Brookhill Village in Charlotte, NC, is being demolished. Hundreds of African-American families are going to be evicted, and their are no plans to offer them any sort of affordable alternative to their homes, which are now being demolished.
Developers like Shook Kelley are actively demolishing the neighborhood and replacing it with higher-end housing that will “attract millenials” without a second thought of what will become of Brookhill’s current residents.
In other words, this is another step in the process of gentrifying Charlotte, making it essentially unlivable for all of the communities that have lived here throughout its entire history.
The developers and architects of this project to displace an entire community have continued shamelessly and unchallenged, what little publicity this event has received has been glamorous news reels, talking of plans to “revitalize” a working-class community.
This Thursday, December 13th, I hope that I can help change that.
A small organization has gathered around the purpose of offering some kind of meaningful resistance – I am proud to say that I have been doing what I can to aid in these efforts.
The main goal of everyone involved has been to organize a community meeting this Thursday in order to rally the community to defend their homes.
However, as you can imagine, this is not as simple as handing out flyers and expecting everyone to be there – I must once again stress that the residents of Brookhill are working class families who work long hours, and need a material reason to show up in opposition to a developer who is literally burning down flyers and posters that mention the event.
The organization, STP Charlotte, has vowed to do their best to
provide transportation to and from the meeting as well as provide food
and child care at the meeting itself.
As you can imagine, this costs money.
If you have the money to spare, I ask that you send what you can to help organize this meeting. This really means a lot to me, but it would certainly mean a whole lot more to the families living in such a precarious housing situation.
Google Pay: ServeThePeopleCLT@Gmail.com
Venmo: @STP-CLT
If you can’t spare any money, consider reblogging this post, and if you know anyone in the area, be sure to let them know.
How the fuck is this shit even “legal”?
Brookhill Village is technically an ‘apartment complex’ – it was built in the 1950′s, and everyone living there is technically a tenant that can be evicted at any time. Brookhill has fallen into complete disrepair over time, but with rent as low as $300 a month, it’s really the best option for a lot of people who live in Charlotte.
However, “in 2016, the federal government filed
a complaint to begin the process of seizing the Brookhill Village
apartments on South Tryon Street, due to allegations of repeated drug
activity — marijuana, heroin, ecstasy and crack cocaine. Before the end
of the year, the federal government reached
a settlement with the owners of Brookhill Village. Part of the
agreement called for Brookhill Village Two to demolish or
“substantially” renovate the run-down apartments on the property. The
settlement also called for a system to screen tenants, provide on-site
patrols and monitoring to eliminate crime, improve lighting and
communicate often with Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police about crime-fighting
measures.”
Not to take the blame off of the owners of Brookhill or the developers currently tearing the place down, but the federal government absolutely played a significant role in this. And if you want my opinion, I believe the government made this decision fully aware of the profitability involved in replacing low-income housing with expensive millenial homes.
And that “screening process” is absolutely going to be used for evil.
Portland is sick and the sickness is white supremacy and the toxic and myopic smugness of a middle class that doesn’t know it has voted away every support that allowed it to come into existence.
How are you gonna be mad about a homeless shelter…….
😭😭property values 🙄
Just for those of you not from Portland or who don’t know, this is the same city where people posted the private addresses of teachers and school board officials for threats bc of what was essentially the integration of a white school in a high income area with a majority black school only a few blocks farther that was mostly empty bc PROPERTY VALUES
I don’t usually add to posts but since we’re shitting on Portland………I lived downtown for a number of years, right on the boundary of where the Pearl District (richest part of town) and Old Town (epicenter of the homelessness crisis) meet. There are several consecutive blocks of green space there that act as a boundary between the two, and because there are resources in Old Town for people struggling with homelessness, there were usually people sleeping on the benches in this park, or snoozing under the trees on the grass, etc. Well the Pearl is expanding rapidly, so now the wealthy people that live there have to (god forbid) look at/acknowledge the poverty right under their noses. And oh, the complaints! The concern! The self-righteous cries for change! So loud and adamant that the mayor himself declared he was going to come see just how bad the homeless problem is……
Only the dumbass set a time and date for his visit. And, shockingly, about an hour before he was supposed to arrive, the Portland PD swept through the park blocks and cleared out literally everyone that looked even remotely impoverished. So when the mayor showed up? Empty park blocks. Not a scrap of tarp or cardboard to be seen!
And that’s just one incident, but it does a pretty good job of summarizing how Portland operates: all talk, no effective action. Not because we lack the funds, but because for the most part, the wealthy white people that live here don’t actually want to fix the problem–they just want it to go somewhere else.
Haha I didn’t know about this incident. I said it on another version of this post but do you remember when they fenced off the same park blocks bc the wine bar complained that their patrons shouldn’t have to see houseless people?
So what I’m reading is Portland is Satan’s hellspawn?
This will seem pedantic to a lot of you but using language like this detached and disengages the REALITY of structural white supremacy, a huge problem across the country and not just in Portland, and reifies it as a specifically Portland problem, and one that isn’t being replicated in various ways and degrees across the country.
What makes portland DIFFERENT is it’s reputation as a safe and progressive enclave; what I’m attempting to clarify with the original post and this one is that this reputation is a myth that functions to keep Portland’s white supremacy in place.
What commentary like THIS, yours, does, is once again make Portland a special case, although this time in the opposite direction.
Portland is not special.
San Francisco, LA, NYC, Atlanta, London, Brighton, Paris, to name a few—this is happening all over the world. This is white supremacy and this is part of what it does, to white people as well as people of color.
Gentrification creates a stifling homogeneity in urban areas that makes it less suited for the everyday lives of the lower class and more suited towards the leisure and tourism of those with expendable income.
An old, decrepit laundromat gets replaced by an upscale bakery? And people are mad? It’s not that the poor hate organic vegan cupcakes, it’s that most of us don’t have a way to do laundry in our own home.
Run-down corner stores replaced by hand-made designer clothing boutiques? We don’t hate your eco-fabric shawl, but I can’t eat that for dinner after work like I could have a can of beans I grabbed from that corner store when I don’t have time to take the bus to the real grocery store after work.
What gentrification brings in and of itself is not typically bad, it’s that gentrification brings institutions of leisure and pleasure and makes it so that the poor have to go farther out of their way for basic necessities. It turns low-income living spaces into local tourist attractions. It can even create food deserts by putting restaurants, grocery stores, etc. in that the majority of the lower class cannot afford.
Imagine if someone totally renovated your house and turned it into a mini theme park – they took away your sleeping space, where you prepare food, where you clean yourself and get ready for your day, and replaced it with things that will please people who are visiting, who have their own homes they can go back to, who are here not for their entire life but just as a distraction from their otherwise mundane existence. It’s not that you hate theme parks, it’s not like you’ve never been to a theme park and vow to never visit one again. It’s just that you need to live! To survive! And the leisure of those who have more than you should not invalidate your existence.
I am glad this has made the rounds. Some people feel a dense misunderstanding or misinterpretation concerning gentrification, and I think it helps to hear a description/explanation of what gentrification is from those who are both affected by it and educated by the culture from which it hails. I and many others enjoy some of the delights of gentrification while simultaneously having their livelihoods threatened by it.
people are fucking dying. i’ve never been so furious
if you haven’t seen it, the residents’ Grenfell Action Group wrote a blog article last year addressing fire risk in the buiding and “reached the conclusion that only an incident that results in serious loss of life of KCTMO [the Landlord] residents will allow the external scrutiny to occur that will shine a light on the practices that characterise the malign governance of this non-functioning organisation.“ [x]
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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