While her history of bringing foreign investment to the Upstate is the stuff of legends, Carroll Properties Corp. CEO Elizabeth Belenchia prefers looking ahead instead of backward.
“I can talk about the history of foreign direct investment in the Upstate,” she said. “But I’d rather just keep breaking new ground.”
Belenchia, a former registered nurse, turned to commercial real estate development almost five decades ago as a way to support her growing family.
“I started my own business because men in the ’70s said women couldn’t do commercial investment in the Upstate,” she said.
In the process, Belenchia learned the nuanced connection between opportunity and hard work.
“I was a Yankee Catholic woman when I came to South Carolina,” she said with a laugh. “I had to do a lot of research on the area, because you can’t take people into the future if you don’t know where they’ve come from.”
Now one of the Southeast’s leading voices in foreign direct investment, Belenchia said the state of foreign investment in the Upstate is strong, but fraught.
Foreign investment concerns
“Globally, there’s a lot of concern about the direction of our country,” she said. “The automotive industry is in a major transfiguration, and the need for batteries is helping put us on-target for being a major producer, given North Carolina’s lithium. We have a lot of positive things that are happening as investment is targeting us.”
Another opportunity is in the development of industrial hemp production, Belenchia said, because industrial hemp can be used to manufacturer everything from clothing to building materials that are pest, mold and fire resistant.
“Consider that fire is our greatest hazard in rural areas of South Carolina,” she said. “A hemp house won’t burn. A hemp house won’t attract termites and other pests. It won’t mold.”
But as with all things, Belenchia said critical infrastructure projects, and political ideology, feed into the narrative.
“[The Interstate-26] construction is the slowest project I’ve seen in my life,” she said. “It’s unbelievable that it has not yet been widened.”
The same holds true of green energy investment.
“The governor cheer-leads for EV plants, and yet his party does not believe in climate change,” she said. “It’s a strange dichotomy.”
“South Carolina has so much potential,” she said. “There’s so much yet to do. But so much of their economic mentality is rooted in scarcity. Everyone in South Carolina should be rich and have plenty of food, and they don’t.”
Carroll Properties Corp. services:
- Site selection
- Project financing
- Incentives
