Redevelopment Commission
government
Also known as urban renewal
Redevelopment Commission — government, appearing in the Charlotte record across 17 documented year(s).
In the record (28)
1949
The federal Housing Act of 1949 established the slum-clearance and public-housing framework — federal funding for demolishing designated 'blighted' urban areas and building public housing — that undergirded the urban renewal programs later applied to Brooklyn, Greenville, and First Ward.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1954
The Housing Act of 1954 amended the 1949 act, broadening federal urban renewal funding beyond new construction and demolition to include rehabilitation and conservation, and reorienting federal urban intervention toward the broader 'urban renewal' strategy that Charlotte applied to Brooklyn.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1957
The Redevelopment Commission of the City of Charlotte was created in 1957, tasked with planning and organizing urban renewal projects and rehabilitating neighborhoods the city deemed blighted; over its lifespan it worked in Belmont, Brooklyn, Cherry, Dilworth, Downtown, First Ward, Greenville, North Charlotte, Third Ward, and Wilmore.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1958
Brooklyn was a 238-acre neighborhood within Charlotte's Second Ward that was home to schools, churches, civic organizations, Black-owned businesses, and, by most accounts, over a thousand families before urban renewal began.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1958
In June 1958 the federal government approved Charlotte's first urban renewal project application, opening the door to federal funding (under the Housing Act framework) for demolition in Brooklyn and other designated neighborhoods.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government Center
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1960
A University of North Carolina at Charlotte master's thesis on the effects of urban renewal on Charlotte's African American community found that over a 14-year period, more than 900 families were removed from their homes in Brooklyn as the entire neighborhood was demolished — a figure lower than the ~1,007 or 1,000+ family counts cited elsewhere, illustrating how displacement counts vary by source and methodology.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1960
In February 1960, Redevelopment Commission director Vernon Sawyer attempted to reassure Brooklyn residents about the coming redevelopment plans as the commission began acquiring land in the neighborhood.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1960 · 1960-01-19
On January 19, 1960, the Charlotte City Council approved the 'slum razing' project targeting Brooklyn for demolition under the federal urban renewal program.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1961
By early 1961 the Redevelopment Commission of the City of Charlotte had begun purchasing land in Brooklyn ahead of large-scale demolition.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1961
Under the Redevelopment Commission's demolition project, the NAACP and other advocates publicly protested the Brooklyn urban renewal plan, raising concerns that the city was displacing residents without providing adequate replacement housing.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1963
First Ward residents fought to have their houses relocated rather than demolished when urban renewal razed the neighborhood's public housing, but many were left with nowhere to go as demolition proceeded — a Charlotte Observer retrospective photo essay documents the period.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1963
Friendship Baptist Church's original South Brevard Street sanctuary in Brooklyn was demolished as part of urban renewal; in October 1963 the congregation left the site and held worship services at Northwest Junior High School while awaiting a new church home.
Harding High SchoolSecond Ward High SchoolCentral High SchoolMecklenburg PresbyteryFirst United Presbyterian ChurchFirst Baptist Church WestFriendship Missionary Baptist ChurchEphraim Brevard
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1965
According to named narrator James Ross II, interviewed for UNC Charlotte's Brooklyn Oral History Project, pre-demolition Brooklyn contained two movie theaters (including the Savoy Theatre on South McDowell Street), a library, two funeral homes, two colleges, a high school, an elementary school, roughly six nightclubs, about twenty restaurants, an Elks Club, a YMCA, a YWCA, two commercial laundries, a commercial icehouse, twenty-three churches, a pharmacy, doctors, dentists, and two newspapers — testimony describing the density of Black-owned institutions before urban renewal, not an independently verified inventory.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Harding High SchoolSecond Ward High SchoolCentral High School
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1965
According to the UNC Charlotte Brooklyn Oral History Project, in 1947 Charlotte's all-white Planning Commission rezoned Brooklyn as industrial land, and by the late 1930s federal redlining practices had already marked the African American community for disinvestment — both preconditions the project's public history cites as groundwork for the later urban renewal demolition.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1966
Charlotte's Urban Renewal Committee issued a 1966 plan for the Greenville neighborhood that designated 214 of the area's 272 acres for expressway construction, having deemed roughly 70% of the neighborhood's structures 'blighted.'
