Crowdfunding for Historic Redevelopment

Main St Historic Buildings Crowdfunding or the act of raising investment dollars locally within a community can be traced in North Carolina to the early 20th century and potentially even earlier. Many of our community’s most iconic buildings were developed with financing provided by local residents. In early 1921, a committee of local residents in the City of Albemarle came together with the vision of building a downtown hotel. As they wrote in a 1921 opinion piece in the Stanly News-Herald, building this hotel would “mean a new start towards building up Albemarle” and that executing this vision “will show to those who do not live here that we mean to grow and make something out of our town.” Due to the success of this local campaign, the Albemarle Hotel opened in 1923. Similarly in the City of Fayetteville, fourteen local business people organized The Community Hotel Co. with the goal of raising $200,000 to build a downtown hotel. As these organizers wrote, “The purchase of stock should appeal to every citizen…because the project is distinctly a community enterprise and a new and modern hotel will be a very definite asset to the entire community.” The Community Hotel Co. raised $271,000 from 593 people and enabled Fayetteville to build what later became known as the Prince Charles Hotel, which opened in 1925. While not technically called crowdfunding, these two examples resemble today’s notion of crowdfunding: public campaigns to raise investment dollars to support local transformative community economic development projects. However, campaigns like these began to dissipate in the late 1920s [...]