Live, shop, thrive in downtown Macon: The shift that spurred new development

One of the newest additions to Macon’s downtown residential scene will be loft apartments opening up above the Lawrence Mayer Florist shop on Mulberry Street.

The lofts are one of 20 downtown Macon redevelopment projects since 2012 that received financing from a program operated through downtown booster agency NewTown Macon. The $10 million loan program has spurred $30 million of investment in downtown property.

Soon, the remaining $3.5 million will be available for another round of redevelopment.

The loan program has driven a $38 million increase in property values that’s brought in $1.3 million in annual property tax revenue to Macon-Bibb County, according to NewTown.

“You went from a place that felt mostly empty to a place that feels mostly alive,” NewTown President and CEO Josh Rogers said.

The lofts inside the Lawrence Mayer building are the second downtown project developer Trace Butler has used a NewTown Macon loan to help finance. Those projects wouldn’t be viable without the NewTown program and historic tax credits, Butler said.

“I think what’s happened (downtown) in the last decade has been nice but I think within the next decade it’s going to improve even more with the projects that have been announced or are underway,” he said.

The idea behind the loan program came at a time when the philosophy on downtown Macon’s revitalization shifted.

A market study in 2011 found there was a demand for 200 new apartment units per year around downtown. That year only 11 were built, Rogers said.

“We had really spent the past 10 years focusing on storefronts,” Rogers said. “You would walk around an empty downtown and think we need stores in those storefronts.”

The better route was to have more people move downtown and that would lead to more businesses opening.. Last year, there were 159 new apartment lofts that came into the downtown market.

The loft residents spend about $15,000 a year on new storefront services, Rogers said.

Now about 75 percent of downtown storefronts are filled. About 50 percent were vacant in 2012.

“Turns out the market demand was one story up from the storefronts,” Rogers said. “As the lofts started to fill out, the people who lived in the lofts had money to spend at the storefronts.”

In 2012, developers were interested in doing downtown projects, but typically a bank loan would only cover about half the cost. That’s when NewTown approached Bibb County government about starting the loan program, and a $5 million bond was floated for a four year period.

Typically, a developer contributes about 10 percent of their equity into a project while the bank and NewTown’s bond program covers the rest of the cost, Rogers said.

The loan program proved to be a critical piece for developers.

And as more residents choose to live downtown, new businesses such as Your Pie and Famous Mikes restaurants are opening up in the rehabbed buildings.

The rate of growth seems sustainable for the near future.

“We do we track occupancy monthly so we can tell if there’s anything softening and that would allow us to pull back on financing and pace things out a little bit further, Rogers said.

This story was originally published February 25, 2019 at 8:54 AM.