View From Streetcar

The View From a $37 Million Streetcar

Visions of race, poverty and politics in the ‘two Charlottes.’

By Michael Graff

The most howled-about public transportation vehicle in the South’s most spit-shined city feels like an amusement park ride as it trolls through town. Its wheels click and clack, its bell rings at a pitch just higher than cute and its wooden seats are as quaint and uncomfortable as they can be.

The thing travels only 1.5 miles, back and forth along decades-old tracks. Coming from the east, it starts in front of a hospital in a leafy neighborhood. Then it chugs down a hill and straight through the campus of Central Piedmont Community College, a well-regarded institution that President Obama mentioned in his 2012 State of the Union address. Heading into uptown, on the left, you’ll see an eight-foot bronze statue of Gandhi. On the right is the arena that serves as the home of the Charlotte Hornets, a professional basketball team owned by Michael Jordan. Its last stop is in front of a place called the Epicentre, Charlotte’s version of Times Square, with flashing screens and a giant ad for Apple products.

Charlotte’s new LYNX Gold Line has been a controversial character here for years, especially since Anthony Foxx, now the U.S. Secretary of Transportation, became mayor in 2009. A month after he took office, the city's unemployment rate scraped bottom at 12.9 percent. The streetcar was one of Foxx's biggest sales jobs during his tenure, right up there with bringing the Democratic National Convention to town in 2012. The city, now with unemployment back in the neighborhood of 5 percent, approved the street car in May 2013, just one month after Foxx told us he was going to Washington.

No step before or since has been without controversy. Supporters, mostly Democrats, lovingly call it a “streetcar,” and they’ll tell you it’s a valuable instrument that now transports 47,000 riders a month—about double expectations. Opponents, mostly Republicans, condescendingly call it a “trolley,” and they’ll tell you that it cost $37 million just for this phase with $100 million more to come for extensions in the next decade. A local columnist derided it as "unnecessary," "built on untested promises and driven by out-of-control spending."

For all the fuss, though, the Gold Line is just one symbol of contention on a lengthening list of divisions in the second-fastest growing big city in America.

Charlotte is an attractive place for any number of reasons—mild weather, cleanliness, fitness, proximity to the mountains and the coast—but its defining blemish is that it’s an either-or city in an either-or state. Although the same can be said of many places around the country entering the 2016 election season, in many ways the chasms are wider here. Charlotte has an absurd amount of wealth thanks to banking, energy, real estate, and health care. But a recent study by Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley showed that Charlotte ranks last among American cities in terms of economic mobility—meaning a child born into poverty here is less likely to become wealthy in his lifetime than in any other city in the country.

Within that great divide are other telling splits. Fifty percent of Charlotte’s public schools are segregated by race, defined as having 80 percent or more of one race or the other. The city’s overall population is becoming more diverse every year—the percentage of foreign-born residents has jumped from 3 percent in 1990 to 15 percent today, with the bulk of the newcomers arriving from Asia and Latin America—but Charlotte’s wealthiest and whitest population is situated tightly in the southeastern part of town known as The Wedge. Think of a map of the city as a clock; The Wedge would be the hours of 4 to 6. People there provide about half of the city’s property taxes, and they also enjoy nearly all of the fine restaurants and shops and stores.

“We’re past the recession. It’s a period of boom growth again. … There’s a lot of optimism around all of that,” says mayor-elect Jennifer Roberts, who in November defeated her Republican opponent, Edwin Peacock, 52-48. “But underlying that, there’s a sense that there’s kind of two Charlottes.”

In the early 1980s, Roberts was a recent graduate of the University of North Carolina when she drove through her Southern hometown and passed something that startled her: a new development in south Charlotte with fences around it.

“When I saw the first gated community go up, I was sad,” she says. “I was like, ‘We’re putting up walls and gates to really separate from our neighbors?’ Before that, we hadn’t had that kind of real, conscious separation.”

Roberts observed the legacy of that separation this summer and fall as she canvassed Charlotte to gather votes, and she saw it again in the results. Despite the relatively narrow victory overall, Roberts dominated in Democratic areas of town, receiving more than 65 percent of the vote in 76 of the city’s 168 precincts.

