Kissimmee is taking a new approach to help solve a problem that’s not — reinventing the city’s aging, motel-laden corridor.

The city is collaborating with the Orlando Economic Partnership (OEP) in a pilot program to breathe new life into Vine Street by attracting larger businesses to the area.

The partnership is part of the city’s plan to continue growing despite having only 850 acres of undeveloped land left.

Tom Tomerlin, city economic development director, said challenges facing Kissimmee are not unique.

“The exciting thing is that it’s going to take a fresh look at something that affects a lot of communities throughout the state,” Tomerlin said. “We have these arterial roadways that at one time served the retail needs of a community or even tourists in our case but … it’s a Florida problem of how corridors whose lifeblood shifted get reinvented.”

“Can a corridor like this that at one time was tourist-serving be reinvented in such a way that it becomes a job corridor? That is one of the interesting questions we are exploring.”

As part of the program, a first for OEP, the organization will conduct a market analysis to identify various economic opportunities and challenges on Vine Street, connect businesses with the city and provide recommendations for attracting companies.

The study will last a year but agency CEO Tim Giuliani said in six months or so it will yield a list of the kinds of businesses they’ll seek to attract to the area.

He said Kissimmee has a lot of economic opportunities due to its proximity to tech hub NeoCity, a semiconductor manufacturing center OEP helped establish in Osceola County.

Achieving the impact OEP seeks for the city will take time, Giuliani said.

“The work we do isn’t what happens just on its own,” he said. “So for instance, the work we’ve been doing with semiconductors, we’ve been at this for like 10 plus years and only in the last 18 months we’ve seen that $500 million investment so we don’t work on quick and easy projects.

“We work on projects that are transformational for the entire community and we feel this is just that.”

In order to transform Vine Street with little additional land, Kissimmee officials anticipate mixed-use developments — businesses on the first floor and higher-density housing on top — could be the standard across the corridor.

“There’s some really underutilized parcels of land for instance, some of the shopping areas like that Kmart plaza, you know Kmart is no more,” Tomerlin said. “The corridor is ripe for being reinvented.”

Another prime example of redevelopment in the city is conversion of the former Super 8 motel into an affordable housing complex called the Haven on Vine, which includes 40 emergency housing units and 80 affordable apartments, he said. It’s located at the corner of Vine and North Hollywood streets.

The large number of residents who call motels on the corridor home — including people dealing with homelessness —presents a challenge to redevelopment, Tomerlin said.

And the number of those experiencing homelessness is growing. Over the last five years Osceola County has seen a 70% increase, according to recent regional data.

He said the program will develop a strategy to address the issue of the motels with input from their owners.

“The hotel motel footprint is one of those large challenges that kind of overhangs the Vine Street corridor,” Tomerlin said. “Obviously it’s all going to depend on the ownership of these motel properties and what the market dictates.”

Businesses in the area say they expect to benefit from having larger companies that provide Kissimmee residents access to better-paying jobs, Kiss Kornucopia President Rick Lewellyan said.

Kiss Kornucopia is a community-supported agriculture program that pays local farmers for their crops and in two years aims to start a co-op grocery store in the area. The organization charges members $728 for 26 once-a-week deliveries of local produce but has had difficulty getting the community on board.

“One of the hard things is Kissimmee … is not a high-income area so when they see you pay $700 for this it sounds like a lot of money but it’s really much cheaper than if you went to a traditional grocery store,” Lewellyan said.

He said he hopes higher-paying jobs and more businesses results in a tighter-knit community.

“That’s the center we want to create,” Lewellyan said. “We want to create this hub, this heart, this beat where people want to come and hang out.”