Spartanburg.