Greensboro seeks land partnerships to keep housing goal on track

Greensboro’s housing push has reached the land question. City leaders say they have already completed more than 3,300 housing units, but the Road to 10,000 cannot advance on demand alone because Greensboro cannot create new land.

The next phase hinges on parcels the city can help unlock, especially church-owned property and city land that still needs work before it can be marketed. Greensboro housing leaders are offering churches technical help, zoning guidance and development support so congregations with large tracts of unused land can decide whether housing belongs there. On the public side, the city is preparing property near Summit Avenue, Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and Gate City Boulevard, with water, sewer and public rights of way handled before a developer steps in.

That sequencing matters because the city is trying to do more than chase a unit count. Land that is cleaned up, zoned properly and ready for private investment is more likely to produce projects that can move quickly and fit existing neighborhoods, whether that means apartments, townhomes or other infill housing. Greensboro’s own Housing GSO plan ties the effort to four goals: affordable rental homes, neighborhood reinvestment, access to homeownership and supportive housing.

The city launched Road to 10,000 publicly on February 13, 2025, saying the goal was meant to support development of 10,000 new housing units by 2030. Greensboro has also said that target equals about one-third of the housing units Guilford County needs by 2030, a sign of how quickly pressure has spread beyond the city limits. The Planning Department says zoning and rezoning move through the Land Development Ordinance and related review processes, which is why city help can matter so much to churches and other landowners who have property but not development expertise.

Greensboro is also using financing tools beyond land assembly. In September 2025, the city announced Low-Income Housing Tax Credit support for The Grayson at Randleman Crossing and Overland Place Apartments, two projects expected to add 132 affordable homes. Those developments show the city is still trying to produce units that can reach teachers, service workers and first-time buyers, not just pad totals.

The urgency has grown alongside JetZero’s expansion. The company said on June 12, 2025 that Greensboro would be its first U.S. factory site and said it expected to create more than 14,500 high-tech jobs. On June 15, 2026, JetZero said the Greensboro campus would be an 8 million-square-foot factory on more than 600 acres, near Piedmont Triad International Airport. With that kind of growth coming, Greensboro’s housing strategy now depends on whether it can turn hard-to-use land into homes fast enough to keep the market from falling further behind.