Rebuilding Reid: Habitat for Humanity aims to turn around a Charlotte neighborhood

CHARLOTTE — Drive up Amay James Boulevard and try counting all the new houses before you lose track.

Down the street, construction workers pour cement for the foundations of two new homes while masons sling mortar for the brickwork on another.

Across the street, a new playground will go up next month. Further down is the site of a future family center to serve the community.

No, you are not in a fast-growing suburban subdivision, although you can be forgiven for thinking so.

You are in the inner-city neighborhood of Reid Park on Charlotte’s largely destabilized and impoverished west side, pocked by derelict homes and blighted by weed-infested, empty lots that serve as hangouts for neighborhood troublemakers.

But not here. Not anymore.

Thanks to a group of nonprofits led by Habitat for Humanity, which has built or rehabilitated 38 homes in Reid Park since 2005 and sold them at cost to families in need of housing, this older neighborhood of predominantly small, 1950s homes has a dramatically improving present.

However, the future of the neighborhood — located on both sides of West Boulevard between Donaldson and Old Steele Creek roads — remains a big question mark.

Habitat families account for about 10 percent of the 400 households in Reid Park and about 30 percent of the homeownership.

But the Reid Park revitalization project is a work in progress.

Can it really be called a success unless there’s a critical mass of residents and purchasing power to attract private, for-profit homebuilders and commercial developers to come in and complete the job that Habitat and the other nonprofits have begun?

“Right now there’s a Family Dollar and a few beer and wine stores,” said graduate student Artie Pryer, a liaison between the neighborhood and the University of North Carolina at Charlotte’s nonprofit affiliated Action Research Project.

“But there’s no full-service grocery store or anywhere near the kind of public and private amenities you find in a Mallard Creek or a south Charlotte neighborhood.”

The only attempt to pump private capital into the revival of Reid Park came a few years ago when federal and state government agencies put up funding to entice a handful of for-profit commercial and residential developers, who ended up walking away from their projects with the seed money, never to be heard from again, said Habitat Charlotte spokesman Phil Prince.

But stop by the well-kept non-Habitat home at 3115 Amay James Blvd., where Edward Jones lounges on the front porch watching the construction next door. Ask him about the neighborhood, and he’ll tell you how successful the nonprofit effort has been in Reid Park.

“I was raised up in this house,” owned by his mother, said Jones, who is retired at the age of 65. “Lived here for 40 or 50 years, and this neighborhood sure has changed a lot, first for the worse and now for the better.

“It got really bad there for a while, decent people moving out because the wrong kinda element had moved in. But Reid Park has gotten better and better, the way they’re building these houses out here.”

Jones said crime is down, public transportation more plentiful and the general vibe of the neighborhood is sunnier than it used to be.

That’s largely, if not entirely, to the credit of Habitat’s neighborhood revitalization initiative.

“It’s more than just building houses; it’s building a coalition of partners to turn a neighborhood around, and this one was pretty beat-up when we got here” seven years ago, Prince said.

In addition to the UNCC project and Habitat, the group includes the Junior League of Charlotte, a neighborhood association and several churches in the area. The idea behind the consortium is to share information and resources to attract and promote development and infrastructure.

The Action Research Project, for instance, contacted another nonprofit, Washington, D.C.-based Kaboom, about obtaining a grant to build a playground in Reid Park. Just as Habitat specializes in building homes largely with volunteer labor, Kaboom specializes in helping needy neighborhoods build playgrounds largely with volunteer labor.

Kaboom connected the Action Research Project with the Canadian insurance company Foresters, which donated the money for the playground, which will cost around $80,000 to $100,000, Kaboom spokeswoman Stephanie Bowen said.

The playground is scheduled to go up in a single day, Oct. 13.

Habitat and its partners have managed to make Reid Park a more racially diverse neighborhood, too. The surrounding area, and most of west Charlotte, is almost entirely black, U.S. Census Bureau statistics show. But Myanmarese families and Montagnards from the central highlands of Vietnam have moved into Reid Park to live in Habitat homes.