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1967
As part of urban renewal in Charlotte's First Ward, the city cleared the neighborhood's Black residential core and in 1967 built Earle Village Homes, a 409-unit public housing project, on part of the cleared land.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1969
According to UNC Charlotte's Brooklyn Oral History Project, over the period 1960-1977 Brooklyn lost over 1,000 families, roughly 200 businesses, and numerous churches and civic institutions to urban renewal demolition, with displaced residents scattered to neighborhoods including Biddleville, Belmont, Villa Heights, Washington Heights, Wesley Heights, and Wilmore, and no new residential or commercial structures built to replace what had been razed.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1970
A 1970 photograph documents the demolition of the Second Ward High School building, among the last major Brooklyn institutions to fall to urban renewal.
Harding High SchoolSecond Ward High SchoolCentral High SchoolW.W. Ward
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1970
Grace AME Zion Church's sanctuary at 219-223 South Brevard Street survived urban renewal's demolition of Brooklyn and is the only religious structure remaining from the historic neighborhood, since repurposed as an event space and music venue.
Grace A.M.E. Zion ChurchMecklenburg PresbyteryFirst United Presbyterian ChurchFirst Baptist Church WestGrace AME Zion ChurchEphraim Brevard
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1970
Marshall Park is a 5.5-acre urban park at 800 East Third Street built on part of the former Second Ward (Brooklyn) neighborhood after urban renewal demolition cleared the site.
Marshall ParkMarshall ParkW.W. Ward
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1970
Some accounts of Brooklyn's destruction cite far larger displacement figures than the commonly repeated ~1,000-1,480 structures / ~1,000 families: Queen City Nerve's history series and a Clemson University thesis both state that urban renewal in Brooklyn ultimately displaced approximately 9,000 residents (Clemson: 'over 9,000 residents forced to relocate over a decade'; total public funding spent on the project reported at nearly $60 million), a population figure roughly nine times the commonly cited family count and worth flagging as a separate, higher estimate.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1972
In 1972, Greenville resident Margaret Green Harris sued the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development over urban renewal's failure to provide adequate alternative housing for displaced residents; by that point 631 of the neighborhood's original 763 housing units had already been destroyed.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1976
The destruction of Brooklyn, Greenville, and the Black core of First Ward under urban renewal is understood by historians and the city's own 2020 mayoral apology as a case of a thriving Black community's homes, businesses, churches, and generational wealth being deliberately destroyed by government action — a moral assessment distinct from, and not undermined by, the genuine disagreement among sources over exact structure and family counts.
Charlotte-Mecklenburg Government CenterW.W. WardDorothy Counts
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1977
Charlotte's federal urban renewal program ran from the late 1940s through roughly the mid-to-late 1970s, and its patterns — clearing 'declining' Black neighborhoods for institutional, highway, or redevelopment use — recurred across Brooklyn, Greenville, and First Ward alike.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
1977
Sources differ on how many structures urban renewal destroyed in Brooklyn: Brooklyn Village's own history page cites 1,480 homes, 216 businesses, 13 churches, and 2 schools destroyed with 1,007 families displaced; the UNC Charlotte Brooklyn Oral History Project's public-facing history cites over 1,000 families, 200 businesses, and numerous social institutions removed between 1960 and 1977; and Uptown Charlotte's own description cites 'nearly 1,500 structures' cleared. This entry documents that the widely repeated figures do not fully agree; the underlying fact of near-total neighborhood destruction is not in dispute.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
2019
In 2019, the Levine Museum of the New South mounted an exhibit titled 'Brooklyn: Once a City within a City,' documenting the neighborhood's history and destruction as public reckoning with urban renewal intensified alongside the newly announced Brooklyn Village redevelopment.
Unverified — sourced but not confirmed against a primary record.
Levine Museum of the New SouthMint Museum of ArtLevine Museum of the New SouthHarvey B. Gantt CenterNASCAR Hall of Fame
Source · checked 2026-08-13
2020 · 2020-08-10
More than 60 years after Charlotte's City Council voted for the federal urban renewal program that destroyed Brooklyn, Mayor Vi Lyles said the neighborhood 'was wiped off the map and its residents dispersed during the 1960s era of urban renewal' as part of a broader apology for the city's history of systemic racism.
Source · checked 2026-08-13
2020 · 2020-08-10
On August 10, 2020, Charlotte Mayor Vi Lyles delivered a formal statement acknowledging and apologizing for the city's role in urban renewal, specifically the destruction of the Brooklyn neighborhood in the 1960s, at a public forum organized in part by the Stan Greenspon Center for Peace and Social Justice.
Source · checked 2026-08-13