How a century-old building feeds hopes for reshaping Charlotte’s Historic West End
The building is about 100 years old. It’s around 7,000 square feet and sits on .28 acres.
That might not sound like much. But to Dianna Ward and others in the Historic West End, the parcel is at the center of what many hope is a spark of future investment into this part of Charlotte.
Sankofa Partners, a developer in which Ward is a 38% owner, bought the vacant building at 1800 Rozzelles Ferry Rd. in 2019 for $1.2 million, according to property records. A longtime resident of the West End, Ward said there was a need for more commercial activity in an area that was seeing an explosion of new town homes and people moving into the historically African American neighborhood.
Last week, the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation said it has given $450,000 to the Charlotte chapter of Local Initiatives Support Corporation, or LISC, a community development nonprofit. In turn, LISC used the money to provide low-cost financing and technical assistance to Sankofa.
The investment is one of many in the West End by the Knight Foundation. It has given more than $7.6 million in recent years to help put residents first in conversations around growth.
Ward said her project is the result of listening to the needs of residents who have gone for years without a food option around the Five Points section of the West End.
Besides pizza and ice cream shops, the building will soon be home to a pharmacy and a spa and salon.
“There hadn’t been a lot of investment on the west side. People hadn’t really been paying attention to it,” Ward said. “People were waiting for someone to be the first.”
Other development in West End
Other recent development has come to the West End. Among it is the $25 million Mosaic Village, built in 2012 as a 300-bed residence hall for Johnson C. Smith University students.
By the end of the year, the city of Charlotte expects to finish construction of the Five Points Public Plaza, complete with an amphitheater, water splash pad, swings and chairs in a newly-designed gathering space.
Sankofa’s building on Rozzelles Ferry Road shares an entryway with the future site of that plaza.
Earlier this summer, the Charlotte Area Transit System unveiled a 2.5-mile extension of the CityLYNX Gold Line that connects West End along Trade Street with the Elizabeth neighborhood through the uptown Charlotte Transportation Center.
Development is not Ward’s full-time job. She’s the executive director of Charlotte Joy Rides, a bike-share program. She also owns a Segway tour company operating in Charlotte and a few other cities.
But she viewed redeveloping the Rozzelles Ferry Road building as a way to bring people together in the neighborhood. She also saw it as a chance to provide generational wealth to her nieces and nephews.
“We’re not going to sit back and wait for someone else to come do something in our community,” Ward said.
So far, success
When the Sankofa team first bought the building, it discovered that a lot of work needed to be done.
“The building with repairs was going to cost us more than we would be able to finance,” Ward said. “That it made it necessary for others to step in and support us.”
Today, the owner of a Jet’s Pizza restaurant leases space along with a Rita’s Ice Cream shop. By the end of the year, Ward said Premier Pharmacy and a spa and salon will join them. The strip of businesses will all be owned by people of color, something Ward said happened organically.
Both the Jet’s and Rita’s owners have other locations in the region. They’ve reported the West End locations have been doing as well or better as their other stores, Ward said.
It’s a testament to anyone who dismissed relocating to the historic West End, said J’Tanya Adams, who founded Historic West End Partners, which advocates for residents and businesses.
There have been misconceptions about businesses not being able to thrive that have caused people to hesitate opening in the neighborhood, Adams said. She’d point people to the success at Rozzelles Ferry Road.
The next thing the West End needs, Adams said, is a grocery store.
Economic mobility
Sankofa’s development will bring the first food option to the Five Points area in years. It’s a result of listening to people in the community, said Charles Thomas, director of the Charlotte Knight Foundation program.
Residents don’t want to have to drive outside the neighborhood to find food or a place to gather, Thomas said.
They also want to support people that look like them, he said, pointing to the importance of the project being led by a Black developer, in Ward, and businesses owned by people of color. The West End is home to some of Charlotte’s oldest African American neighborhoods.
Since 2015, the foundation has supported several projects in West End to improve residents’ ability to “shape and benefit from the rapid growth being experienced by the Charlotte region,” according to a post on its website.
In 2019, Thomas wrote in a blog post that residents were excited about growth but also feared being priced out and displaced because they wouldn’t have a voice in development decisions.
In Ward, Thomas found someone who stood out not just as a Black developer but as someone committed to doing something that benefited the Black community.
“Sometimes you get something that looks like what you want but doesn’t deliver what you want,” he said of other projects. The Knight Foundation is intentional about supporting economic mobility in neighborhoods that Thomas said have been “asking and yelling for it.”
This story was originally published October 29, 2021 at 10:18 AM.
