Tattoo shop owner Reynaldo Barrera has been a part of the east Charlotte community for four years. His business El Rey Art Tattoo is a short walk from the former Eastland Mall site that is transforming into Eastland Yards.
“This development is an improvement in every sense,” Barrera said. “In my case, more clients for me — and if they are Latinos, even better. But at the same time, it also gives more opportunities to local businesses to expand and grow a little more.”
The first phase of development on the 80 acres where Eastland Mall once stood is underway. The site will include more than 400 apartments and townhomes, a park and a sports complex. Grocery and retail stores are also anticipated.
Many residents and business owners hope the new development will bring opportunity that strengthens, not weakens, the diversity that defines east Charlotte.
Barrera came to the area to be part of its immigrant community. WFAE spoke with many immigrant entrepreneurs who are optimistic about the future of the Eastland Mall site.
“I am also glad that this space was empty, but now that it is a housing complex, there will be more movement of people,” Barrera said.
Eastland Mall was long a boon to Charlotte’s east side. Jordan Lopez grew up nearby. He was just elected to the North Carolina House to represent the area that includes the site.
“I look backward at what Eastland Mall used to be and it was an economic driver for our community,” Lopez said. “It provided jobs. It was a place to go. It was a real anchor for the east Charlotte area.”
However, the mall began losing customers in the mid-'90s. As it declined, many neighboring businesses closed. That left affordable spaces for a new wave of immigrants to Charlotte to start businesses on the east side. Lopez hopes Eastland Yards will once again be an anchor to what is now the city’s most diverse community.
“You’re bringing in a range of incomes and all of that is needed especially to kind of diversify the amount of property tax revenue," Lopez said. "For example, that the city and county get to collect from east Charlotte, which then ultimately gets invested back into East Charlotte.”
A range of rental housing is planned for Eastland Yards. Seniors have already started moving into 70 apartments for people making 30-80% of the area's median income. That’s between $22,300 and $59,400 a year for a one-person household. The rest of the apartments are marketed as workforce housing. Townhomes are advertised at around $2,200 a month. That’s around double the surrounding area’s median rent.
UNC Charlotte professor Michelle Zuñiga studies neighborhood change. She hoped Eastland Yards would provide more affordable housing. She worries it will accelerate a change already taking place on the east side.
“There is concern about increasing rent in the area,” Zuñiga said. “A lot of low-income communities, the immigrant Latinx community in particular, have felt pushed out of their communities, going to more affordable places such as Gastonia or Mint Hill.”
Zuñiga hopes the businesses that spring up at Eastland Yards will be affordable and appealing to immigrants who have long called the east side home.
“There’s also this sense of internal displacement where you're still physically in your neighborhood, but you just feel like it’s changed so much that it’s not the same and that you’re in a different neighborhood,” Zuñiga said.
It’s not clear at this point what businesses will be part of Eastland Yards. The site’s developer, Crossland Southeast, and the city held many meetings with east side residents to understand what they want on the site. The city plans to sublease 16,000 square feet of retail space on the ground floor of the apartments to small and minority-owned businesses.
“We’ve lost almost a generation of potential investment in growth because the city sat on its hands for so long,” said Greg Asciutto, the head of CharlotteEAST.
The City Council voted in 2012 to purchase Eastland Mall for $13 million. It was demolished the following year — and sat vacant for about a decade. Asciutto hopes the new development will mean more jobs, not just housing.
“You have to put something to give folks instead of just roofs over their head,” Asciutto said. “We have to have the jobs to allow folks to flourish in their own neighborhood.”
The city has now dedicated more than $50 million to revitalize the site, including an additional request in September by the developers behind the sports complex planned for it. Asciutto says with all those investments property will get more expensive.
“I do have a lot of confidence in the leadership that’s on the ground right now in terms of the property owners and maintaining their current existing tenant base as much as those tenants see fit to want to do business on the east side,” Asciutto said.
He and many others hope the former Eastland Mall site will once again be an anchor to the east side, and boost the businesses and neighborhoods that surround it.
