Hickory increases funding to fight downtown vacancies

When Dave Leonetti looks at maps of downtown Hickory, he doesn’t see streets or points of interest. He just sees vacant buildings. Lots and lots of vacant buildings.

Some of them are from the 1970s, some from the 1980s. Some were even built in the 1990s. Some used to be restaurants, many used to be factories and some used to be warehouses.

But now, they’re all empty.

As senior planner for the city of Hickory, Leonetti worked with the City Council to come up with the Vacant Building Revitalization and Demolition Grant to try and spur reuse.

That was in September of 2008. But the grant money, up to $25,000 per project, just hasn’t seemed to be enough of an incentive. That led the City Council this month to up the grant amounts and the program’s requirements.

Under the new program, the grants will top out at $30,000 or 15 percent of a project’s costs, whichever is less.

The grants will only be awarded as reimbursements, and the building must have been vacant for at least 12 months and be at least 10,000 square feet. Only projects in which investors spend at least $75,000 will be eligible.

“People can use this money to help fix windows, repair facades, fix exterior work or those kinds of things,” Leonetti said. “But this is only for commercial or industrial properties.”

Over the past three years, the program has barely made a dent in the amount of vacant properties in the town’s central business district. There were 2 million square feet of vacant space in the CBD in January 2010. By this past October, the figure had fallen to 1.8 million square feet, according to the city’s records.

“Most of that was because people began reusing some of that space,” Leonetti said. “Some of it was because of demolition.”

The grant program was based on an idea presented by Councilwoman Sally Fox at a 2008 planning retreat. Since its inception, 15 grants have been awarded, but one of the projects fell through: The former Peddler Steakhouse restaurant building at 1180 Lenoir Rhyne Blvd. is still empty.

One project that did work out was a new warehouse and corporate offices for Unifour Fire and Safety.

“We worked on up-fitting the building over the last two years,” Morgan Anderson, owner of Unifour Fire and Safety, said. The company moved into the building at 1025 Tate Blvd. — formerly a textile mill for Louis Lavitt Inc. — about two weeks ago but bought it in 2009.

Anderson said he bought it at an auction after the textile company went into bankruptcy. He declined to say how much he paid for the 40,000-square-foot building and the roughly 5.5 acres of land, but Catawba County tax records show the site is worth $663,400.

Anderson said the building needed a lot of work before it could go from a textile mill to selling fire equipment and sprinkler
systems.

“It had really good bones,” he said. “But after they built it really well in the 1970s, they didn’t do much to it. When we came in, it still looked like the same people had decorated it as had decorated ‘The Brady Bunch’ house. It had everything but the disco ball.”

Anderson and his 40 employees modernized the offices and reformatted the warehouse space, but the real challenge was the parking lot. That’s where the building reuse grant helped. The project got the then-maximum of $25,000 to repave the lot and rework the driveways to allow access to both Tate Boulevard and Ninth Street.

The parking lot work cost Anderson about $50,000, so the city ended up reimbursing him for half.

David Moore, owner of Hickory Mechanical Inc., also got a grant to fix up an old furniture plant in the CBD. The former home of North Hickory Furniture Co., at 509 11th St., is now home to a facility that makes piping for heating and air conditioning. Moore bought the building at an auction in 2010 and said he paid about $100,000 for the 105,000-square-foot facility.

But it needed a lot of roof work, Moore said.

Moore spent $120,000 fixing the roof and making other repairs inside the building. Hickory’s reuse grant helped with the roof project, and Hickory Mechanical was eligible for the entire $25,000 grant.

“The reuse grant was a factor for us,” Moore said. “I’m not sure if we would’ve cancelled the project without it, but it helped us get some things fixed we otherwise might would’ve left undone.”

Helping projects along is the central point of the grant program, said Todd Hefner, Hickory’s economic and community development manager.

“Hopefully, we have the worst of the worst buildings occupied or demolished by now,” he said.

Leonetti said the program also provides grants for demolition. They cover up to 35 percent of demolition costs or $20,000, whichever is higher.

Leonetti said the program has detractors who say the government is trying to solve the city’s vacancy problem by just throwing money at it.

“This is one of the reasons that we have the requirements of the performance agreements to make sure the person renovating is holding up their end of the bargain,” Leonetti said. “And we have had some people look at it and tell us it still isn’t enough money to get them to renovate one of these buildings.”

Anderson said he was happy with the end result, but he had complaints, too.

“There are hoops you have to jump through,” he said. “You have to get two or three bids on something, and it is kind of a pain. But if you’re doing a project like this and not getting two or three bids … you’re a moron anyway.”

Baughman can be reached at [email protected].