Affordable housing near the Blue Line failed. Can Charlotte learn with the Silver Line?
More than a decade after the Lynx Blue Line opened, thousands of apartments have popped up along the line, offering convenient access to public transit and amenities. Almost none are affordable for the city’s lowest income residents.
As the Charlotte Area Transit System begins plans to develop a new 26-mile line, some city officials say affordable housing must be a top priority to avoid repeating what they describe as mistakes and missed opportunities with previous rail investments.
“It is going through some of the most fragile neighborhoods and we know that land will be gone and those neighborhoods will be disrupted again,” Mayor Pro Tem Julie Eiselt said during a recent council meeting about the Silver Line’s route. “We know that with the Blue Line, we didn’t get it right (in) preserving the land for affordable housing.”
The proposed Silver Line will connect Belmont in Gaston County and Charlotte Douglas International Airport through uptown and down to Matthews.
In a follow-up interview with the Observer, Eiselt said Charlotte must proactively purchase property along the Silver Line, which is projected to begin service in 2030.
“Speculators and developers are going to get ahead of us to acquire that land and (then) we’ve lost the ability to put mixed-income and affordable housing close to those transit stops,” she said.
Council member LaWana Mayfield, whose district contains part of the line’s western branch, offered similar concerns about small business displacement. The city council is expected to vote Monday to spend $50 million to study Silver Line development.
Lessons from the Blue Line
Convenience and access to amenities make living near the light rail a popular selling point for Blue Line-adjacent complexes.
Despite city policy adopted in 2002 stating Charlotte “shall aggressively pursue opportunities to develop affordable housing within transit stations areas,” much of what has developed along the Blue Line are luxury units with rents well above $1,000 for a one bedroom.
The city’s struggle to promote affordable housing near the light rail is most evident in the failed mixed-development project near the Scaleybark station. Charlotte’s deal with developer Peter A. Pappas months before the Blue Line opened in 2007 called for 80 low-income apartments.
Instead, the project languished for more than a decade and the city eventually cut ties with Pappas, who sold a portion of the land back to the city.
But affordable housing is still coming to the Scaleybark station, thanks to an 82-unit development by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership. Besides using $3 million from the city’s Housing Trust Fund, the project crucially includes nearly $2.6 million in city-owned land.
Julie Porter, the Housing Partnership’s president, said while developing affordable housing near rail lines is always a goal, it makes financing more difficult.
“Unless you get the land early, you’re going to have challenges with land costs once the line goes in,” she said.
Porter said she doesn’t know if Silver Line-adjacent parcel prices have started to increase yet, but said they will “the minute that (officials) announce” they’ve secured funding for the project.
More than 12,000 housing units have been built along the Blue Line, according to a city economic analysis. Only a few could be considered “affordable” to lower-income households.
CATS chief executive John Lewis described “lessons learned from the Blue Line.”
“There were probably some opportunities that were missed to be a little more aggressive in regard to property acquisition,” he said. Land acquisition near the Silver Line could involve Housing Trust Fund money or rezoning parcels through the city’s new transit-oriented development ordinance, or TOD.
One way developers can exceed new TOD building height limits is to include affordable housing in the project or pay a per-square-foot fee to the city’s housing trust fund.
Lewis said while housing is not the primary focus of the requested $50 million Silver Line study, CATS will look at “hot spots” and work with city housing and economic development staff when opportunities are identified.
Lewis said he didn’t know how much land the city already owns along the proposed Silver Line, but said that will be part of the study.
Does transit spur displacement?
Researchers from UNC Charlotte studying how mass transit affects neighborhoods and displacement say it’s a complex issue.
“I think the people give too much credit or blame to the impacts of transit, probably because it’s a big, expensive investment and people can easily point to it,” said Elizabeth Delmelle, who often hears the argument that Charlotte neighborhoods gentrify because of the light rail.
“It’s a factor, but it is not the (only) factor,” she said. “It is a combination of factors: an increased desirability to live uptown, the walkability, the amenities and a change in demand in who moving to the city. All of these factors probably have more to do than the light rail itself.”
Researchers are studying transit projects across the country and found that although low-income residents are more likely to move more often, new transit development did not have a statistically significant effect in displacing them.
In Charlotte, researchers said, apartment construction along the Blue Line has often been on undeveloped or underdeveloped land such as previous industrial sites. Building on empty or unused sites spurs less immediate displacement than tearing down existing apartments or single-family homes, researchers say.
What has been built along the Blue Line, researchers found in interviews with developers, is often “higher-end, luxury apartments.”
The team also found “a significant shift” in the racial makeup of people applying for mortgages near the Blue Line extension after officials announced the expansion.
“There was kind of a dramatic drop in the number of black applicants and a big rise in the number of white applicants,” Delmelle said. That shift was more evident in neighborhoods close to uptown that were already starting to gentrify.
Delmelle said expanding transit should provoke discussion about affordable housing.
“Concerns about affordable housing should not be your reason not to build a transit station,” she said. “But rather an opportunity to think about how to incorporate housing and transportation development together.”
Reporter Bruce Henderson contributed to the story.
This work was made possible in part by grant funding from Report for America/GroundTruth Project and the Foundation For The Carolinas.
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