Three PILOT towns were selected in 1977 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to test a premise: Historic Preservation is Economic Development. After demonstrating success, the National Main Street Center was established in 1980 to formalize the teaching process, and since then, has helped over 2000 communities restore economic vitality to their historic downtown districts.
The Main Street Approach is based on utilizing local assets, building a sense of place, identifying unique market characteristics, and can be tailored to a variety of situations using a practical adaptable framework of transformation strategies.
The Main Street Four Point Approach adapted to Industrial Park Development
- Organization: Create a foundation for asset based sustainable development, including unique funding partnerships and broad based community involvement
- Promotion: Position the development project as a community hub of innovation, tech transfer based economic development, and lifestyle support services
- Design: Build a sense of place that attracts people to work, live and visit extending the activity beyond the industrial park to include surrounding neighborhoods
- Economic Vitality: Develop an integrated collaborative collection of businesses that satisfy market needs and provide living wage jobs from technical to professional
GreenG Network will encourage every development project to consider these ideas:
- clean distributed energy systems to power the industrial park and provide next generation energy to surrounding neighborhoods via independent electrical grids
- community food hubs that combines aspects of farmers markets with local production of food in a “field to market” and “field to school” delivery model
- employer assisted housing finance models to provide enhanced next generation communities surrounding the industrial park
- workforce development programs that start in the primary and secondary education system and continue to communities of creative entrepreneurs
If you are interested in learning more, schedule a call. We love to talk about this.