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The city’s longtime and consistently successful business incubator officially has a new home and a new lease on life.

The 24-year-old Nussbaum Center for Entrepreneurship this week tied the final loose ends on financing that should allow it to move from its current location at Revolution Mill Studios to a new site at South Elm/Eugene and Florida streets.

Despite its impressive record over the years of nurturing start-up businesses and generating local jobs, the center’s future had been far from certain. Its landlord wants to use its present space for more lucrative, higher-end office tenants, forcing the need for the relocation. When the old Carolina Steel building was donated for that purpose, the Nussbaum Center still needed funding to refit that 60,000-square-foot building.

Now, thanks to federal new market tax credits, those renovations, which will cost $3.2 million, should begin within two weeks. The center also benefited from a $1.2 million low-interest loan it received from the city of Greensboro in 2010.

That loan had been a surprisingly hard sell; some members of a City Council that touted its support for small businesses didn’t seem at first to grasp that this is precisely what the Nussbaum Center does. Some even misinterpreted any aid for the center as public assistance for one business. The center is not a business; it is a nonprofit that helps create businesses. It provides a safe haven where fledgling companies of all types can gain their footing. It furnishes not only office space but such shared resources as a receptionist, copying and fax machines, business counseling and some clerical services.

Since its founding, the Nussbaum Center has successfully nurtured more than 229 businesses. According to a 2005 survey, the average pay per employee for its graduates was $50,378. Firms that start there boast an 80.4 percent success rate versus the national rate of 44 percent for new businesses. Further, more than 30 percent of current and former tenants have been owned by women, 26 percent by minorities. And businesses that began there have created more than 1,298 local jobs that tend to remain local.

Among the center’s graduates are such familiar names as Lomax Construction Co.; Mack & Mack, the downtown clothier; and Kindermusik, which uses music as an educational tool for children. Other alumni include a number of technology-based companies: Apex Analytix, which provides software and other services that prevent fraud and identity theft, and Select Diagnostics, a lab-testing company that had grown to 130 employees in Raleigh and Greensboro before it was acquired by a regional company, Solstas, in June, to name two.

Current tenants are just as varied, among them Zenergy, a software testing company (18 employees) and Medical Justice, a company run by doctors which works with other doctors to help them avoid frivolous lawsuits (11 workers).

The Carolina Steel location, near I-85, also should place the center along a more accessible, well-traveled path. There, it should continue to plant the seeds for future jobs. In a new garden.