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With huge red brick smokestacks that jut in the sky, Revolution Mill is hard to miss. The 800,000-square-foot former flannel mill was one of the dozens of industrial mills in Greensboro, North Carolina.
When fully operating, the mill was a cornerstone of the local economy. It changed the lives of thousands of residents, providing consistent work for decades and permanently shaping the landscape. The Cone Mill Corporation, which owned Revolution Mill, built employee housing in the surrounding hills. Today, the simple one-story “mill houses” dot northeast Greensboro.
But in 1984, with demand for flannel plummeting, the mill ceased operations. For nearly two decades, it sat in disrepair.
Durham-based Self-Help – a community development financial institution that include two credit unions, a nonprofit loan fund, and a research and policy affiliate – began as the lender to the property’s developer. Their role was to find money to support the project, not take the lead on it. But in 2008, the Great Recession threw a wrench in the project and halted further progress.
Self-Help began walking their clients through foreclosure — but instead of going ahead with the process, Self-Help decided to develop the property themselves. By 2012, the historic property officially belonged to the credit union. With the textile industry gone, Self-Help decided to restore Revolution Mill and give it a new life as commercial and retail space, eventually adding a housing component with industrial loft-style apartments.
A view of the Revolution Mill campus. (Photo by Self-Help/Joey Seawell)
Taking on a 50-acre property amidst a real estate crisis would be a huge risk for most banks. But Self-Help isn’t a typical banking operation. As a CDFI, its primary goal isn’t to line its investors’ pockets. Their stakeholders are rooted in the local communities they serve, like Greensboro. That means that in their capacity as property investors, real estate developers, builders, and project collaborators, everything they do has to make both economic and cultural sense for the community.
A lot made sense to them about the property, despite its size. There is still today a generation of residents who remember working at Revolution Mill. The property was once the biggest flannel mill in the world, according to UNC Greensboro researchers. It also helped that Self-Help Founder Martin Eakes was born and raised in the city, and that the bank had just completed its downtown nonprofit center just two miles from the site. The way Self-Help’s leaders saw it, it would have been a waste of historic, cultural, commercial, and residential space if Self-Help didn’t step in.
Emma Haney, the current director of business and project management for Self-Help, was just an intern in the early days of Revolution Mill. “It’s really because of our role as a lender, and because we also had this capacity as a community real estate developer to kind of step in and take on such a large project and a complicated, credit investment structure that we consider doing,” she said.
There are more than 140 businesses and nonprofits now operating in the building including restaurants, cafes, art galleries, and event spaces, according to Haney. In the summer of 2024, a free city trolley that runs directly from the property to downtown Greensboro made Revolution Mill even more accessible to the public.
“It’s gigantic just in terms of the impact of space that was sitting there vacant before, but is now active in some way and bringing people to [the mill],” said Haney. “You can count the people that live there, and you can count the businesses that live there, and those are the people day in and day out on campus.”
Self-Help made deliberate choices to preserve the historic architecture of the former textile mill, including keeping the original maple floors—patching areas only where it was necessary. (Photo by Marielle Argueza)
Self-Help’s unique position as a CDFI gave its team a deep understanding of what funds were available to keep developing the property as a commercial space—and eventually a residential project too. Because the property was recorded on the National Register of Historic Places in 1984, Self-Help had access to historic tax credits. But they also tapped into new market tax credits, available to CDFI to help develop economically “depressed” areas, and even some city funding to help restore and renew the property.
Access to this diverse pool of funds meant lower construction costs, which eventually meant allowing them to think beyond the original project and bring in some new collaborators.
For example, historic tax credits which reward developers for keeping the majority of important historical elements of the building, like the original brickwork, maple floors, and the iconic towering smoke stacks—allowed Self-Help to add an affordable housing element. At the moment, they have 184 units, 20% of which are affordable housing. “In this part of town, that’s a lot of housing,” said Haney.
Residents who live in the industrial-loft style apartments have easy access to the commercial and retail areas of Revolution Mill through the several of the mills walkways, accessible on the second story. (Photo by Marielle Argueza)
Institutions like the city and local universities were funders and collaborators too. Greensboro’s Parks and Recreation Department helped bring federal Greenway Funding. Those funds brought a new recreation trail and helped restore the North Buffalo Creek that runs through the property.
UNC Greensboro was essential in preserving and unearthing the history of the mill. Curated by UNCG researchers, small history exhibits can be spotted along some of the corridors of the property, and a permanent history museum memorializes the cultural and economic impact of the former mill in photographs and old machinery.
“The more you zoom out, the more you see just sort of like tens of thousands of people being able to interact with this campus that really would not have ever been able to without redevelopment,” Haney says.
This story is part of our series, CDFI Futures, which explores the community development finance industry through the lenses of equity, public policy and inclusive community development. The series is generously supported by Partners for the Common Good. Sign up for PCG’s CapNexus newsletter at capnexus.org.
