OneSpartanburg, Inc. President & CEO Allen Smith discusses part of the Vision 2.0 plan with two community supporters. OneSpartanburg, Inc. photo
What began four years ago as a hopeful economic development strategy to make Spartanburg County more competitive for jobs and talent and improve quality of life for residents has so far surpassed even the most optimistic expectations.
Now entering its fifth and final year, the OneSpartanburg Vision Plan 2.0 has not only led to more economic growth in 2026 than all of last year, its leaders and supporters are already wondering how far it will take the county into the next decade.
“In 2016, we knew that we needed a comprehensive, data-driven community and economic development strategy,” said One Spartanburg, Inc. president and CEO Allen Smith in an October 2025 presentation the City Council. “So we started the process of building the One Spartanburg vision plan.”
Launched in March 2022, Vision Plan 2.0 was developed over six months by Broad Ripple Strategies, a 49-person consulting committee, a wealth of data, and input from more than 2,800 residents.
Year one alone brought more investment to downtown Spartanburg than ever before with many fast-track achievements, such as a $250-million investment spearheaded by The Johnson Group for multi-family housing, Class A office space, and entertainment to the City’s western gateway.
By year two, momentum was outpacing predictions, confidence, and even assumptions: Power Up Spartanburg, for example, created in 2023 as a county-wide initiative to transform the area into the No. 1 place in the U.S. to start, run, and grow a small business, engaged in its just first year with more than 1,600 small and minority businesses countywide.
That number is now close to doubling, and efforts have so far provided small business owners and entrepreneurs with more than $15 million in contracts to create 56 new businesses and 264 jobs.
“This is a community today where you can lose your job on a Monday and you can get another one on a Tuesday,” Smith said. “That's a blessing because there are a lot of communities in South Carolina right now where you can lose your job on a Monday and you have two choices: You can move, or you can plan to drive an hour to and from work every single day. That's just not the reality for people that call Spartanburg County home.”
On June 18, Smith greeted 60 attendees at the OneSpartanburg office to celebrate the plan’s four-year milestones and discuss the progress of 15 key initiatives, which include:
• Expanding Spartanburg’s Competitive Edge with Developing Talent. One of the vision’s most critical pieces, the aim is to connect every county student to a postsecondary degree, training program, or career-track job within one year of high-school graduation.
More than 600 paid internships were pledged by more than 100 employers for summer 2026, nearly double that of all internships in 2024 and 2025 combined.
And Talent Gap Analysis 2.0 was introduced in October 2025 as a tool to help industry leaders, business representatives, and educators understand the background of talent demographic considerations, particularly in the sectors of manufacturing, transportation and warehousing, hospitality, and healthcare.
• Attracting and Retaining more White-Collar Jobs. White-collar jobs based in Spartanburg County increased by 23 percent between 2015 and 2025, above the national average of 15 percent.
Several companies included AIRSYS Cooling Technologies, a global cooling solutions provider which invested $40 million to create 215 new jobs; Carolina Foothills Federal Credit Union, which established new headquarters in Spartanburg; and aerospace firm Woodward, Inc., which provided nearly $200 million to establish local operations and 275 new jobs.
• Adult Degree Completion. To help thousands of Spartanburg County residents with some college experience to earn an unfinished degree, OneSpartanburg, Inc. partnered with the Spartanburg Academic Movement to create Re:Degree.
To date, the program has engaged 1,743 people, with 592 people re-enrolling, and 74 competing a degree.
• Outdoor Recreation. The Saluda Grade Trails Conservancy successfully purchased the 31.5-mile rail corridor, marking the next step of development of the Saluda Grade Rail Trail.
The planned trail will travel through the Upstate into the mountains of Western North Carolina, through Inman, Campobello, and Landrum.
And the second phase of the Mary H. Wright Greenway Trail will add new connection points where existing trail connections end, adding about 1.25 miles to the overall trail system.
• Placemaking Enhancements. Keep OneSpartanburg Beautiful, led a total of 189 clean-up events in the past year through its ongoing work and a new Adopt-A- Road program. Utilizing 1,728 volunteers, clean-up efforts removed 39,920 pounds of litter countywide.
And a total of $219 million so far has been invested or announced in trailside multi-family and mixed-use developments. This includes the new Boxcar Apartments, the new location of Ciclops Cyderi & Brewery.
• Establish a Nationally Renowned Downtown. A new report by Clemson University indicates that construction projects in downtown Spartanburg, whether underway or completed since 2017, will have an economic impact of more than $1.77 billion countywide.
Downtown growth currently supports a total of 13,706 jobs – more than BMW, the county’s largest single employer.
Construction is also underway at the Joint Government Center, and sites are being prepped for Project CORE’s Grain District Office Building, West Main Street Office Building, West Main Street Hotel, and Magnolia Multifamily Building.
“We're in a special moment right now in the City of Spartanburg, particularly
downtown,” Smith said in the October presentation. “The state as a whole will see almost a $ 1.9 billion economic impact by what's happening in downtown Spartanburg.”
And while it sounds like a lot, it is, in many ways, only the start of a much bigger ambition – one that even now is expected to far outdistance all previous accomplishments.
“The process of building Vision Plan 3.0 is underway,” Smith said. “We have formalized this portion of our work under the OneSpartanburg, Inc. Foundation, ensuring we can sustain and propel efforts that elevate and evolve our community.”
