Downtown Holly Springs is blooming. Like a tree in spring, Holly Springs’ long-held vision for the Village District is beginning to bear fruit.
Construction is nearing completion for Town Hall Commons, a mixed-use development on the 200 block of South Main Street across Ballentine Street from Town Hall. It is bringing 45,000 square feet of offices, retail businesses and restaurants to downtown. Next to Town Hall Commons, construction has begun on The Block on Main, a three-story mixed-use development totaling more than 52,000 square feet.
To support this downtown transformation, the town has invested approximately $10 million in public infrastructure that includes hundreds of parking spaces, road improvements and storm water management. The additional parking includes a two-level deck just behind Town Hall Commons.
Irena Krstanovic, the town’s Economic Development director, said that one of the distinguishing characteristics of Holly Springs’ downtown development is its local involvement. “It’s not your national builders,” she said. “It’s your homegrown developers who have seen the potential here and are willing to invest.”
One of The Block on Main’s tenants will be Rendering House, with its growing staff of graphic artists, computer modelers and software developers. The firm’s owners, Stephen Chan and John Lee, became major investors in The Block so that they could expand their business while remaining practically a stone’s throw from their current Raleigh Street location. Without the development downtown, Rendering House likely would need to seek new space outside of Holly Springs. “When people can live and work and play in a town,” Chan said, “it’s a very satisfying life.”
Another major investor in The Block is Jon Harol, founder of the Coworking Station. It will move to The Block from the former police station adjacent to Town Hall and have triple the space. Harol said that having the Coworking Station downtown facilitates more activity there and what he calls “cross-pollination,” citing a need for a place that unique businesses can call home. “I think that one of the major values of co-working is beneficial collisions that are almost accidental,” he said. “When that guy that you get coffee next to every day needs a website, they’re more likely to use the guy they’ve gotten to know.”
The existing location for the Coworking Station opened its doors in 2016 and provides flexible office space to tenants. It’s intended for people who don’t want to sign a long-term lease, those who need to scale their business up or down, people who only want to work a certain number of days per week or remote workers who want to get out of their homes. “There were just a ton of people who worked from home here,” Harol said. “We saw that there was a need for this community to interact with people.”
A few blocks away, construction of a 50-bed hospital has begun on the UNC Rex Healthcare campus at N.C. 55 and Main Street. The target date for completion is January or February 2021. The hospital will bring hundreds of jobs while fulfilling a long-time quest by town leaders to provide residents with fast, in-town access to hospital care.
In addition to the shops and restaurants of Town Hall Commons and The Block on Main, other retail and restaurant development coming to the Village District includes a restaurant in the historic Brown-Holloway House on the 200 block of North Main Street. A former home across Main Street from Town Hall Commons is being converted into a consignment store, gift shop and coffee house.
Downtown development is giving more Holly Springs business owners and entrepreneurs opportunities to start or grow their businesses close to home. “It all started with listening to what the residents wanted,” Krstanovic said. Success in economic development comes from relationships with community partners. “We have worked hard on establishing those relationships with our local businesses — understanding their needs and really listening to what they have to say,” Krstanovic said. “Eighty percent of job growth comes from your existing businesses, and I think that is something that is often overlooked.” The town’s Economic Development Department mailed letters to more than 500 home-based businesses in the area asking what their challenges were in growing a business in Holly Springs. The resounding response was that they needed a place to congregate and network. “In economic development, we focus on the recruitment of large and small companies,” Krstanovic said. “In light of that, we wanted to look at it from a local perspective and try to find people that were in their bonus rooms, their attics, their garages. They’re the backbone of your community, they’re the people that you want to engage with.”
In 2017, Holly Springs became a Certified Entrepreneurial Community — the first in North Carolina. The CEC certification has given Holly Springs entrepreneurial street cred, but it’s also
given the town a new sense of purpose. The program helps a city decide what initiatives would make it
more entrepreneur-friendly, and then creates a system and strategy to help those visions become a reality. Anna Johnston, project manager for the Economic Development Department, said the two biggest gaps that were seen were downtown economic activity and also support for entrepreneurs.
The community identified two initiatives to engage and support entrepreneurs:
Help local business people find and leverage the business resources that serve Holly Springs.
Develop events and physical planning to make downtown Holly Springs a great place to live, work and play.
An example of downtown events was RaceFest in November 2017, a downtown celebration that coincided with the Holly Springs Half Marathon.
Downtown promotion was a reason why the town’s Planning and Zoning Department established the Holly Springs Farmers Market a dozen years ago.
This spring, the town assisted with the inaugural SpringsFest, a Chamber of Commerce celebration on April 27 showcasing recent development downtown with vendor tents, food trucks, a beer garden, and a car and truck show.
John Dalpe, a Holly Springs resident and business owner, was leader of a group that focused on bringing awareness to the growth of downtown.
Dalpe said Town government leaders and staff are very supportive of the business community and want it to succeed.
Town Engineering Director Kendra Parrish said the impetus of much of the public infrastructure funding downtown was born from the goals of the CEC initiative.
For years, progress “on the ground” was limited. Most of it was occurring beneath the surface, laying the groundwork. Examples of public investment over the past dozen years include decorative sidewalks, street lights and benches along Main Street; underground utilities; public Wi-Fi and a fiber optic network; landscaping; road improvements; and more downtown events.
With the roots established, Holly Springs’ Village District is transforming into the kind of downtown that town leaders and residents have long desired.
