Rude Awakening For Uptown Dreamers And Schemers
Despite pouring tens of millions of dollars of public money into uptown to help fuel growth in the private sector, the wildly optimistic dreams and schemes that boosters touted for Center City have fallen woefully short of predictions.
When the uptown lunch bunch was huddling over linen napkins and pewter goblets during the boom of the mid-2000s, they confidently predicted Center City would soon bustle with more than 17,000 residents calling the area home. Today, the number has all but remained flat at 11,000, about the same as four years ago, according to this dissection of the Center City scene from the uptown paper of record.
The forecasted development explosion for upwards of 20 new condo high-rises dotting the Queen City skyline has, to date, sprouted only eight. Meanwhile, property values have tanked, with condos originally priced in the $400,000 range tumbling to price points that hover around $200,000. In many cases, units that were once for-sale have become for-rent, and still sit vacant.
The only real boom that hasn’t gone bust uptown, in fact, seems to have come courtesy of local GovCo burning through your tax dollars, building a dizzying array of shimmering trinkets and baubles within the Center City loop. The justification for such incredible largess, heard over and over, was that the bevy of new museums and cultural centers, arenas, halls of fame, and train sets would reap long-term reward in additional tax base through private-sector urban revitalization.
How’s that working out? No worries, according to Center City Partners head honcho Michael Smith, who says he’s still bullish on uptown, calling the latest pie-in-the-sky predictions for Center City to hit 25,000 residents by 2020 “incredibly achievable.”
Local government’s solution to the mess, as usual, is to throw still more money at the problem. One of the most recent gifts for Center City comes wrapped in a $30-million public subsidy to help build a parking deck and a new urban park for UNCC’s planned uptown campus and a mixed-use development by Levine Properties. Both of those projects are slated to be located in uptown’s First Ward, near the publicly subsidized TWC Arena and ImaginOn center, alongside the grossly over-budget Lynx Blue Line.
The latest $30-milion investment, officials claim, is seed money that will – wait for it – help uptown growth bloom and boom.
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