The Cost of Expensive Dirt

Land prices, especially near uptown Charlotte, are forcing even some affluent homeowners to flee for the sticks

- By Chuck McShane

Every morning since November, my wife and I have woken to the beeps of bulldozers in reverse and the cracks of clearing brush. Across the street from our condominium complex, built in 1965, crews are leveling four lots to make way for a new development. The general process has repeated itself over the past few years along this block, tucked behind Park Road Shopping Center, four miles south of uptown. This time, it’s four houses built in the 1950s, to be replaced by 16 townhomes. Starting price for each: about $600,000.

It’s a common scene in Charlotte’s “close-in” neighborhoods, those that adjoin or are within a few miles of uptown. Investors snap up ranch-style and other houses from yesteryear’s suburbs and in their place build custom homes twice their size or, where zoning allows, townhomes and apartments that seem to fill out every inch of once-expansive lawns.

From the perspective of this block, it’s a happy story. The young couple bought that three-bedroom for $237,000 in 2014 and sold it to the developer for $465,000 last fall. They’re certainly not complaining. “Don’t mess this up for us,” the woman told a neighbor who approached her with a petition in 2018, when word spread about The Drakeford Company’s plan to ask the city to rezone the property. The neighbor feared tree loss and traffic increases. But opposition fizzled when developers noted the zoning in place allowed them to build the same number of units.