Did light rail destroy parts of the South Boulevard area? Did it drag the far-flung sections outside Uptown’s sphere down from merely aged but still affordable and suitable for some business to a state of vast abandonment and decay?

This article in the Charlotte Observer today is an indictment of the light rail line so staggering it would have been unthinkable even to me, a light rail skeptic, a decade ago.

The Scaleybark station development was supposed to be the signature jewel in the light rail line, proof it could lift an aging but still functional area out of its doldrums and breathe new life into it. But even with $11.2 million in cold, hard tax payer cash pumped in to help make it profitable enough to develop, it remains undevelopable.

Don’t buy this mumbo-jumbo the Observer is slinging today about how the tax credits to pay for a mere 80 low income apartment units are holding up the Scaleybark development. This is an 18-acre property originally slated to hold mostly mid to upper income units and office space.

If there was demand for market-rate rental housing along the distant parts of the light rail line — which is to say much of it — developer Peter Pappas would start building. There isn’t, not even in the middle of a huge spike in demand for regular rate market apartment units everywhere else, the Observer notes:

Yet the Scaleybark housing remains in limbo during an apartment boom caused by the difficulty of getting a mortgage.

Charlotte-area apartment sales more than tripled last year to $207 million,
up from $48 million the previous year, according to research firm Real Capital Analytics.

Why? Because the Scaleybark section of the light rail line is a Goshforsaken hell hole. In fact, it is currently in demonstrably WORSE shape than when I used to work near what is now the Scaleybark station around 2003. I ride the line often now because my 3-year-old loves trains, and it is still shocking to me how many of the buildings in the area that were fully occupied with businesses before the rail line went in are now vacant, boarded up or have aging “For Lease” signs in front of them. I can’t imagine the bankruptcy rate for the area’s commercial property owners.

The train has literally devastated that area because its construction forced nearly all of those businesses to shut down and most of them never came back.

It is worth a ride down there just to take in the devastation, especially if you knew the area before the train. It wasn’t attractive then, but now it is a wasteland. Even the strip club shut down. The sign out front remains pockmarked with holes, as if someone shot it out. An entire development by Ryan Homes remains frozen in time, the lots graded with utility connections sticking out of the ground waiting for something to happen. Gang graffiti tags cover the weathered sign advertising the development.

The entire purpose of the line, as the Observer reminds us this morning,

… was to change development patterns in Charlotte.The idea was to cluster apartments, offices and stores near train stations so residents would be less dependent on cars and to reduce sprawl.

The uptown elites are of course trying to blame this on the economy, but it was predicted by their own consultants — in 2003. A report by consultant Charles Lesser & Co., which the city buried but that I got a bootlegged copy of, warned of how difficult, if not impossible it would be to develop most of the light rail line down South Boulevard.

The problem was that the property along much of South Boulevard was “brownfield” or aging. And once you left uptown, there was no highway access, making it unattractive to business.

According to the study, in order to even have a shot at attracting development along the future rail line, much of which is currently loaded with old, low-density, unsightly development, local government would have to condemn or acquire hundreds of acres of land around transit stops so it can be given or resold to developers to help them combat the high cost of redeveloping the corridor.

Again according to the report, local government would also have to act as a developer in joint-venture deals with private sector developers, provide gap financing, build parks and plazas to anchor development and provide parking and other infrastructure.

The cost was incalculable and even then it might not work, the report warned. And that was in a relatively good economy.

Which explains the rush to build light rail lines two and three, also through miles of brownfield areas. They’ve got to do it before anyone realizes that South Boulevard is an unfixable wreck, one that light rail likely made much worse.