Today it’s fallen to 80 percent of the national average. In 2004, the Greenville area’s per capita income was 83 percent of the U.S. Those without such training are being left behind. For those workers still on the factory floor, jobs are changing too, requiring new skills. Increasingly, these modern factories are dominated by machines, employing far fewer people than textiles once did. New businesses are being created here faster than anywhere else in the southeastern U.S., according to data tracked by the South Carolina Department of Commerce.Ī family enjoys the Upper South Carolina State Fair at the NASCAR Greenville Pickens Speedway.īut there is a downside to this transformation of Greenville’s economy. Between 20, $1.5 billion was invested in businesses in the county, which added 8,947 new jobs. Unemployment today is below the national rate at 4.7 percent, and median household income and property values have risen in recent years. Though it sank with the rest of the country during the recession, it has bounced back since. The payoff for Greenville has been a strong economy by many conventional measurements. As local factories have adopted increasingly computerized and automated techniques, the region has evolved into one of the country’s leading centers of advanced manufacturing. Major global manufacturers with outposts here include BMW, ABB, Michelin, Bosch, and General Electric’s power division.
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While Charlotte, North Carolina, a 90-minute drive to the northeast, bet on financial services as the centerpiece of its economy, and other cities have tried to cultivate software hubs or tourism, Greenville has remained focused on manufacturing. Already producing more cars than any other BMW factory, it is now adding a new body shop. In recent years, the city and its surrounding counties have benefited from large increases in tax revenue and improved funding for local schools.Īn aerial view of the BMW plant in Greer, South Carolina. A flock of construction cranes spend the days erecting pricey new condominiums. On Main Street you can eat at nationally recognized restaurants. Visit its pretty downtown and you will find runners pushing jogging strollers and tourists snapping shots from the pedestrian bridge across the Reedy River in Falls Park. In 1990, 48,000 people still worked in textile manufacturing in the Greenville area, according to the U.S. Over the next decades, many factories closed. Beginning in the 1970s, however, facing competition from lower-cost manufacturing regions like Mexico and Southeast Asia, these companies began to struggle. First attracted by the area’s fast-moving rivers as a way to power looms, textile manufacturers employed tens of thousands of people here. For decades, Greenville was the heart of the state’s textile industry-and its economic engine. In the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains in a corner of South Carolina sits a town that should be economically dead.
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