Guiding Greenville County: How a High-Growth Community is Planning for the Year 2040
How innovative scenario planning and strategic community engagement cultivated a shared community vision.
Plan Greenville County shapes a shared vision for the future of a large metropolitan county in Upstate South Carolina. The plan casts a 20-year vision for the continued improvement of the community and provides the foundation for future land use and development regulations that will impact the future of the community in significant ways. Crucially, the plan also offers a road map for future coalition-building and strategic decision-making for elected and appointed officials.
MKSK led a team of consultants (Orion Planning + Design, Infrastructure Consulting & Engineering, RCA, Conduit Planning, and Black & Veatch) and Greenville County staff on the development of the project, which set out to accomplish three major goals:
Take a proactive approach to growth. Greenville County’s population is expected to increase by over 40% from 514,000 residents in 2018 to 736,000 in 2040. At the same time, employment in the County is anticipated to increase from 262,000 jobs in 2018 to 370,000 jobs in 2040. The question of where people are going to live, work, and play is fundamental to future land use, prosperity, and quality of life in the County. The plan addresses these questions with a future land use map and policy recommendations designed to promote desired growth in the urbanized core and curb unwanted development in the mountainous northern and agricultural southern stretches of the County.
As part of a scenario planning process, MKSK developed a series of land use models to illustrate how today’s policy decisions can impact the future of Greenville County.
Build consensus for decision makers. The comprehensive planning process included twenty community meetings (these meetings drew 1,000 attendees who provided over 9,000 comments and data points), a statistically valid survey, and numerous convenings of a citizens advisory committee and stakeholders advisory committee as well as numerous meetings with educational and economic development leaders, planning commissioners, and County councilors. (The final plan and related documents are located at the project website: www.plangreenvillecounty.org.) The result of this thorough engagement process is a sense of consensus, clarity, and confidence among citizens and decision makers regarding the big planning-related issues the County will confront in the coming years.
MKSK developed a community outreach strategy that included a public meeting toolkit that enabled consultants and County staff to facilitate nearly two dozen community meetings during the planning process
Create a foundation for future planning and development. Plan Greenville County includes 10 goal statements, 32 measurable objectives, and over 100 implementation strategies that address partnerships, funding sources, and time frames for key initiatives and efforts. The plan includes a future land use map that is designed to address the character of the diverse communities within the County, with a flexible set of “character areas” to help define the unincorporated County (most of which is unzoned).
MKSK developed a series of renderings to illustrate how the County can accommodate future population and employment growth while retaining community character.
Plan Greenville County will be adopted in January 2020. In February, the County will get to work on one of MKSK’s key recommendations: the development of a unified development code that will reimagine the County’s zoning and land development regulations in order to promote context- and environmentally-sensitive development in the coming years.