Affordable Housing

No local issue has been bigger than housing in Charlotte for the past few years — specifically, how much it costs to find a place to live. The soaring cost of housing dominates local news, local government meetings and local conversations. Talk to anyone in Charlotte, and it won’t be long before you hear some […]

The Quality of Life Explorer — Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s source for more than 80 interactively mapped variables about the economy, environment, demographics and more — has been updated with new information allowing you to explore our community. Maps that rely on data from the U.S. Census’ American Community Survey are now up-to-date. This includes variables such as […]

Nearly 60 years after the major legislative victories of the Civil Rights Movement, two troubling patterns persist–one economic, one geographic. First, Black Americans possess significantly lower levels of wealth than White Americans. Second, residential neighborhoods across the country remain highly segregated by race. These patterns and their connections to each other are largely undisputed in […]

Neighborhood Defenders Katherine Levine Einstein, David M. Glick, and Maxwell Palmer Available in paperback from $24.99 Hometown Inequality Brian F. Schaffner, Jesse H. Rhodes, and Raymond J. La Raja Available in paperback from $34.99 One of the favorite mythologies of American politics is that local government is the closest thing we have to direct democracy. […]

A new study of online rental housing advertisements in Charlotte found that corporate landlords are more likely to include potentially exclusionary language in their listings, and those listings are largely concentrated in minority communities. That’s one of the key results from a study by UNC Charlotte scholars Providence Adu, a PhD Student in the Department […]

Brookings Institution Press (February 22, 2022) From $24.99 (paperback) Length: 210 pages Who should read it? Fixer-Upper is a great book for policymakers and people interested in understanding the nitty-gritty of how some housing policies have distorted the market and driven up prices. The data and anecdotes agree: people in the Charlotte region are struggling […]

With rents and home prices shooting up to record levels, it’s not news that finding a place to live in Charlotte is getting more expensive. Last week, the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative brought together local and national experts, advocates and community members in search of policy solutions that could help ameliorate the situation. One takeaway: There’s […]

We often paint Charlotte’s housing market in broad strokes: rising prices, bidding wars and gentrification reshaping neighborhoods. Updated data on the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer lets you can dig deeper into the story told by those aggregate numbers. Charlotte’s neighborhoods are starkly different when it comes to characteristics such as what percentage of homes […]

As investors — including Wall Street-backed single-family rental companies — buy more homes across Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, the city of Charlotte is considering changes to some of its homeownership assistance programs. Buyers in the region face record-high prices and record-low inventory. In January, the median sales price in the Charlotte region was almost $350,000 […]

In 2020, Lookout Housing Ventures proposed a redevelopment plan for Brookhill Village, a 36-acre naturally occurring affordable housing development near the intersection of Remount Road and South Boulevard. Although the proposed development has not moved forward, the approximately 120 households of Brookhill Village may be at risk of displacement if Brookhill Village were to be […]