Wow, a report comes out telling everyone the obvious — Eastland Mall is dead and needs to be buried — and immediately the blame starts flying around Charlotte.
Mayor Pat McCrory gets on his “corridor of crap” kick, telling us we built the wrong stuff in the 1970s, when the mall was built. Mary Newsom rushed to blame the “big boxes” — of course — citing a 1999 zoning approval for a Target and a Lowe’s down Albemarle Road as the final, telling blow that sealed Eastland’s fate.
Time out. Deep breath.
First point. Real estate has a life cycle, especially commercial real estate. At 30 years plus, Eastland has had a damn good run. Plus all of the development it spurred — the strip retail McCrory and Newsom so loathe — had a good run as well. Paid the city a nice chunk of change in property and sales taxes over the years.
Contra McCrory, the Eastland corridor was not crap for a very, very long time. It was thriving, booming even, certainly through the 1980s and into the 90s. Eastland was a center of community life in East Charlotte. It was not a government created and planner-mandated “community center,” yet it still functioned as one.
What changed?
Well, it couldn’t be that the Developers stopped building things that people wanted to live in and shop at, while providing immense revenues to government — that was the problem to begin with according to Newsom and far too many deluded Eastsiders.
I’d argue that one factor was the arrival of Providence High School, which started to pull the cultural focus of parts of Matthews down Highway 51 towards South Charlotte. And many East side residents swear that sending Section 8 apartment dwellers into the area’s copious apartment stock, much of it also built around the same time as Eastland, changed the demographics from working-class to government dependents.
This points to the fact that the Eastland area was functionally mixed use for a long time, it did have the “homes, retail, recreation” mix that is now hailed as the great fix — probably with government money. Why didn’t it stay that way?
I don’t know that you can point to anyone thing. I’d like to hear more ideas, however, and less dogma.