A Charlotte native, Roberts shoulders a simple yet significant burden as she enters office—the city needs someone to finish a full term. She follows a string of people who have been either temporary or ousted. The first, Patsy Kinsey, finished the last five months of Foxx’s term. The second, elected mayor Patrick Cannon, was arrested on federal corruption charges just three months into his term and now lives in a federal prison in Morgantown, West Virginia. The third, Dan Clodfelter, finished Cannon’s term, but lost to Roberts in the Democratic primary this fall.

Charlotte isn’t used to inconsistent leadership. Foxx was a well-respected figure and a product of the local school system and Davidson College. Before that, Republican Pat McCrory held the office for 14 years before being boosted into the governor’s mansion in 2012, riding a wave of Charlotte Democrats who supported him for leading the city to prosperity in the 2000s. McCrory oversaw the November 2007 opening of the LYNX Blue Line, a light rail that runs 10 miles from center city to the southern suburbs that has spurred block after block of new construction.

McCrory’s reputation here has since sagged. He leads a Republican-dominated state government that redrew legislative districts in such a way that guaranteed GOP domination for at least a decade. Republicans own a 34-16 edge in the state senate and a 73-45 margin in the state house—numbers that hardly reflect a state with 2.6 million registered Democrats and 1.9 million registered Republicans. Under McCrory, the state government has shifted heavily in favor of rural North Carolina, riling metropolitan areas, where Democrats outnumber Republicans more than 2-to-1. The legislature regularly tries to find ways to redistribute tax revenue from cities to outlying counties, which stretch from hardscrabble Appalachia in the west to the poor coastal plain flatlands in the east.

McCory’s first term will be judged in 2016, when the state will again be the focus of national attention, with races for president, governor, and U.S. Senate all on the ballot. North Carolina has been the most competitive state in the past two presidential races—Barack Obama won by 0.3 percent in 2008; Mitt Romney won by 2 percent in 2012—and experts predict it will be very close again this year.

“North Carolina is almost a bipolar state,” says Dr. Michael Bitzer, who teaches political science at Catawba College. “When you get into districts, congressional and General Assembly, that’s a whole ’nother kind of North Carolina because of the way the districts were drawn. It’s a tale of two different political environments within one state.”

Less than a century ago, future evangelist and minster to the presidents Billy Graham was raised on a dairy farm on the outskirts of Charlotte. Today, the land where that farm once stood is essentially part of the middle of town. It is home to the popular Montford Drive, a street packed with restaurants and bars.

Looking around Mecklenburg County now, it’s hard to remember that a half-century ago, much of it was farmland. But there are times when Charlotte reveals its conservative, Southern Baptist roots. In March 2015, for instance, the city council held a meeting to vote on a nondiscrimination ordinance that would have added gender identity and sexual orientation to the list of protected categories. The debate became all about bathrooms—some residents didn’t want a transgender woman in a public women’s room or a transgender man in a men’s room. The public-comment meeting lasted several hours. At one point a man who opposed the ordinance sang about how roosters need hens and stallions need mares. “Come on down to the farmyard!” he sang, according to a Charlotte Observer article. The measure was defeated.

Conflict, like most things in Charlotte, is relatively new. In the Civil War, Atlanta burned and Wilmington and Charleston were blasted, but Charlotte was the Southern city that escaped devastation. While the rest of the South struggled to reconstruct, Charlotte thrived. Textile mills went up all around the city. Charlotte engineer Stuart Cramer, who designed more than 150 mills throughout the region, coined the term “air conditioning” in 1906, forever changing the hot, Southern workplace.

In the 20th century, Charlotte progressed regardless of downturns, detractors or history. Before the civil rights movement, Birmingham was twice the size of Charlotte. But brutal images of police using fire hoses and a church being bombed happened there, not here, and now Charlotte is four times the size of Birmingham. Unlike other Southern towns, Charlotte didn’t fall apart when the textile industry collapsed. Instead, it built banks, so many that by 2014 finance and insurance sector jobs accounted for 8.8 percent of employment. When the banks crashed in 2008 and people again started to write the city’s obituary, Charlotte finished construction on a glimmering new tower that looks like a martini glass and is now home to Duke Energy, the largest electric power company in America.

