development

Raleigh's gentrification gains national spotlight

Submitted by scharrison on

The whitening of former black neighborhoods:

In the places where white households are moving, reinvestment is possible mainly because of the disinvestment that came before it. Many of these neighborhoods were once segregated by law and redlined by banks. Cities neglected their infrastructure. The federal government built highways that isolated them and housing projects that were concentrated in them. Then banks came peddling predatory loans.

“A single-family detached house with a yard within a mile of downtown in any other part of the world is probably the most expensive place to live,” said Kofi Boone, a professor at North Carolina State University’s College of Design. Here, because of that history, it’s a bargain. And while that briefly remains true in South Park, the disinvestment and reinvestment are visible side by side on any given street.

This is one of those issues that is not cut-and-dried:

On urban revitalization and those pesky homeless

Submitted by scharrison on

Your destitution is depressing my profit margin:

Middlesworth and some neighboring business owners want the Men’s Shelter of Charlotte and nearby Urban Ministry Center to relocate to boost a burgeoning plan to transform North Tryon into Charlotte’s next boom corridor. They argue that the hundreds of homeless individuals who sleep at the shelter and frequent the Urban Ministry for meals and services would discourage development and scare off customers.

Okay, this is an incredibly complex issue and I will try not to oversimplify. But there are many factors that come into play when locating homeless shelters; from access to government offices/services to availability of faith-based (church) substance abuse meetings, as well as a nexus of public transportation options. The farther you move away from city centers, the more difficult it is to both deliver those services and access them. As to Middlesworth's "solution" to the problem:

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