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More About Affordable Accessibility

Charlotte, North Carolina has been experiencing unprecedented growth since the early 1980’s. As the population continues to boom, it has put a strain on the availability of affordable housing. Due to rising market rents, and the lack of incentive for developers to construct additional non-luxury units a task force has been set up to explore alternatives to stimulate the creation of affordable housing in the city and county. One of the findings of this task force was to create a database of potential sites for affordable housing to be constructed. This is a first step in the creation of this database. It includes most land currently off the tax rolls and in the hands of either city, state, or local government, or in the hands of nonprofit and religious organizations that may be interested in partnering to help create a more affordable community. If you have skills you would like to contribute, or ideas of how to make the project better, please get in touch!

Using data from the City of Charlotte Open Data Portal, Mecklenburg County GIS, the US Census Bureau, and the Charlotte Area Transit System I tried to begin to piece together a picture of the parcels of land which could be analyzed – in partnership with the owners – for their potential to be used as sites for additional units of affordable housing. One of the main factors was to map the accessibility of these potential sites. Looking at the location of CATS bus and rail stops, I drew a buffer of ¼ mile around each bus stop, and ½ mile around each rail stop to highlight areas accessible via transit. In addition, I used recent US Census data on poverty joined with the census tracts in which it was measured, as well as the number of units of currently vacant housing to illustrate the current situation in different parts of the city.