The Gold Line opened on July 14 with a grand ceremony. Foxx returned to give an impassioned speech, noting that this was only the first leg of the route, and that future extensions would reach the west side of Charlotte, a mostly minority area of town where he grew up.

“This isn’t a project to nowhere,” Foxx said.

The celebration lasted a little less than a week. Ridership numbers rose. The press coverage was positive. But on Saturday, July 19, with mostly families and children on board, the fun stopped.

Just after 10 a.m. that day, longtime public transit employee Metro Coston—yes, that’s his real name—pulled the streetcar out of the station in front of the hospital. As he started to roll down the hill, he lost control. Gravity took over. He pulled an emergency break, but nothing happened. At the bottom of the hill, the streetcar smashed into the back of a white Chevrolet SUV.

Nobody was seriously hurt, but within days, news sites throughout Charlotte posted surveillance video from inside the streetcar. In the video, you can hear a young boy scream, “I want to go home.” Online comments from the anti-streetcar crowd delighted at the opportunity to rhyme trolley and folly.

As much as this city bestows upon its residents—a thriving food scene in some neighborhoods, oak-tree-lined streets in others, a funky arts scene in another, Broadway performances in uptown—it starves them of other things. I can spend several hours in certain areas of town and see only people who look like me (I am white), and several hours in other areas of town and see only people who don’t look like me.

The mayoral election indicates that the divisions are getting worse. Only 15 of the city’s 168 precincts had results that fell within the 55-45 margin. In other words, only 9 percent of the precincts were competitive, meaning that here in the largest city in the state, we aren’t just segmenting ourselves in terms of urban and rural, or even in terms of white and black, or even in terms of The Wedge and the rest of Charlotte. We’re segmented from block to block.

“People have sorted themselves in like-minded communities,” Bitzer says. “So then when someone from the city of Charlotte meets someone from [rural] Randolph County, it’s like Democrats are from Venus and Republicans are from Mars. It’s because we talk to fellow folks in our community and they all think alike. When we meet someone from the opposite side, we have no way to understand how that person thinks that way.”

Roberts, the mayor-elect, and I live in the same neighborhood. We drink coffee from the same coffee shop. The shop sits just across the street from a plot of land where an old recording studio once launched music from R.E.M. to Joe Walsh to James Brown. A stick-framed, five-story apartment complex is rising on that patch of dirt now. Money magazine named this part of Charlotte the best big-city bargain in America last year, and we are proud of that.

Across the intersection, though, just beyond a popular restaurant started by a pair of Serbian brothers, is the Belmont neighborhood. It’s a mostly black neighborhood with a proud past. Housing prices there are significantly less than what they are on “our side” of the street. That is changing, though, as gentrification creeps their way.

On nice days, I walk to work from home, a little more than three miles each way. On less ambitious days, I walk down to the Gold Line station in front of the hospital, less than a mile away, and take the streetcar into uptown, where I’ll catch the light rail to my office. I did that one day last week. Sitting on benches in front of me were four African-Americans and three white people. A few were young professionals, earbuds firmly in their ears. Others were older and more wide-eyed as they looked out the window during the ride. Behind me was the owner of a popular local food truck and a friend of his from Afghanistan.

When we talk about the Gold Line in Charlotte, we talk about it in either-or terms: The streetcar is a valuable tool, or, That trolley isn’t worth a damn. But sit on those hard and uncomfortable benches for a few minutes, and it’s clear that it’s become one of the most integrated spaces in a city that needs them.

A woman in the front grabbed the cord to ring the bell. It dinged its cute ding. She clutched her purse and stepped off in front of the Mecklenburg County Jail. The men behind me talked about a big fish fry they planned to attend. Then they looked left. “I’ve never understood why there’s a statue of Gandhi here,” the man from Afghanistan said.

As we chugged up and over the hill, everything modern about Charlotte came into view— the Duke Energy Center with its glistening windows, the Hornets arena, the sign for the iPhone 6(s).

Just then, a funny little Charlotte thing happened. Traveling in the oncoming lane near the heart of the 17th biggest city in America was a John Deere tractor, a big one with a climate controlled cabin, the kind you’d see in the soybean fields that still surround this New South city. Hard to tell where it came from, or where it was going, but as its diesel engine grumbled past the clicking and clacking streetcar, neither driver waved.