Thread by @dfergusson

Just started reading THICK and Dr McMillan Cottom opens the book with some memories of Beatties Ford Road in Charlotte, which took me way back to a city I haven’t lived in for over a decade

(a short thread about urban planning)

Here is a messy map of Charlotte neighbourhoods based on my memories and the 2010 Census. The blue areas are 67% or more racialized and the yellow areas are 88% or more white forcharlotte.org/wp-content/upl…

Like lots of American cities, this is a city whose history and urban form can’t be separated from Indigenous genocide, chattel slavery, the Reconstruction, racial capitalism (hello Bank of America: HQ Charlotte NC), and white flight. It’s no accident the map looks this way

I grew up in the SE, straddling that sea of white nbhds & more diverse ones. In the 90s, white folks continued to leave the first ring inner suburbs like Dilworth, Cotswolds, and the-definitely-racially-segregated&maintained-Olmsted-designed Myers Park to new McMansion hells in S

In the 90s, downtown Charlotte had nothing going on, but real estate corps were gentrifying some first ring suburbs, like North Davidson (NODA), Plaza Midwood, and Southend. They happened to be old streetcar suburbs and therefore walkable and with decent transit...

This has continued in the 2000s when I was in high school and uni, and more so since I left in 2008. Here are some examples from this study patch.com/north-carolina…

Charlotte's Optimist Park neighborhood, for example, the number of white folks grew 10x between 2000 and 2010. At the same time, minority families across the board were displaced as the median home value rose from $75,344 to $86,800, the report found.

In the area near Bryant Park, almost half of the black families in the neighborhood were displaced as median home values nearly doubled in that same time span, jumping from $90,984 in 2000 to $171,900 in 2010.

Here’s where those neighbourhoods are located on the map.

here’s a real estate piece describing Optimist Park, highlighting all the breweries, condos, parks, and bike lanes styleblueprint.com/everyday/optim…

Something that isn’t talked about enough in white urbanism is how white saviourism shows up to “rescue” neighborhoods, as if doubling the median home value and adding some breweries, fourth wave coffee, juice bars and a yoga studio is a good thing.

Plus there’s the unexamined fact that many nbhds targeted for gentrification across the US are old streetcar suburbs, therefore already having good walkable bones. Urbanists didn’t “make” that suburb walkable. It already was that way.

Something I worry about is the second ring suburbs between the already targeted first ring streetcar ones and the white flight outer ring ones. take, for example, Farm Pond on the east of the map

Farm Pond is a place where life hasn’t been getting better over the last few decades. It’s located in what once was Orr Plantation. After Emancipation formerly enslaved people were given land in this area, which was promptly stolen back during the Reconstruction.

The Hickory Grove neighbourhoods was then developed in the area. Charlotte annexed it i. The 1970s and then built Eastland Mall and the Four Seasons nbhd. The area became relatively well-off, with suburban homes for wealthy white folks.

The nbhd began to decline in the 80s. Residents blame it on out-of-towers buying homes for investment property and predatory rent-to-own loans leading to foreclosures. At the same time, the City was ’revitalizing’ Uptown so newly displaced racialized folks moved to East Charlotte

The City allowed development in the SE & SW and annexed new areas. Two new malls opened, and the Eastland Mall died. The City made Farm Pond vulnerable to increased crime and poverty. And, because race and poverty are highly correlated in Charlotte, nbhd demographics changed

Farm Pond is a loops and lollipops area, not well serviced by transit, not near jobs. It’s not the kind of place that white urbanists want to come in and rescue.

And that’s The Rub. Today’s urbanists are part of a long story of market-driven nbhd shaping efforts. Nbhds with good bones don’t need outside advocates, because that’s likely to create displacement by making the nbhd visible to gentrifiers with an aesthetic of white urbanism

Second ring suburbs like Farm Pond don’t need them either. When I talked to resident there 10 years ago, they just wanted the City to act on its existing servicing commitments and have channels to access power to vocalize their own needs.

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