Sui Aye said she and her family, who come from Myanmar, which used to be known as Burma, have been in the U.S. for three years and for the past six months have called Reid Park home.

But building up enough population and financial clout to attract retail development and private homebuilders has remained elusive so far.

The decision-making process for retailers is complicated and “not particularly scientific,” said Andy Misiaveg, a partner in the Charlotte office of the Atlanta-based Shopping Center Group brokerage and consulting firm.

“There are three kinds of full-service grocery stores,” said Misiaveg, who consults with the Sav-A-Lot chain, the most likely kind of grocery store to go into a neighborhood like Reid Park, Misiaveg said.

“You’ve got your Fresh Markets at the top end, Sav-A-Lots and Aldis down at the bottom and pretty much everybody else in the middle, and everybody looks for different things. Sav-A-Lot looks for an area with a population of about 20,000 and areas with annual household incomes averaging below $50,000, but not too far below that.”

But with far fewer people making far lower incomes than what grocery stores look for — much of the population on the west side of Charlotte lives at or below the poverty line — the Reid Park area will have to grow financially and in population before much new retail will be seen, Misiaveg said.

As for the possibility that new $80,000 Habitat homes will inspire private, for-profit builders to build their own new homes in Reid Park, that’s complicated, said Karla Knotts, co-owner of Knotts Builders.

“No Habitat houses can be used as comparable sales,” Knotts said. “They aren’t appraised because they’re sold at cost. So, just because the neighborhood looks better, (that) doesn’t always mean builders or real estate agents will find the neighborhood attractive.”

Carolina Multiple Listing Services doesn’t indicate whether the Habitat building has helped buoy prices in Reid Park, where one 1952 house with about 1,000 square feet of heated area is currently listed by Easy Street Realty at $12,000.

There’s also the question of whether people who qualify for Habitat’s no-interest mortgages — their incomes cannot exceed the mid-$20,000s to mid-$30,000s — would be able to qualify for commercial loans.

Only one of the five Charlotte-area builders contacted for this story said that they would even entertain the idea of building in the Reid Park area.

The exception is Jon Nichols of Accent Homes, which has built homes that sold for as little as $99,000.

“Reid Park? I don’t know enough about that neighborhood to say, but I’ve gone into existing neighborhoods in the city and built affordable housing.”

Even if homes built by private contractors aren’t springing up everywhere in Reid Park, that doesn’t mean that some contractors aren’t getting work out of the neighborhood.

Drive around the side streets off Amay James Boulevard, and you’ll see that many residents have been putting money into their homes, whether it’s a full rehab or just siding and windows. And the reason, said Jones — whose home sports bright-yellow vinyl siding that has been added to the house in recent years — is the influence on the neighborhood of Habitat’s work.

“That’s right, sure looks nice, don’t it?” Jones asked about the newer exterior of his mother’s home. “With all these new houses in the neighborhood, Mama wanted to keep up.”

Most of the Habitat work is done by volunteers, including the future owners, who must put 250 hours of sweat equity into their homes and those of others. Habitat employs subcontractors to install HVAC systems, plumbing, electrical and other specialty work.

And while some of the subcontractors do this work at cost or at a deep discount, it beats not doing any work as the housing slump continues to idle some workers.

Last week, Kelton McGee mortared blocks and brick under a Habitat home on which construction was started in uptown Charlotte during the Democratic National Convention and which was moved moved to 3121 Amay James Blvd., where it hovered on steel beams above the foundation.

Kelton’s boss and uncle is Alan McGee, manager of McGee Bros. construction company of Monroe. He said his company makes money on Habitat projects, which doesn’t always happen with for-profit construction.

“They’re good folks,” McGee said. “They pay their bills.”

BROWN can be reached at [email protected], (704) 247-2912 or on Twitter at @tonymecktimes.