New South Renewal: The Uphill Battle for Upward Mobility in Charlotte

Abstract

In a 2013 study of intergenerational economic mobility in the United States, the city of Charlotte was found to rank 50th out of the 50 largest metropolitan areas for upward mobility. This relative positioning came as a shock to many Charlotte leaders and citizens whose city had experienced local and national praise for high economic growth and New South progressivism over preceding decades. In recent years, Charlotte policymakers across all sectors have engaged in a wide-ranging reprioritization of attention, volunteer hours and funding to combat perceived obstacles to inequality in their community.

This thesis tracks the events preceding and succeeding Charlotte’s contemporary policy redirection in order to exhibit how the upward mobility ranking, in conjunction with a highly publicized 2016 citywide protest movement, motivated an abrupt and unprecedented restructuring of Charlotte leadership from a centralized corps of growth-minded business elite to a broadened and more representative policymaking regime. This transformation has gone hand in hand with an expansion of on-the-ground efforts to promote opportunity, but has also brought with it increasing challenges to coordination and consensus building.

This thesis arose from a qualitative analysis involving personal interviews, engagement with prominent theories of urban governance, exploration of scholarship and media reporting, and broad coverage of the public and private sector organizations and initiatives that have originated or restructured to join this new wave of community investment. The immediacy of Charlotte’s contemporary response means there is little available data for evaluating long-term efficacy. As a result, this thesis will instead suggest a number of implications surrounding the catalytic effects of disruptive self-analysis in motivating policy change and the strengths and weaknesses of a more representative and broadly inclusive urban leadership regime.