It’s hard to be a good arts town if you keep pricing artists out of town. That’s why gentrification, the natural result of the city’s urban redevelopment policies, is very near the top of reasons why Charlotte is a bad town for arts and music.
Tara Servatius correctly points out in this week’s Creative Loafing that the city’s policy of redeveloping land — mysteriously always near Uptown — has the impact of displacing poor blacks while offering profit opportunities for developers and young professionals. But poor blacks in communities like Belmont and Double Oaks aren’t the only people being displaced by waves of condo and townhouse projects
The sorts of condo and townhouse projects aimed at young professionals — and their steady six-figure or high-five income streams — are simply unaffordable by young (or older) non-professionals. Like, well, many of this city’s very talented artists and musicians, the sort of very cool mid-to-late 20s scenesters that are paying their own way through UNCC or Queens by waiting tables or tending bar while playing in a band. Or making movies. Or painting and sculpting.
And the affordable near-Uptown areas of older, small rental houses and apartments that artsy types tend to live in exactly because they are affordable are precisely the places that the city and developers want to turn into condos full of young, tax-paying, service-not-consuming high-income young professionals. And to the degree an area has a cool vibe, all the better to attract the hordes of Volvo drivers.
Of course, if you put enough young professional types, some cool, some soulless banker types, into an artsy area, you soon price out the actual artists. Compare Dilworth of 20 years ago to today. Or NoDa of 10 years ago to today. Or today’s very musician friendly (and populated) Plaza-Midwood to what it will become in five or 10 years.
And so it goes, with local artsy types continually pushed further to the periphery, both physically and the minds of the Uptown’s groupthink prone movers and shakers, who see the arts as little more than a recruiting tool and as events at which to be seen.