By admin 
If any community knows how to trade on a little river with a nice waterfall it is Greenville.
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Just look at what has happened along the Reedy River over the past two decades — two new major parks, upgrading another and millions of public and private investments in a downtown that once looked moribund.
Now comes a new project, albeit much less grand but significant nonetheless. It’s the renewal of the kudzu-choked Richland Creek, a slip of a waterway not far from downtown that flows for seven miles into the Reedy in Cleveland Park.
City officials are calling the creek an “untapped resource.”
It is in the Spartanburg-Greenline neighborhood, traditionally an African American community that also includes the historic Richland Cemetery.
Many of Greenville’s African American professionals are buried there — educators, health practitioners, and community leaders such as contractor William Sewell, who built Sterling High School and the S.C. Franks Mortuary, banker J. P. “Pick” Chappell and Hattie Logan Duckett, founder of the Phillis Wheatley Center.
“The cemetery features a variety of funerary art, landscape features, and cultural artifacts which distinguish it as a traditional African American cemetery and provide important information about ethnic burial customs in the American South,” according to the South Carolina Register of Historic Places.
It was established by the City of Greenville in January 1884 as the first municipal cemetery for African Americans and drew its name from the adjacent creek.
The city has developed an overarching master plan for Greenline Spartanburg, a neighborhood of neglected and narrow roads and the creek, which is a barrier between the two communities. Back in the day, residents placed large boulders to get across.
And the creek floods when it rains hard.
Aracdis, a design, engineering, and consultancy company, developed the plan to not only improve the community, but also to avoid gentrification, which has begun.
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“While years of neglect to the community’s infrastructure cannot be denied, it is not just the roads and creek banks that are in danger of completely vanishing,” the master plan states. “The stories and culture of this area are at risk of being forgotten.”
The draft plan was months in the making and included neighborhood meetings that sought input from young people, who had a series of suggestions including movie night under the stars, a big greenhouse and multigenerational book clubs.
The plan envisions adding 481 housing units — both single- and multi-family — to the 248 existing units. About 44% of 215 units would be considered affordable housing.
The plan also calls for extending Chestnut Street with a bridge to connect the two sides.
The city has obtained a $375,800 grant from the South Carolina Office of Resilience and will match it with $104,000 to pay for planning and design for floodplain mitigation and disaster recovery.
“It doesn’t take a hurricane. It doesn’t take the biggest of your storms to have your water exceed the banks here in Richland Creek,” said City Engineer Paul Dow.
The Greenline Spartanburg neighborhood plan prioritizes connectivity, access to nature, affordable housing, and quality of life.
“Richland Creek has the potential to be a beautiful, accessible asset for the community,” Dow said.
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The City Council will consider the creek plan on Sept. 28.