It happened almost by accident, University City leaders say.
If you moved to Charlotte 10 years ago and couldn’t afford a $300,000 house, your real estate agent most likely directed you to the new subdivisions of east Charlotte that grew up around UNCC. At that time, thousands of African-Americans were moving to Charlotte. They, together with many white newcomers, wound up settling in the University area. Because of the wide range in housing prices, many of these newcomers stayed on as their careers advanced and incomes grew.
“If you look at University City, at those three zip codes, it’s one of the few places that you can come in and rent your first apartment, buy your first house at $80,000, move all the way up to $500,000 and still be in the same five-mile radius so your child is not at risk, technically, of moving schools,” said University City YMCA Executive Director Mike DeVaul.
The result has been a pocket of suburban diversity that’s rare in Charlotte — and just about everywhere else. While whites in other areas of Charlotte have fled by the thousands as African-Americans moved in, the University area has managed to maintain a precarious racial balance that is almost utopian — and, some believe, too good to last.
The University City area is only 67 percent white now, down from 78 percent in 1990; a quarter of the area’s population is now African-American. Part of DeVaul’s job is to track the changing demographics of the community the YMCA targets and make sure the Y’s membership reflects it. His maps show that the University area’s African-American community is largely spread out across neighborhoods of all income ranges.
In zip codes such as 28269, where the median income is $71,700, there seems to be a greater dividing line among the lower, middle and upper middle classes than there is between people of different races. Between 1990 and 2000, 17,700 whites and 8,100 blacks moved to zip code 28269, which is located between East Field and Mallard Creek roads and I-77. Upper income types tend to choose the eastern part of the zip code, toward the county line, while people of lesser means, regardless of race, are more likely to be found on the western side.
Because of that, many of the schools in the area, such as North Mecklenburg High School, have minority populations of 35 percent or more.
“When people look at the [racial breakdown] of North Meck today, they are just shocked,” said DeVaul.
While the University area and east side in general seem to be most popular among African-American newcomers to Charlotte, all but five of the county’s 30 zip codes saw double-and triple-digit increases in the percentage of African-Americans in the last decade and a half.
In the process, the large influx of African-Americans to the county — 61,000 new faces since 1995 alone — has radically altered the social landscape here so quickly that the area’s leadership has been left in the dust.
The problem, say many who have closely followed Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s rapidly changing demographics, is that most of our leaders are operating under the assumption that this county still looks like it did 10 years ago.
When DeVaul ran into former mayor Harvey Gantt at O’Hare airport recently, the YMCA executive gave Gantt an earful. DeVaul’s message was simple. The people making decisions in Charlotte should get on a bus and take a field trip to the suburbs sometime to see what’s really going on.
“I said, ‘Harvey, you’ve got to change everybody else’s paradigm,'” said DeVaul. “Yours is changing, but it’s not for the people around you who are making decisions about the schools. They have the same old filter, and most of them live in the center city and south Charlotte and that is their filter.”
Civic activist Madine Fails came to Charlotte in 1986. “I can remember when we moved into Highland Creek when it first opened and my son might be the only black kid there in the swimming pool,” she said. “Now, when I take my morning walks and see people along the parkway, there are just all kinds of African-Americans who have moved into the neighborhood.”
Houses in the massive subdivision, which opened in 1993 and has expanded to thousands of homes, run from $100,000 to $300,000. Fails said she often wonders how many white people will put their houses up for sale as time goes on if African-Americans continue moving into the neighborhood.
So far, large numbers of both whites and blacks are still moving into the middle and upper-middle income east side.
“If the neighborhood is ritzy, there are some places where class can trump race concerns,” said Charles Gallagher, a professor at the Center for Neighborhood and Metropolitan Studies at Georgia State. “If someone that is black moves into the neighborhood, the assumption is that if these folks can afford a $600,000 house, they must have all the kinds of values that whites see themselves as basically having.”
But will it last?
The odds aren’t good, said Gallagher, who studies racial migration patterns.
“Universities create a unique case,” Gallagher said. “If you look around all the big universities like in Boston and Philadelphia, you’ll always have more integration. It might be graduate students and faculty. It creates an unreal bubble.”
As a rule, Gallagher said, neighborhoods just don’t stay integrated, as much as communities would like for them to.
“Permanently integrated neighborhoods are an anomaly,” he said. “An integrated neighborhood is the amount of time it takes before the last black person moves in and the last white person moves out. If you look at neighborhoods that look integrated and then you look at them 10 years later, they never look the same. You see this happen in Clayton County, which is a county adjacent to Atlanta where 20 years ago it was majority white and now it is majority black. There has been huge white flight.”
DeVaul has studied the numbers, too, but he has a more positive outlook.
He points to a 2002 survey done by the University City Community Building Project in which 71 percent of University area residents polled said the area’s diversity was a strength and only three percent called it a weakness.
DeVaul said his demographic maps show that while people of all races with higher incomes increasingly tend to live closer to the county’s edge, the area isn’t experiencing white flight.
Elsewhere in the county, the picture doesn’t look as sunny.
In dozens of east Charlotte neighborhoods with median family incomes of $40,000 or less, whites are fleeing by the thousands as African-Americans and Hispanics move in.
The 28205 and 28212 zip codes, which start at the edge of uptown and stretch outward to Shamrock Drive and Harris Boulevard, were predominantly white, blue-collar neighborhoods in 1990. But over the following 10 years, the two zip codes lost a staggering 14,146 whites and gained 14,223 African-Americans. In the past five years, an additional 8,400 whites fled the two zip codes, and were largely replaced by African-Americans and Hispanics, according to demographic estimates by Claritas.
“In the blue-collar communities, the only asset many of these folks have is a house and those houses often aren’t worth that much money, so when the neighborhood starts to change, all of the sudden there is this panic, the red flags go up,” said Gallagher. “The three things that whites think about typically with housing are, one, there is no such thing as an integrated neighborhood, two, when blacks move in my house will become devalued and, three, because I’m white I will be basically the target of black on white crime. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
Bill McCoy, the retired director of UNC Charlotte’s Urban Institute, agrees.
“When you look at current data, the only places where it continues to be primarily white, I would say, are essentially above sort of where I-485 is going to be in the north and below maybe highway 51 in the south,” said McCoy. “In between those areas there are still places that are primarily white, but the complexion is changing.”
The changes will present a particular challenge for the school system, says McCoy, because how schools handle diversity will have a great impact on the stability of communities and neighborhoods.
“It is a critical issue for the school system,” said McCoy. “If we continue along this neighborhood assignment track, which I think we are going to, then there is no way around the fact that there are going to be increasing numbers of schools that are at least majority black and a decreasing number of schools that are majority white.”
Fails says the whole community needs to plug in to what is going on. She grew up in the north, and Northerners are a lot more accustomed to segregated communities than Southerners are, she says. She worries that as more Northerners of all races move down here, they’ll seek out the more homogeneous communities they are used to.
The push earlier this year by some of the county’s smaller towns to secede from the school system was the first sign of that, she believes.
Fails also thinks African-Americans — in particular, upper-income African-Americans — need to become more engaged in racial and economic segregation issues, because in some cases, they too are contributing to the problem. She worries that many of them are more concerned about the investment value of their homes than about living in a diverse community. “If I’m out advocating for poor disenfranchised black kids,” she said, “I might find a lot of my black counterparts who don’t agree with me, they live in Highland Creek and other communities.”
This article appears in Jul 13-19, 2005.
