Crisis Planning

This year, the city will present to the public a proposed plan—the first like it in Charlotte since the 1970s—to solve our runaway city’s biggest and most complicated problem: Land is getting too expensive for many people to afford to live on it. Will the plan be enough, or will it require even more radical measures to work?

- By Greg Lacour

The Building a Charlotte for All Summit draws 250 people across age, ethnicity, and economic class, a remarkable feat on a rainy Saturday morning in January.

The summit is part of an ongoing series of events, hosted by Charlotte Center City Partners and the city, about Charlotte’s dominant problem: economic and population growth intense enough to force poor and working-class people to live miles outside the city where they work. The slender, soft-spoken man who takes the stage in the auditorium at UNC Charlotte Center City frames the issue humbly.

“We don’t want to lose our waiters,” Taiwo Jaiyeoba says. “We don’t want to lose the people who don’t have as much money in our city.”

The ability of “the people who don’t have as much money” to live in Charlotte is determined mainly by the soaring value of the land they live on, whether they own or rent homes on it. Jaiyeoba, 51, has been the city’s planning director for a little less than two years, and he’s in charge of developing a plan to counteract the real estate market’s surge toward escape velocity. He expects this year to unveil a draft of a comprehensive city plan—the first of its kind in Charlotte in 45 years— that reflects the desire of a population as varied as this audience for all Charlotteans, not just the rich, to be able to live affordably in the city. “We live in different geographies,” Jaiyeoba says in the lyrical cadence of his native Nigeria, “but at the end of the day, we are all Charlotteans.”