City of Anderson 2025 Shines with Updated Parks, Workforce Housing, Comprehensive Planning
Greg Wilson/Anderson Observer
The City of Anderson spent 2025 not so much reinventing itself as unearthing what had long been buried under stalled plans and seasonal floodwaters: a city ready to house its teachers and nurses, to lure crowds with lights and music, and to stitch its parks into a network of usable public life. The year unfolded in groundbreakings and glowing strings of bulbs, in the careful calibration of who could afford to live near Main Street and how many could stroll its sidewalks without tripping over construction cones. What emerged was less a boom than a deliberate recomposition, block by block, of a Southern downtown’s quiet ambitions.
At the corner of West Franklin Street and Murray Avenue, where visions have languished for a quarter century, earthmovers finally bit into the dirt in November for The Franklin, a $26 million complex of sixty-eight apartments pitched squarely at the workforce squeezed out by market rates—nurses, firefighters, retail clerks earning sixty to a hundred and twenty percent of the area’s median income. City Manager David McCuen called it a cornerstone for future development, with its community room, playground, fitness center, and laundry on-site; Councilwoman Beatrice Thompson, who had championed the site for decades, termed it a blessing made real, a wind beneath the wings of southwest Anderson and the downtown just beyond. Developers from Prestwick Companies promised residents by mid-2027, framing the sticks and bricks as a bid to build community, not just shelter.
Parks, too, came alive from their own long slumbers. Lindley Park, that northside staple once prone to ponding, reopened after a $13.75 million overhaul of trails, playgrounds, and a peanut-shaped roundabout, its traffic tweaks set to wrap by November’s end—a transformation from drainage ditch to daily draw for walkers and families. Across town at Cater’s Lake, a $5.8 million reinvestment of hospitality taxes yielded paved walkways, new parking, curbing, a duck habitat, and a covered bridge as focal points, all ahead of schedule and emblematic of Mayor Terence Roberts’s push to turn liabilities into landmarks. These were not mere facelifts but links in a budding trail system aiming to thread from recreation center to Murray Street Bridge, urban trails being, as Roberts allowed, tricky but committed.
Events provided the year’s punctuation, none more electric than the Anderson Soirée in late April, which shut down Main Street for two days of visual arts, culinary stalls, and performing acts, drawing vendors and crowds who spilled into side streets and filled Carolina Wren Park for a Saturday-night finale. The festival, now in its fourth year and backed by city and county dollars, offered artists booth sitters and snacks alongside a headline musical kickoff, cementing its place as a street-filling signature amid the usual suspects like Rock the Country’s July rumble.
Come December, downtown twinkled anew with over 100,000 Christmas lights strung along Main all the way to Lindley Park, holiday music from the historic clock tower, a tree lighting at the courthouse, and ice-skating performances—a Hallmark glow underwriting the year’s theme of amenity over asphalt.
Through it all ran the steady hum of planning: a new twenty-year comprehensive plan’s first reading in March, annexations, a sales-tax push for roads, Main Street’s long-awaited repave after utility digs, and AnMed’s Windsor Place medical complex, which stirred murmurs of a health system’s outsized footprint amid national accolades. Roberts framed 2025 as the year projects became amenities, hospitality taxes hitting $5 million to fuel it all. In a city threading growth’s needle—enough to hold its workers, its walkers, its weekend revelers—Anderson’s story felt less like headlines than the incremental accrual of a place finally breathing easier.
