I never thought I would have to go over to Greenville, South-damn-Carolina to see the future, but I’m glad I went, thanks to the Athens-Clarke Heritage Foundation bus trip on Saturday, May 24. Greenville has brought its downtown in the last 30-plus years from abandoned to vibrant, and of course it didn’t happen by accident.

Greenville is not Athens, in spite of some similarities. Greenville is a lot larger than Athens, even though it doesn’t have a dominant university. Greenville is a moneyed town, with old fortunes and foundations left over from its cotton-mill days and newer corporate wealth represented by the influx of international companies like Michelin and BMW, along with a lower percentage of indigenous poor.

Nevertheless, the Greenville story is exciting to anybody interested in cities and how they make people want to live, shop and visit in them. (See Kristen Morales’ story) Back in the 1970’s, Greenville, like Athens, was tearing down its old buildings and concentrating on “progress.” (“Advancing Athens,” y’all.) Then they wised up, as we did, and started figuring out how to use what they already had, after their anchor stores, like ours, had moved to the mall.

The first thing they did, like us, was to hire consultants to come in and draw up plans and tell them what they needed to do. The second thing they did, unlike us, was listen to the consultants and buy into the planning.

The smartest thing they did was elect Knox White mayor 18 years ago—without term limits. White is a lawyer from an old Greenville family. He’s a Republican, too, but what you’d call a chamber of commerce Republican rather than the tea party variety. And he has flat-out got the vision thing. Even when he was on the city council before becoming mayor, White caught on to the essentials of revitalizing his hometown. And he learned how the city could partner with developers who had the ability and the resources to bring back discarded landmark buildings, build new ones and mix it all with enough residential to create a demand for shops, restaurants and, yes, even a Publix grocery store, which turned out to be the highest-grossing Publix in Greenville County.

But the falls! The very epicenter of Greenville history, right in the middle of town on the Reedy River, had been obliterated by a four-lane highway bridge for a whole generation. White kept pushing and finagling and fighting until he was able to get that bridge torn down and replaced by a soaring pedestrian bridge, and suddenly Greenville could see what an incredible gem of a tourist and local attraction had been hidden from them. And then White and his crew turned around and convinced everybody to build a minor league ballpark, with condos wrapped around it, right downtown on, you guessed it, an abandoned lumber yard. Yeah. Don’t even think about it.

But that is Greenville, and we are Athens. They figured out their strengths and capitalized on them. We’ve got to do the same thing over here with our own strengths. (The mayor’s son, a music fan, asks him why Greenville can’t be more like Athens.) And then we’ve got to get together and agree on a plan and make it work. (We’ve got a brand-new downtown master plan just waiting for action.)

The lessons of Greenville are that vision, planning, persistence and bold leadership will pay off. Those qualities are not site-specific. They can work here in Athens. We’ve just got to figure out how.