During months of public input on the city of Wilmington’s Greater Downtown Plan, several issues have emerged as top priorities for the community.

Travis Henley, the city’s comprehensive planning manager, provided an overview of that input and the next steps for the plan during a presentation to the Wilmington City Council on Monday. The Greater Downtown Plan aims to outline a vision for 18 neighborhoods inside the city’s 1945 corporate limits – an area that encompasses downtown, the Brooklyn Arts District, Love Grove, the Soda Pop District, Carolina Place and the South Front District, among others. (A map of the included neighborhoods is shown below.)

The plan is designed to replace three existing small area plans, Henley said, including the Northside Community Plan, adopted in 2003, Wilmington Vision 2020: A Waterfront Downtown, adopted in 2004, and the Southside Small Area Plan, adopted in 2009.

Public engagement has been a top priority for the planning effort, Henley said. So far, two phases of public engagement have taken place, consisting of event pop-ups, open houses, focus groups and interviews. The first phase took place from April to July 2024 and included nearly 2,800 participants.

“From this engagement effort, four overarching themes emerged: local character, economy, small business and mobility,” Henley said.

The second phase of input, which ran from September to December 2024 and included nearly 2,400 people, focused on prioritizing the themes and strategies identified during the first public input phase.

Under the theme of local character, Henley said, residents supported creating “safe and pleasant” public spaces, building in harmony with the city’s historic scale and character, forming neighborhoods where residents can meet daily needs and establishing more green spaces and planting more trees.

In the economy category, residents voiced support for increasing the number of people living and working in the greater downtown area and using publicly-owned properties to advance community goals. Housing also emerged as a top priority, Henley said.

“Under economy, improving access to high-quality affordable housing was pretty much an overwhelming favorite for the community,” he said.

In the small business realm, the public backed improving support for existing businesses and efforts to attract and establish new ones; investing in the physical environment within retail areas like widening sidewalks or adding trees; and adjusting the regulatory framework to improve the area’s business friendliness.

“Are there changes we could make to the city code or the Land Development Code,” Henley said, “that would increase the ability for businesses to be flexible and creative while still being good neighbors?”

Finally, in the mobility category, planning staff found support for improving the bicycle and pedestrian network along city streets, continuing work on the downtown trail network and expanding multimodal options throughout the downtown area.

“We heard a lot of interest in being able to park once and then being able to move through not just the Central Business District but out to the Cargo District or the Soda Pop District without having to get back in their vehicles,” Henley said.

Wilmington Mayor Bill Saffo said on Monday that he would like to see a plan of action to address the identified issues.

“Since this is a high priority for the community, for the citizens that you’ve engaged, I’d like to see what a preliminary plan would look like in addressing this issue,” he said.

Moving forward, Henley said, planning staff will schedule a joint meeting with the city council and Wilmington Planning Commission to review specific staff recommendations in more depth and gather feedback from officials. 

After any changes are made, the plan will be released to the community for additional feedback. It will then move through a formal adoption process before being implemented.