The city of Clemson, South Carolina which boasts a population of approximately 12,000 full time residents and 17,000 student residents has focused on its planned retail growth over the past 4 years. The city understood that their retail sector would grow naturally, but in order to control the growth and have this coincide with the City’s initiatives, they began working with Buxton in 2006.

Below is a question and answer excerpt from an interview conducted with the City’s Program Manager, Andy Blondeau:

Buxton: Lowes announced last fall they were coming to Clemson. How is their project coming and did you provide any incentives to bring them to your city?

Andy Blondeau: The Lowes project is right on track – their plan reviews are done and they should open in early 2010. We don’t provide incentives for retailers per se, but we did provide them with an Infrastructure Reimbursement program where the City paid for new street lights, and Lowes will pay for the installation. We also paid to have a new stop light put in around the new site to help with traffic.

Buxton: We heard that Publix was also opening up in Clemson – how did this come to pass?

AB: Publix approached us about a site. They came to the planning and codes office looking for an available property. We found a track that they could assemble for a shopping area just off of Tiger Blvd. (just off of campus), and Publix will serve as the anchor for this area.

Buxton: What are you doing to promote the information you have on-hand provided by the Buxton study?

AB: I have the Buxton information on our website and I’ve also created a Property Guide that is updated monthly which includes any commercial real estate space available within the City.

We have a quarterly e-newsletter that we send out to anyone that has expressed interest in coming to our City as well as local developers. This started out with just a few prospects on the distribution list and now includes anyone I meet at trade shows, developers who call in to inquire about land, etc. After the newsletter goes out each month, I usually get a rash of inquiries for more information. As a follow up, I provide a cd that includes local data combined with the most pertinent Buxton data with a summary of the highlights of the Buxton report and provide a link to the full report if they want to dig deeper.

Buxton: Talk a little bit about the success you’ve had with retail since beginning your retail focus.

AB: Walgreen’s opened this past summer just off of campus. Landing one of the smaller footprint Lowes was a big win for our City. As far as restaurants go, we’ve had a Chick-Fil-A, Bojangle’s and a Brioso open. We’ve also had a Holiday Inn Express and Courtyard Marriott open in the past couple of months.

View the October 2009 Community Matters Newsletter