For decades, the old United States Pipe and Foundry site along South Broad Street sat as one of Chattanooga’s most overlooked stretches of land. It was the kind of place most people drove past without a second look: heavy industrial, tied to a legacy of foundry work and the environmental baggage that came with it. Not exactly the site you’d pick first for a signature development.

That’s exactly why it’s such a good case study, not because CEG had any hand in it, but because of what it teaches about how to introduce a project to a community.

This spring, that same site opened as Erlanger Park, the new $115 million, 8,032 seat home of the Chattanooga Lookouts. We’re highlighting it purely as an example worth learning from, not a project we’re claiming any credit for.

Construction broke ground in July 2024 and the ballpark welcomed its first game less than 2 years later. The old Power House building on the property wasn’t torn down to make way for the entrance gate. It became the entrance gate, a deliberate nod to the site’s industrial past rather than an erasure of it.

Here’s the part worth studying: the ballpark wasn’t a side effect of redevelopment in the South Broad District. It was the opening move.

Before a single new residential unit or commercial building broke ground on the surrounding land, the decision-makers involved chose to give the public something first. A gathering place. A reason to show up. A visible signal that this stretch of riverfront, long associated with industrial decline, was becoming something the whole community could be proud of. By the time private development follows in that district, it won’t be arriving in a neighborhood that feels imposed upon. It will be arriving in a neighborhood that already asked for more.

That’s the sequencing most developers get backwards.

The instinct on a big site is to lead with the plan: here’s what we’re building, here’s the density, here’s the timeline. To residents nearby, that often reads as something being done to them rather than for them. Approvals get harder. Public comment periods turn adversarial. City council votes get closer than they need to be.

Flip the order, and the dynamic changes. Offer the public benefit first: a park, a trail connection, a reused historic structure, some visible investment the community didn’t have to ask twice for, and you buy something money alone can’t purchase later in the process: goodwill. People who feel like they already received something from a piece of land tend to root for what comes next on it, instead of fighting it.

A few principles worth carrying into your own site planning, drawn straight from this example:

Lead with a gift, not an ask. Whatever your first visible move on a site is, consider whether it benefits the surrounding community before it benefits your bottom line.

Respect the site’s history instead of bulldozing it. The Power House didn’t need to survive. Keeping it did more for the story of that project than any new construction could have.

Let public support do the heavy lifting on approvals. Goodwill earned early tends to show up later as smoother entitlements, friendlier public hearings, and neighbors who show up to support your project instead of oppose it.

None of this is about charity. It’s about sequencing a project so the hardest parts, permitting, public support, political will, get easier instead of harder as the project matures.

A few of us on the CEG team got to see this play out firsthand. We toured during construction, and the team spent a Fourth of July afternoon out there for a CFC match, a fun day out and a good look at what this kind of project can do for a neighborhood once it’s finished.

This is the kind of conversation we like having with developers early, often before the first site plan is even sketched. If you’re weighing how to introduce a project to a community rather than just build on top of it, let’s talk it through.