Charlotte – Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy

Action Alert: Support the 2040 Plan Today for a Better Charlotte Tomorrow

Posted on June 4, 2021

Revised draft of Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan charts a sure path toward a more just, equitable community.

The statement below is from the local group Neighbors for More Neighbors CLT, of which Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy is a founding member. Learn more about our coalition and join our campaign for a equitable, inclusive and prosperous community for all Charlotte residents.

The Neighbors For More Neighbors CLT is a growing coalition of non-profit organizations and neighborhood leaders and individual citizens guided by a vision for a more diverse and inclusive city. Our coalition remains steadfast in our support of the Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan and urges the Charlotte City Council to adopt it at the June 21 City Council meeting as currently revised.

The revision to the plan includes the important addition of an Anti-Displacement Stakeholder group composed of neighborhood leaders and housing advocates, as well as residents threatened by displacement. This is an important addition to ensure the Plan fulfills its promise of an equitable growth framework. In addition, we are in support of the revision to Policy 2.1, which retains largely intact a key element of the plan to increase diversity of housing types on single-family lots. We are encouraged by the City Council taking a bold action to ensure that our espoused values, expressed vision becomes our lived experience. We appreciate your recognition that we must continue to press forward for change.

Why This Matters:

Equity is a key goal of the Charlotte 2040 Plan. In the second draft plan’s own words, “Equity is, in a sense, what we owe to each other: a fundamental part of our social contract that recognizes the inherent value of every Charlotte resident, actively works for justice and equality of opportunity in our City, and treats every person with dignity.”
Charlotte is hyper-segregated racially and economically. A group of well-funded private interests that benefit from the status quo are working hard to discredit this plan and mislead the public.
The revision to the plan includes the important addition of an Anti-Displacement Stakeholder group composed of neighborhood leaders and housing advocates, as well as residents threatened by displacement. This is an important addition to ensure the plan fulfills its promise of an equitable growth framework. In addition, we are in support of the revision to Policy 2.1, which retains largely intact a key element of the plan to increase diversity of housing types on single-family lots. We are encouraged by the City Council taking a bold action to ensure that our espoused values, expressed vision becomes our lived experience.

Learn, Support, Speak Up for the 2040 Comprehensive Plan

Action Alert: Don’t We All Deserve a More Just, Equitable Community? Read our last statement on the 2040 Plan

Myths and Facts About the Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan

How to get involved:

Join Neighbors for More Neighbors CLT in calling on broad, public adoption of the Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan with approval by all City Council members at the June 21, 2021 business meeting.

Join our campaign! Add your name to the growing list of supporters of Neighbors for More Neighbors CLT and learn more about ways to get involved
Explore the 2040 Plan with us Wednesday, June 9, 6-7:30 p.m. with us and Sustain CLT. Join us for a beer, food and live music as we introduce you to this vision for the future of Charlotte and why it’s so critical as the city grows. This in-person event and registration is required to manage capacity. Admission is free, but we do ask for a $10 donation is possible to cover event costs. Register now!
Join us at upcoming meetings to show your support. Find a full list at the bottom of cltfuture2040.com
Contact your City Council members and urge them to unanimously support equitable, inclusive Charlotte by adopting this plan.
Be a 2040 Plan Ambassador and help us spread the word! Encourage your networks to support adoption of the plan and participate in the process.
Pick up a free yard sign to show your support for the 2040 Plan in your neighborhood!

Action Alert: Don’t We All Deserve A More Just, Equitable Community?

Posted on May 3, 2021

Charlotte’s future is in our hands. We have an incredible opportunity to put Charlotte on the path toward equitable, long-term social and economic development.

The Charlotte City Council is considering adoption of the Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan, a guiding document that will inform how our city grows over the next 20 years.

Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy applauds the critical importance the plan places on dismantling the intentional and systemic mechanisms used to segregate Charlotte by race and economic status since World War II.   

The plan is rooted in an equitable growth framework that strives to create a dynamic, just, and inclusive city.    

But a potential decision to significantly delay the vote on the Charlotte 2040 Comprehensive Plan has concrete consequences: maintaining the unacceptable status quo as last in the nation for upward mobility. 

Charlotte did not get here by accident, but rather through decades of deliberate decisions by powerful policy makers and political leaders, as well as refusals to act.  

How Charlotte Got Here

Charlotte is more racially and economically segregated today than it was 100 years ago. Residential zoning laws, specifically single-family zoning, have been utilized as tools of racial segregation, white supremacy and socioeconomic exclusion. 

Housing options for communities of color and lower-income Charlotteans were drastically limited by exclusionary zoning policies mandating single-family detached homes and minimum lot sizes, by restricted access to federal mortgage financing through redlining and federal housing policy, and by blatantly discriminatory deed restrictions. 

