Selma’s Citizens Unite To Revitalize the Town They Love
This feature profile highlights the work being done in Selma, one of the four finalists in the 2024 Strongest Town Contest. Cast your vote to determine the winner, or learn more about the contest, here.
The JoCo Latino Festival in Selma is an annual signature event of Latinos Activate JoCo, along with the Miss Hispanic Heritage Johnston County Pageant, held at Selma’s Rudy Theatre. The group often advocates on local issues at town and school board meetings.
Like many cities in North America, Selma, NC, has stared down its share of historic challenges, “from the closing of the mills, to the closing of the companies that replaced the mills, to the closing of small businesses downtown that depended on foot traffic from the company employees,” says Cindy Brookshire, a co-founder of Activate Selma.
Watching the town of 6,200 go from a once-bustling hub of North Carolina’s textile industry to a declining downtown with vacant storefronts was distressing to residents who loved their town. “When I used to volunteer in the visitor center, people returning for their high school reunions would stop in and ask, and not in a good way, ‘What happened to Selma?’ They were angry that no one seemed to care,” says Brookshire, a local author.
Activate Selma co-founder Melissa Dooley, described the phenomenon where citizens look at a problem and say, “They should do something about that.” Appearing on a local newscast, Dooley declared, “We’re that ‘they,’” and described how her group of local activists had started small and grown into a coalition of citizens, civic groups, and city leaders striving to improve housing, transportation, and the local economy.
Much of that emphasis has been on reviving downtown Selma. This includes infrastructure improvements like sidewalk repair, improved crosswalks, wayfinding signage, and installation of bike racks. Private funding helped turn a vacant lot into Art Out Loud Park, now a beloved public space with game tables and “whisper benches.” A program to encourage public art has generated new murals that add “a splash of beauty and inspiration to our streets,” says Kelly Blanchard of Latinos Activate JoCo, and public events and programming are designed to bring people to downtown’s outdoor “living rooms.” As part of its investment in human-powered infrastructure, planning is underway to connect Selma’s seven public parks with the North Carolina Mountains-to-Sea Trail.
Selma’s efforts to expand its housing supply emphasize infill development, and the city itself built or renovated 82 homes in 2023. Selma has also offered incentives to add residential over retail properties, and to renovate vacant buildings and spaces. One recent success has been the relocation of local real estate developer AdVenture into the historic Person-Vick building downtown, with additional tenants, including an engineering firm and a Creole restaurant. Selma has also added a number of downtown apartments, including several above Hatchet Brewing Co.’s Vault taproom.
Selma has a rich heritage as a railroad hub, and locals are proud of their ongoing efforts to save the 1855 Michener Station and convert it into a local history museum. At the same time, the town worked with Amtrak and the North Carolina Department of Transportation to renovate the Selma-Smithfield Station, and is pursuing a $500,000 feasibility study for a passenger rail line from Raleigh to Wilmington.
Deputy Town Manager Phillip McDaniel notes that Selma never fully recovered from the jobs lost in the textile mills in the 1990s, but with “our commitment to being business-friendly, offering incentives, and simply raising our profile, life support has arrived.” He touts the Eastfield Crossing project, a 3 million square foot mixed use development along the I-95 corridor comprising retail, industrial, residential, hospitality, entertainment, and senior living space, as a hopeful economic sign.
There’s work to be done to make your own town a Strong Town, and you don’t have to go it alone. Thousands of people across North America are working to make their community a better place. Join with others in your area, or start your own Local Conversation.
Ben Abramson is a Staff Writer at Strong Towns. In his career as a travel journalist with The Washington Post and USA TODAY, Ben has visited many destinations that show how Americans were once world-class at building appealing, prosperous places at a human scale. He has also seen the worst of the suburban development pattern, and joined Strong Towns because of its unique way of framing the problems we can all see and intuit, and focusing on local, achievable solutions. A native of Washington, DC, Ben lives in Venice, Florida; summers in Atlantic Canada; and loves hiking, biking, kayaking, and beachcombing.