I’m not sure whether to flag this as inappropriate or not. If something looks too long for you, just don’t read it. If you want brevity, go to Twitter.
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Gentrification started in this area when the City bought Dix property. Investors started buying land along lake wheeler (Fuller Heights) to Wilmington Street. Look at Kirby Street since the City controlled Dix. We now have Overture Centennial (Pullen & Bilyeu) since City built Pullen Road to Bilyeu St. That was a cool neighborhood. Will people be impacted, yes. There use to be a lot of low cost apartments near downtown and they are gone. Did you cause it? It is happening to anything within the belt line. Downtown South will accelerate the built out of everything between 40 and MLK. There will not be a gap in between. There are positives and negatives. My coworker had a mechanic that owned his shop on Saunders street who sold the land this year and retired. He has been there over 30 years. Renaissance Park started over 15 years ago. Did they start this? Downtown South Didn’t start this, but they are easy to blame…
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I see people have been talking about gentrification and affordable housing again. Let me shed a light on the cause of both issues:
- Redlining crippled the rich black communities all over the country and forced rich people to be forced to live with poor people, ie. leading to violence, theft, and crime due to greed.
- In addition, banks stopped giving loans to black businesses and black banks were forced to close due to unfair land tax practices, etc.
- Today, bank still consider “black” areas and neighborhoods to be less than and the market values are low, even if a few houses are rebuilt by the original black owners.
- When a white family moves in the area the banks automatically raise the market value of the nearby lots therefore causing issues.
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Talking about Renting and the reason why it’s popular in the black community will be a longer discussion
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Well I’ll just say this rich black people in particular were forced to move out of rich and diverse neighborhoods then forced to pay rent to live in the “ghetto” created for black people but owned by white people. And you can guess how these families became poor. Renting is still a scam to this day.
Drops mike
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I’m stuck in a time warp. As a gay man coming along in the 70s and 80s, we bought and relocated to dilapidated homes in black areas of most large cities. We (gay men) were likely to be accepted there rather than in the traditional white areas + the housing was close to downtowns and exciting venues. The “gentrification” seemed to be accepted as it spread through neglected areas and refreshed areas of town. The increase of property values were not a thing or not that I recall. 50 years and we have a different connotation.
It’s only a concern once the home or complex is redone or renovated by someone who’s not from the area. Today, a rich black family could possibly fuel gentrification if they bought a few lots and built luxury homes in the middle of the ghetto. But 50 years ago and even today the majority of the people doing this were/are white.
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That’s a fair clarification, Thanks for that.
I actually believe it’s based on the individual or family’s income too. That might be the main reason.
There’s been many studies that have documented that redlining is a root cause of widening generational wealth gap between Black and White Americans. This is not only true because it was largely white ownership of most rental neighborhoods that were Black occupied, but also because wealth that has been largely built on the foundation of housing values wasn’t there to pass down to the next generation in the Black community.
Redlining also led to other systemic issues as well like cities not planting trees in black neighborhoods, or not putting in sidewalks, etc.
While it’s easy to just say that we have a free market, and that nothing should be done about it now, one needs to consider that the long run of the market has been more free for some than it has been for others.
I’m not saying that I know the answer to how to fix this, but I am saying that everyone needs to acknowledge the history of how it came to be this way.
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I think something that could be a short term “band aid” of sort would be to freeze property tax increases for legacy residents in rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods. Ex if you’ve lived in said neighborhood 5 years prior to rapid changes taking place you have your tax assessed amount frozen. Obviously it wouldn’t solve everything but it could help
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uh…no
You realize that would be illegal. You can’t arbitrarily say 'because you are poorer than the new guy in the neighborhood and you get to benefit from the price increase of your property…that you don’t have to pay the corresponding taxes with that value increase"
How many tax breaks do pretty much every developer and big companies get?
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Could be illegal today but with the political will, that can change. It’s not uncommon in other cities so doing that in Raleigh wouldn’t be innovative.
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I actually think that there are property tax programs that already exist for lower income seniors in Raleigh/Wake.
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Evil white peoples at it again, ugggh
Are you being funny? I honestly don’t find it funny.
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Won’t happen. You will never find the political will for what appears to be a handout.
People get priced out of neighborhoods all over the country…and not just poor black neighborhoods…which is really what we are talking about here. I can’t afford to live in certain areas but i don’t think I should be entitled to benefit from a price increase in my home while at the same time not having to pay the same tax rate as everyone else.
Thread is turning into city data.
Just saying.
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I think that it’s more than just that. Starting in the depression era, entire swaths of cities were redlined by the Federal government as risky investments. In kind, lenders often refused to write loans for these parts of cities. Not surprisingly, these redlined neighborhoods were largely Black neighborhoods. One could ask then “why not just move out of that neighborhood?” Well, this redlining was coupled with covenants that existed in many neighborhoods that prevented minority residents. In the case of Southern cities like Raleigh, this resulted in white people living in neighborhoods where they could get loans, and black people living in houses in neighborhoods where they found it impossible to get loans. Because black people were generally poorer than white people, this meant that the landlords in the black (redlined) neighborhoods were nearly always white.
This dynamic played out over a few decades until the fair housing act (or something that) in the 60s where those practices were abolished, but the economic damage was already done. At the same time, black citizens in cities across America were cementing their neighborhoods culturally as home, as they weathered through the flight of the suburbs, and the decline of our center cities.
As Americans’ money has returned to the cities, many of these formerly culturally black neighborhood residents find themselves battling an uneven playing field again. For those who own their property, their prospects are somewhat better if they can realize the value of their properties, and not let the next owner reap the benefits. For far more others who continue to be renters, they have little to no control over what happens to them in their current neighborhoods. This is especially true if their housing is considered under the current market.
In the end, I think that this issue is more than just how we house people who are being displaced; it’s about how we solve for the societal inequity that has been built since emancipation. From Jim Crow, to redlining, to the current wave of dismantling formerly stable black communities, something has got to change. Like I said in a previous post, I don’t know all the answers, but I do think that the change has got to be about more than just housing.
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