Greenville had become the economic and cultural heart of Upstate South Carolina, and its success was the problem. Previous investment had turned its downtown and riverfront into a national example, and the city’s quality of life was drawing new jobs and residents at a rapid pace. But that growth was consuming more land, pushing housing prices up, and worsening traffic. By 2020, the strain on infrastructure, housing costs, and open space was undeniable, and the question on everyone’s mind was whether Greenville would become a victim of its own success. The city hired CZB to build a new comprehensive plan that could guide routine decision-making through what came next.
Greenville wasn’t questioning whether to keep growing. The community coalesced quickly around a different question: how to grow differently. Open space, affordable housing, and mobility rose fast as the three priorities that mattered most, but turning agreement into direction required quantifying exactly how severe the growing pains had become. The onset of the Covid-19 pandemic in spring 2020 added a real complication, forcing the process to weigh whether recent growth trends were about to change entirely.
Over an eighteen-month process spanning 2019 and 2020, CZB designed and facilitated a planning process built around a steering committee of more than forty members. Committee meetings were hours-long working sessions built around interactive exercises and genuinely difficult choices, not presentations. That work was supplemented by regular online surveys and multiple open house events, giving the broader community repeated opportunities to weigh in on critical decisions as they came up. Three scenarios were developed and modeled to project how different growth paths could affect population, housing, transportation, and open space through 2040. The steering committee and the public evaluated the results together, selected a preferred scenario, and its attributes became the foundation of the plan.
GVL2040 was unanimously adopted by Greenville’s City Council in February 2021, giving the city a new framework for where and how it would grow. The plan went on to win the 2021 Outstanding Planning Project Award from the South Carolina Chapter of the American Planning Association, the top planning honor in the state — the awards committee noted that GVL2040 received the highest marks of any submission that year.
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