Nine years ago, Mecklenburg County commissioners made a crucial decision: They selected the Miami Beach-based Peebles Corporation to redevelop Brooklyn, a historically Black neighborhood that was destroyed in the 1960s in the name of urban renewal.
The symbolism was clear: A majority-Democratic county commission chose a prominent Black-owned company to rebuild a Black neighborhood whose destruction remains a stain on Charlotte’s history.
“You don’t have to step outside the door of this building to see all these cranes and ask the question, ‘How many minority contractors are participating?’ Yet here we have the opportunity to do something about that,” said former commissioner Trevor Fuller, who was chair at the time.
Commissioners voted 5-3 to pick Peebles. That was June 15, 2016.
“I’m ready for us to get something done for this county that’s meaningful,” Fuller continued, his voice rising. “Not a lot of talk!”
Today, those words — time to get something done, not a lot of talk — seem regrettable.
The first phase of Brooklyn Village was to be built on a 5.5-acre parcel in Second Ward, at the intersection of Alexander Street and Brooklyn Village Avenue, near the Mecklenburg County Aquatic Center. The site has been cleared and it’s surrounded by a chain-link fence.
But there's no sign of vertical construction on the $700 million project of apartments, stores and offices.
And the nine-year partnership between Peebles and the county is dissolving amid a recent feud marked by finger-pointing and escalating rhetoric that could delay the project even longer.
“At some point you gotta fish or cut bait — that’s the reality of the situation,” said current commissioner Chair Mark Jerrell, who was elected in 2018 after the Peebles deal was signed. “You know, sometimes the situation is right bus, wrong seat.”
The Peebles Corporation says it has done nothing wrong. The company says the project is, for the most part, on time and that recent delays are due to poor market conditions.
The destruction of the Brooklyn neighborhood
Charlotte’s center city — full of skyscrapers, theaters, restaurants and apartment towers — has long been a source of civic pride.
But in Second Ward was Brooklyn, a historically Black neighborhood.
Brooklyn historian Monique Douglas said in a PBS Charlotte documentary that Brooklyn was “a very thriving part of the city. It was all African American, and it was what they referred to affectionately as a city within the city.”
She noted that Brooklyn was self-contained.
“They had their own banks, their own theaters, their own schools,” Douglas said. “And it was really a hub of activity in Charlotte.”
Brooklyn was torn down starting in the 1960s as part of federally funded urban renewal projects across the nation. Today, much of the site is county-owned land, including the aquatic center and Marshall Park. A few plaques on buildings mark the old neighborhood.
Prominent, controversial developer under fire
When it came time to choose a developer to rebuild Brooklyn, the Peebles Corporation stood out.
Founded by Donahue Peebles, the company says it is the largest Black-owned developer in the nation. Peebles got his start in Washington, D.C., and moved to Miami in the 1990s.
He has written a real estate how-to book, "The Peebles Principles," in the spirit of Donald Trump’s "The Art of the Deal." He makes frequent appearances on Fox News, where he discusses the economy and even politics.
Peebles is also known for lawsuits, even involving his successful projects, like a renovation of the Royal Palm Hotel on Collins Avenue in Miami Beach. There has also been litigation on projects that have been in limbo for years, such as a high-end condo project in Mount Vernon in Washington, D.C.
The city of Durham this month ended its relationship with Peebles, less than a year after selecting the company to redevelop an old police station downtown.
The company said litigation is common in development and that the Peebles Corporation is written about in the media more than other firms because Peebles is famous. It also said it has a strong track record of delivering projects in places like South Florida, Washington, D.C., and New York City.
The Mount Vernon, D.C., project — known as Fifth and Eye — was supposed to be built last decade, but it has been tied up in litigation. The company said it recently received a favorable ruling in court.
'Undo past wrongs'
Peebles’ son, Donahue Peebles III, is the firm’s executive vice president and point person for the Charlotte project.
In a conversation with WFAE, Peebles said any perceived delays in Brooklyn Village are not the company’s fault.
After being selected in 2016, he said they did not sign a development agreement with Mecklenburg County until 2018. After that, Peebles said it took until 2021 to clear previous deed restrictions on the land, under a prior development deal with the city of Charlotte and Spectrum Properties. That project never happened.
Peebles then bought a 5.5-acre parcel of land from Mecklenburg County for a little more than $10 million in 2023. That was a below-market price. The discount was given to Peebles to make it easier to build some affordable housing on the site.
The company demolished the Bob Walton Plaza building in 2023. Peebles said the firm spent $5 million preparing the site for construction.
“The goal is to create something that’s economically revitalizing a historically disenfranchised corridor of the city in a way that’s reflective of our orientation to undo past wrongs,” he said.
But those lofty goals cannot be met right now, he said.
Peebles says too many markets have been built
In the fall of 2024, Peebles told commissioners that a residential building boom of 57,000 apartments in the Charlotte area since 2021 has made it hard to get financing.
“It’s created a rise in vacancies, a rise in concessions, and funny enough, a reduction in top-end rent,” Peebles explained.
Data from the real estate firm CoStar shows the average rent in the Charlotte area jumped 17% from 2021 to 2023. That is a positive sign for developers.
The market has softened somewhat in the past two years, with rents declining by a little more than 1%, or $22 a month.
But could Peebles have found a way to build 500 units in Brooklyn Village’s first phase over the past four years — when other developers collectively built more than 100 times that many units?
“I mean, you can see cranes almost everywhere. Every corner of this community, you see cranes,” said Jerrell, the current Commission chair. “OK. If you are telling us that you can’t do that, tell us what you can do.”
In February, Peebles tried to do that. He returned to the county with a new plan: instead of a 522-unit complex with a mix of affordable and low-income units, he would build 250 apartments, all set aside for low-income residents.
Commissioners, including Jerrell, were mostly excited.
But the city of Charlotte’s housing director, Rebecca Hefner, said she couldn’t approve Peebles’ request for $13.5 million from Charlotte’s Housing Trust Fund to subsidize the project.
“As it’s designed, there are a couple of challenges with the project financials,” she told City Council members.
Peebles withdrew his request from the city two weeks ago.
Asbestos deadline
While Peebles works to get Phase 1 off the ground, a bigger problem looms: a hard July 28 deadline to demolish the old Board of Education building on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard to clear the way for Brooklyn Village’s Phase 2.
Peebles has said it recently discovered more asbestos in the building than previously known. The firm said that is a force majeure event — a legal term for something unforeseen, like a natural disaster, that prevents a party from meeting its obligations.
The company asked for a one-year extension.
Mecklenburg County’s outside attorney, Womble Bond Dickinson, called the force-majeure claim “meritless.”
“In reality, this is merely a continuation of BKV’s (Brooklyn Village Partners) ongoing attempts to avoid performing the demolition and removal work it agreed to perform,” the letter said. “Clearly, BKV did not proceed diligently because it has been hoping that it could evade its obligations.”
To sum things up: Peebles said the market isn’t right for luxury apartments. The firm says it can’t make a deal work at the moment for low-income apartments. It will not meet the July demolition deadline, and it has also told the public that Mecklenburg County has no mechanism to reclaim the 5.5 acres.
Coming Tuesday: WFAE looks at the Peebles Corporation’s work in other cities, as well as the city of Durham’s recent decision to sever ties with the developer.
