It’s not every day that you get to be on TV, but three mid-Michigan towns, Bath Township, Grand Ledge and Charlotte, applied for the chance to win a town makeover from HGTV.
The home renovation channel’s newest show “Home Town Takeover” is a spinoff of a current series “Home Town” that renovates businesses and homes in the hosts’ hometown of Laurel, Mississippi.
The network put out a nationwide call for cities with a population under 40,000 and a downtown in need of updating.
“This is a great opportunity for Bath,” said communications coordinator Tayler Reeves. “Our goal is to bring in more small businesses that would help this community and that we could help support, and this HGTV show would really help us.”
Executive Director Lisa Barna of CharlotteRising said the community was invested from the beginning.
“People are really excited,” said Barna. “I find people in downtown that stop me and say, ‘Hey what about the HGTV thing?’, so they are very excited.”
Cities are required to put together a video, take photos of the town and write an essay describing why they believe their town is perfect for the show.
Longtime friends Brigid Schlossberg and Trixie Prince took it upon themselves to fill out the application on behalf of Grand Ledge. Prince said she hopes there will be more additions to the downtown area for the community to enjoy.
“There’s not really a whole lot to do for the community, teenagers especially,” said Prince. “So that’s a thing I think we’re looking forward to the outcome.”
This contest is designed to help and restore historic residences and update small businesses.
Nathan Dolman is the program director of Crosswalk Teen Center in Charlotte. His nonprofit provides an after school space for teens and young adults in downtown Charlotte. If Charlotte is chosen, his building would be one to possibly be renovated.
“For us to have somebody come and help us do the façade of our building, that’s not something that we’ve had the total capabilities to do,” said Dolman. “It’s hard for us to justify taking money out of our budget to do programming for kids to make our building pretty. So that would be very exciting to make our town and city center a nice view beautiful part of the community and help crosswalk kind of improve our look to the community.”
Dolman said this would bring some positive change to Charlotte.
“I think it would give life, a breath of fresh air to the town,” said Dolman, “and make it something to be proud of here.”
The cities will be chosen later this year, and the show will premiere in early 2021.