If already homeowners, these discriminatory tools worked to artificially suppress a family home’s market value for years.  These practices significantly contributed to Charlotte’s racial wealth gap and 50 out of 50 ranking nationally for upward mobility.

We can’t expect true, meaningful change to happen without action. We must take affirmative steps to undo the generations of systemically racist policies that currently shape our community.    

Our city, our citizens cannot afford to wait. 

As a founding member of Neighbors 4 More Neighbors CLT, we urge the Charlotte City Council to adopt the Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan in June.

Without action, segregated development will continue; displacement and limited housing supply will continue, and only those who benefit most from the status quo will continue to benefit.

Myths and Facts About the Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan

Though some opposition from builders and developers mistakenly suggests the aspirational goals and proposals made in the plan are “illegal,” the plan is not a regulation, but a guiding outline of Charlotte’s long-term vision for itself. 

This broad, equity-based vision lifts up Charlotte’s future.

Why the Charlotte Future 2040 Plan Matters

Adopting the plan now guides the legal and regulatory changes needed for implementation, particularly the finalization of the Unified Development Ordinance (UDO).   

The UDO will improve neighborhood inclusion and expand housing options by incorporating middle density housing for the 80 percent of land currently set aside for detached single family homes.   

With an expected population growth of 600,000 people in the next 30 years Charlotte must adapt for the future.  

We must prioritize adding density in a conscientious manner that ensures affordable housing is expanded.  Of course, single-family detached homes can and will be built, the proposed UDO simply offers other, more inclusive options.  

It is critical that the 2040 Plan and concomitant regulatory changes provide safeguards to prevent repeat of the racist “urban renewal” policies of the past.   

Any affordable housing and home preservation policy must ensure those who already own an affordable home may remain, are not priced out by property taxes, or taken advantage of by predatory, unregulated real estate investors incentivized by increased property values.   

Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy’s priorities include protecting financial security and family stability; preserving and expanding affordable housing options; and addressing systemic racism by advocating for removal of barriers and harmful practices that negatively impact communities of color and lower-income Charlotteans.   

We work with homeowners and neighborhood associations to identify problematic practices, educate homeowners about options, and use litigation and advocacy tools as necessary to stop abusive practices.   

Having the City and City Council working with us toward these goals is critical to slowing forced displacement, misleading practices, and unwanted gentrification. 

Charlotte Center for Legal Advocacy supports the plan’s objectives set out in:

Goal 2 (Neighborhood Diversity and Inclusion),
Goal 3 (Access to Housing for All), and
Goal 5 (Safe and Equitable Mobility).

These goals can be further developed as we move forward, but it is important to have them in place now. 

The Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan is a cohesive, thoughtful framework needed to guide Charlotte’s development, priorities and legislative advocacy over the next 20 years and is the first since 1975—almost 50 years ago.   

Now is the time for action. We need courage and leadership from our elected officials to make bold, visionary decisions now. Doing so is what’s right for all Charlotteans. 

With your help, we can build the kind of community we deserve—one that is just and equitable for everyone.

What You Can Do

Join Neighbors for More Neighbors CLT in calling on broad, public adoption of the Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan with approval by all City Council members in a June 2021 vote.

Add your name to the growing list of supporters of Neighbors for More Neighbors CLT and learn more about ways to get involved by visiting the Neighbors for More Neighbors CLT website.
Join us at upcoming meetings to show your support starting with a virtual Planning Commission meeting today, May 3, at noon. Find a full schedule here.
Be a 2040 Plan Ambassador

Thousands of immigrants seek asylum in Charlotte court. Nearly all will lose.

Posted on July 12, 2019

Charlotte N.C.- “Stand up and raise your right hand,” Judge William Riggs said.
He looks expectantly at a Central American man in front of him, who’s wearing headphones to listen to the Spanish interpreter to the left of Riggs. Before she finishes translating, Riggs raises his own right hand to demonstrate the action.
After the man takes an oath, a baby, in the wooden benches designated for observers, starts whining. The mother bounces her knees up and down, attempting to soothe the child.
The immigrant’s lawyer explains his claim, and at one point, Riggs rests his chin in his hand.
It’s about 9 a.m., and this is the first of dozens of asylum cases he’ll hear that day. Once the lawyers finish, he either assigns a later individual hearing or orders the respondent removed from the country.

All of this takes place in Charlotte’s immigration court, located in a mundane office building in east Charlotte. There isn’t a sign outside to identify it, and once inside, you have to take a rickety elevator to the fourth floor — just three floors above an immigration law firm.

That’s where anyone in the Carolinas has to go to claim asylum, and its four judges are some of the strictest in the country.