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There are few bigger worries than displacement and gentrification for many neighborhoods in Charlotte, a city with a well-known fondness for bulldozers, cranes and shiny new buildings.
And as traditionally low-income, majority-Black neighborhoods around uptown experience some of the most dramatic changes and skyrocketing real estate prices, that’s led local politicians to focus intensely on avoiding, or at least mitigating, some of the impacts. Low-income renters, older people on fixed incomes and people struggling to buy their first house are often the focus of these efforts.
On Tuesday, Charlotte’s Neighborhood Equity and Stabilization (NEST) Commission presented their recommendations for the city’s anti-displacement strategy to a City Council committee. Their goal is to help stabilize some of the most vulnerable neighborhoods and figure out how Charlotte can help people stay in place if they want. But beyond the specific programs they recommended, there were three big takeaways: Anti-displacement is expensive, addressing it requires different strategies for different groups, and the city can’t prevent neighborhoods from changing.
First, some background: The NEST Commission was created along with the city’s 2040 Plan and Unified Development Ordinance. The new rules, which permit denser development in existing neighborhoods, sparked fears that displacement and gentrification would accelerate throughout the city — but especially in fast-changing areas that are already seeing a lot of growth.
Planning staff mapped out neighborhoods that are vulnerable to displacement. They identified four contributing elements: high poverty, low educational attainment, race and age. The resulting map follows many of the same crescent-and-wedge dynamics we’ve seen before:
The NEST Commission runs through 2025. On Tuesday, they laid out nine strategies — the ninth of which was to identify future funding for an anti-displacement strategy — that could help mitigate involuntary displacement.
Anti-displacement can be expensive
Commission chairman Justin Harlow, a former council member, went through programs that the city is piloting or has already tried that NEST recommends should be continued. Those include programs to help low-income home buyers with down payments; money to buy, rehab and resell houses; helping small landlords renovate properties if they agree to keep them affordable; and preserving older apartment units that would otherwise be sold to developers.
Council member Tariq Bokhari pointed out that the size of the impact doesn’t match the size of the city’s affordable housing shortfall, which is estimated at almost 30,000 units.
“If you calculate up the first five (listed programs), that’s 80 units for $5 million,” Bokhari said. “When we’re talking 25,000, 30,000 units, fluctuating, and losing more of that every year.”
Other programs aren’t cheap either. Also this week, Mecklenburg County and the West Side Community Land Trust announced the purchase of 32 rental units in the Thomasboro-Hoskins neighborhood to preserve as affordable housing, for $6 million.
Council member Renee Johnson said the comparison is somewhat apples-to-oranges, however, since the city’s anti-displacement strategy isn’t meant to address housing shortages citywide.
“This is about areas that are specifically vulnerable to displacement,” she said.
But there’s another factor beyond mere price to consider. The pilot programs NEST recommends be continued and expanded are mostly paid for by federal American Rescue Plan Act, or ARPA, funds. ARPA dollars also funded the county land trust purchase. That COVID-era pot of money is going to run dry soon — meaning that in fiscal year 2025, local governments are going to be footing more of the anti-displacement bill on their own. The NEST Commission didn’t recommend a specific amount for a permanent anti-displacement fund but said they’ll make proposals for fiscal 2025.
Different strategies for different groups
One point Harlow emphasized: The city can’t take a one-size-fits-all approach. For the past couple of decades, Charlotte has largely relied on the Housing Trust Fund as the cornerstone of its affordable housing strategy. That fund — now $50 million every two years — consists of bonds that the city uses to subsidize new affordable housing developments. Most of the money goes towards large developers.
“The city does so many things for large developers,” Harlow said the commission has consistently heard. “What about folks who’ve got a dozen doors (apartments) in their portfolio?”
The anti-displacement strategy is designed to address more of those groups. It includes making funds available for low-income homeowners to build and rent accessory dwelling units (“granny flats” to earn some extra income from their houses. It includes funds for small landlords who already own property, not just big developers. And it includes money to help people become homeowners.
But addressing more groups means adding more complexity. Rather than a single, $50 million program targeting developers, the city is helping a wide variety of people with very different needs.
The inevitability of change
More than on any other local issue, Charlotte finds itself between two competing imperatives when it comes to affordable housing and displacement. The city and its leaders love to tout growth (How many times have you heard a variation of the “X people a day move here” line?), but also face intense concern about the rising cost of living, especially housing.
Preserving big chunks of affordability is slow. The multiyear saga of Brookhill Village, which has sat deteriorating in South End as a new skyline sprouts around it, illustrates this. A plan to redevelop the site while preserving some affordable housing finally has momentum, but will still require $7 million in local funds from the city and county.
Much more common is the outcome at J.T. Williams, a low-income housing complex north of uptown that an investor bought last year with plans to renovate the houses and double the rent. Dozens of tenants were forced to leave.
Charlotte’s challenges aren’t unique. Fast-growing cities across the U.S., and especially the South, are dealing with similar issues.
Harlow said it’s inevitable that Charlotte will face additional similar situations as it grows. And city leaders have no appetite to stop that growth.
“We know that we can’t be having an anti-growth kind of lens to say, ‘Oh, we’ve got to stop doing everything,’” he said. “We’ve got to try to tackle it as it happens.”
Meet a local church with a global impact
From its Ballantyne-area home in Charlotte, St. Matthew’s Catholic Church has grown a global reach over the past two decades, expanding to send food and other aid to a school in Haiti, a parish in Venezuela and a shelter for boys in India.
St. Matthews wrapped up its 21st annual Monsignor McSweeney World Hunger Drive last month, with 1,300 volunteers packing some 311,000 individual meals into shipping containers. Since its inception, the food drive has sent more than 4.1 million pounds of food and medical supplies to needy families around the world.
“Some of it is just basic foodstuff — pasta, tomato paste, canned tuna. Also, some of it is hygiene stuff too — rash cream, paper towels, toilet paper, stuff that they just can't get,” said Stephen Favory, co-lead of the food drive. “We will contract directly with the rice farmers to buy rice and ship a whole container of rice right out of Missouri. We do that also with beans.”
And through Hands for Haiti, the church also funds St. Marc’s, a school in Tremesse teaching 400 children in the impoverished highlands.
“Between the poverty, the ongoing gang violence, the lack of fuel, and the lack of resources, lack of jobs, there's just every challenge you can imagine. But in spite of it, our kids at the school are healthy, and they're getting an education,” said Ernest Wright, chairman of Hands for Haiti.
The size and scope of the annual food drive and other programs at the church are also a proxy measure of the growing religious diversity in Charlotte. And it shows the growing share of Catholics in a city that, like most of the South, has traditionally been a Protestant and Evangelical community. St. Matthews is the biggest local Catholic parish, with more than 10,500 registered families.
In 1980, Mecklenburg County was 3.7% Catholic, according to the Association of Religious Data Archives. That grew to 15.5% by 2020, and the share of Catholics now surpasses mainline Protestant adherents (Evangelical Protestants are still the largest single group, at 24.9% of Mecklenburg’s population).
It’s a trend driven in part by the growth of Charlotte’s international population, largely powered by Latinos from majority-Catholic countries and the influx of people from the more traditionally Catholic Midwest and Northeast in recent decades.
Favory said the global reach of St. Matthews’ ministries reflects that growth, and the changing makeup of the congregation. But he said it’s important that the church not lose its focus on the Charlotte region as well.
“We also use some of the money that we raise, and some of the meals that get packed stay in the Charlotte community,” said Wright. “We haven't turned our back on the local community and a couple of other places in the world where we have some connections when we know of the need that's there.”
