Our Economic Redevelopment Studio creates positive community growth by helping rewire old and new economic engines for superior outcomes. We create exciting live, work, and play spaces for all – and build joy by aligning the interests of municipalities and their neighborhoods, creating vibrant main street environments. We transform underused or vacant parcels into thriving, walkable downtown destinations.

Let us help you create energy with economic growth and a renewed sense of community that everyone wants to be a part of.

Where others see blight, decay, misuse, or disuse, Tim Elliott sees potential. A lot of potential. Tim is the director of JMT’s Economic Redevelopment studio where he works to reinvent towns and cities by connecting commerce, community, and culture for the benefit of all.

Tim earned his BS degree in Architecture from the University of Maryland and has more than 30 years of experience in architecture, design, administration, and project management for developments ranging in value from $20 million to $300 million. His development visionary work spans several states including New Jersey, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia, and incorporates over 38 buildings totaling more than a half-billion in construction over the past decade.

Tim’s motivation is to grow the economies of university towns for scale and culture and to create Downtown Joy for all.

There was a time when marketing furniture in High Point, NC, was wildly successful. This prompted the construction of a massive 13-million-square-foot furniture showroom downtown. However, that enormous space was only utilized twice each year. Outside of downtown, showroom market events, there was no downtown living or working product to make High Point a 24-7, 365 city.

Solution

Assembling a master vision of housing, office, dining, and retail in a strategic location was needed. A selected site of 14 acres was chosen for a new downtown High Point that would include a vibrant development with an approximate 5,000-seat baseball stadium where people can connect and enjoy their life with another privately owned 7 acres to be developed in the future.

Impact

We created a cultural working magnet: office buildings in the heart of the new downtown; a manicured urban pocket park perfect for time outside and out-of-the-box thinking; a food hall overlooking the stadium (and a great place to work from your laptop) – it’s meticulously planned for workplace freedom – work in the office, near the office, or outside of the office – and love every minute of it. Today, The Outfields welcomes all of High Point with open arms to shop, dine, gather with friends, catch a game, enjoy a festival, and marvel at a nighttime fireworks display.

As a result, High Point went from vacant to being named an “All-American City”.

Greenville, North Carolina was once the epicenter for leaf tobacco farming and auctioning. Then tobacco took a nosedive and the main economic driver for the city with it. In the years that followed the exodus of tobacco, the hospital grew to care for 12 counties in the surrounding area, propelling it to become a preeminent teaching hospital in the region with 9,000 employees. The university, East Carolina University (ECU), also grew tremendously and now boasts over 30,000 faculty and students. Both the hospital and the university are conveniently located in downtown Greenville and it just so happened that sitting between the two were 19 acres of vacant and dilapidated tobacco auction warehouses.

Solution

Develop the vacant historic structures and remaining property. We elevated the entire concept from an innovation hub to a Pacesetter Innovation Hub – an Olympic training center for champion businesses that encourages these industries to relocate R&D to Intersect East. We completely rewired and connected two existing, powerful economic engines – to help promote jobs, living, and new retail opportunities. They’re also training their future workforce with the best and brightest from ECU.

Our vision was to repurpose vacant rail lines and convert them into a hiking and biking trail with access points throughout this growing cultural district of restaurants and shops. We’re even remodeling an old train car and transforming it into a “food train” – not a food truck – a food train – for a full-service restaurant like no other.

Impact

Injecting $300 million cost in this 10-year project will reverberate to impact the city and the region by a projected $635 million and over 3,000 additional jobs.