URBAN ECONOMICS SHOULDN'T BE THIS HARD.

It isn't.

"Walkable urban areas are popular but have an affordability problem."  Well, yeah, you don't have to buy an indulgence any more to live next to the cathedral, but if you're able to make markets all over the world using contemporary information technology, and you want to walk to the office, isn't that going to make the rent gradient steeper?  "Remove the constraints, watch the reallocation to housing and office towers commence." So it is, yet again, and the poor and the ethnics are hardest hit.

It's an emergent phenomenon, and the sort of technocratic order the article suggests is not likely to work well. "To spur walkability and equitable access to walkable areas, cities can advance zoning reform, foster non-car transportation options, preserve and invest in affordable housing, and plan for walkable neighborhoods to be resilient to climate impacts, the report states."  The problem is, the preservation of the houses closest to the office towers is going to make precisely those houses more valuable, and the implicit transportation cost of walking, even with slow motor car traffic in cities, and even slower bus or rail transit, makes the rent gradient even steeper.

There's no end to the wishful thinking.  Consider "Could Charlotte transportation referendum price people out of their houses?"

The problem Charlotte faces, irrespective of how people perceive safety on its rapid transit, is that people are fleeing more heavily taxed or more hazardous places and relocating there.

Greg Jarrell says has seen “an enormous wave of money” crash into west Charlotte in recent years. That’s a new phenomenon for the historically working class part of town, where he has lived for two decades.

He’s also seen scores of neighbors leave their homes in search of more affordable options in Gaston or Union counties as prices in the city continue to climb, he said.

“Most neighbors here would welcome the investment if they were able to enjoy the fruits of it and not be simply run out of their homes,” said Jarrell, who organizes around housing justice issues for The Redress Movement. “But that’s been the case for so many residents.”

Pick your poison.  The logic of urban agglomeration economies works on rent gradients, irrespective of what public officials do.

The proposed 1% tax referendum on this year’s ballot is exacerbating gentrification unease in a part of town that already feels the creeping growth of big box apartment buildings. The measure would fund multiple rail projects, including the Red Line commuter rail going to Lake Norman and an extension to the Gold Line streetcar. The proposed Silver Line light rail would run from Bojangles Coliseum to the east and down west Charlotte’s Wilkinson Boulevard to the airport.

Proponents say the referendum and the transit plan it would pay for are critical for a city where more than 150 new residents move every day.

The Charlotte Area Transit System projects the tax increase would generate $19.4 billion over three years. It would fund other major transformations to transportation infrastructure besides rail projects, including new bike paths and a host of bus and road upgrades.

The west side is sandwiched between the airport and trendy destinations like South End and Uptown, making it a prime spot for future development. The proposed rail sweetens the deal for developers — and raises further alarms for residents and neighborhood advocates who worry the investments will accelerate gentrification and price them out of their homes.

Ah, the joys of maintaining peace among the advocates of city living.  City neighborhoods once had a recognizable, yet emergent pattern, with the churches along the car lines and the commercial corners where the car lines transferred passengers.  The "big box apartment buildings" went up as a matter of course.  Their presence is something some of those advocates see as providing "affordable" housing for more city dwellers, perhaps even a critical mass to support the eateries and shops and maybe fill a neighborhood school with kiddos.  But before you build them, you have to buy out whatever is already there, and Charlotte might not have the sort of light industrial property that in Milwaukee is giving way to some fairly tony big box apartments almost in the shadow of the cement siloes.

In Charlotte, all that has changed is the notion of what urban betterment looks like.

Urban renewal efforts of the 1960s set off a rolling housing shortage that has persisted ever since, according to Charlotte historian Tom Hanchett.

The federal government encouraged local leaders to declare areas as slums and resell the land for “better” uses, Hanchett said. The city made little effort to gather resident input. Many of these communities were largely African American.

“Maybe one or two public hearings, and then, bam, the bulldozer showed up,” Hanchett said.

One of those neighborhoods was Brooklyn in Uptown. A thousand families were kicked out, by Hanchett’s estimates, as were 200 businesses and a dozen churches.

The displaced settled wherever they could afford. Many landed along West and Wilkinson boulevards, once white and middle class areas that Hanchett said would become almost entirely Black and low-income by the ‘70s.

Around the turn of the century, a federal program called HOPE IV that intended to remake America’s public housing caused another wave of displacement for some who had relocated to west Charlotte.

Maybe the best thing for urban neighborhoods is for Wise Experts and their Urban Renewal to go away.  Those hero projects of the 1960s and 1970s tended not to turn out well.  Now, though, the presence of a car line brings with it the development.

Elsewhere in the city, the Lynx Blue Line light rail caused a dramatic and rapid population shift in some communities it passed through after opening in 2007.

The number of white residents in the Wilmore neighborhood increased more than 220% from 2010 to 2020 while the number of Black residents dropped 40%, The Charlotte Observer previously reported. In Optimist Park, where an extension brought the light rail in 2018, the white population increased by 461% while the Black population increased by just 21%.

West Charlotte residents worry history could repeat itself.

“It’s a real fear given what has transpired with the Blue Line, and given the history of light rail. So it’s not an unfounded, unwarranted concern,” said Rickey Hall, the board chair of the West Boulevard Neighborhood Coalition and a lifelong west Charlotte resident. “I don’t think that with growth and prosperity that you ought to have wholesale displacement of people who have been historically investing in these areas.”

A 2022 study published in the journal Travel Behaviour and Society by UNC Charlotte associate professor Isabelle Nilsson and a colleague found Black and lower-income residents felt Charlotte’s growth, including the construction of the Blue Line, benefited younger, wealthier residents over themselves.

“(Displacement) is something that is etched into the memory of, particularly, blue collar African American folks,” Hanchett said.

"Displacement" by condemnation proceedings is different from "displacement" by selling your property to someone who offers a better price.  I hope somebody, somewhere in some urban and regional economics program (if there are any) is looking, carefully, at the people who had been making those investments, what sorts of incentives they had made, and why they did not exercise the option to stay put that is inherent in making an investment.

From there, things get more interesting.  The neighborhood of Charlotte being reported on appears to have the road amenities of the northwest side of Milwaukee, and making the roads safer for people not in cars is part of what public officials seek to do.  They'd like to have their urban improvements and the status quo.  That's not how things work.

The rail and other improvements could accelerate gentrification in the area, [Sustain Charlotte's Shannon] Binns said. But the referendum would bring a benefit to the impacted communities, too.

“The reality is, Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, we are growing exponentially. And so when it comes to concerns around displacement and gentrification, that is happening with or without a transportation plan,” said Tonya Jameson, the director of civic advancement for economic mobility nonprofit Leading on Opportunity. “At least with the transportation plan and the referendum … now we have a lens on it, and we can also create some type of framework to try to mitigate this.”

Conversations about gentrification have ramped up since the Blue Line was created, Jameson said. City leaders are discussing it proactively and working to combat it.

Maybe, after they've tried everything else, they'll place a bet on emergence.  Unfortunately, with improved transportation, road amenities, and big box apartments comes a change in the rent gradient, and if that doesn't present as "gentrification," the neighborhood is in a worse place.