Business View Oceania | December 2019

21 22 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA DECEMBER 2019 BUSINESS VIEW OCEANIA DECEMBER 2019 GREY DI STR I CT , NEW ZEALAND they were asked to prioritize the actions they gave. The top request to come out of it was for the Town Square and Tainui Shared Street. That was completed in December 2017 as a shared space for the whole community – locals and visitors –to gather and be encouraged to spend more time, and money, in town. The project has been a great success. The Shared Street has held 15 events since Dec. 2018 and is a popular spot. Thompson notes, “The CBD Redevelopment is really good in the sense that we have improved relationships with all the stakeholders working together, which we haven’t had at this level before. Now we’re working on an action plan of where we go next because the community is at the stage where we’ve done all the planning but now they want us to put something concrete up.” One of the biggest issues is that much of the land in the CBD is leasehold. People who own a building and want to potentially lease it out to other tenants find that because it’s leasehold land they don’t have a lot of borrowing power. And some of these buildings need significant work to upgrade them to earthquake-prone building standards. As a result, there are shops sitting empty. The short-term focus is simply trying to tidy the town up. Have people take pride in their buildings – give them a lick of paint, get rid of the cobwebs, repair the wood, just make the area look a bit nicer. The town did receive some grant money from the Provincial Growth Fund for a Greymouth Master Plan. Part of that included drawing up a CBD Redevelopment Plan, which built on the original work done back in 2015. In that plan is a more condensed version of the CBD. To account for the fact that there aren’t as many shops, they are going to be smaller and consolidated in a welcoming space that people want to travel around in and actually visit. The CBD, itself, is a very walkable area and the speed limit was recently lowered to 30 km to make it more pedestrian-friendly and better for shoppers. There is no residential there, as such, but that has been identified in the