Full interview with retired Observer business columnist Doug Smith
If you’re a Doug Smith fan like me, you’re not going to want to settle for snippets of his wisdom. You want the whole thing, with his recollections of growing up in Charlotte’s Wilmore neighborhood, the City Council’s decision to build I-485, his interactions with Mayor Vi Lyles way back when she was a city budget analyst and plenty of other local historical nuances that are hard to come by these days. The full Doug Smith Q&A with Ledger editor Tony Mecia is below.
An edited version of this interview was included in the July 22, 2019, edition of The Charlotte Ledger, a 3x/week e-newsletter focusing on important and lively local business news.
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Q: Doug, what have you been up to for the last 10 years?
Well, I did some freelance writing and some freelance internet stuff for a couple of clients, some consulting with people who wanted to find out, “How do I get in the newspaper, and how do I make myself known in the community?” And I did some of that for maybe the first year-and-a-half. And then it dawned on me when my income tax filing time came that I made just enough money to put myself in another tax bracket, which increased my taxes and took almost all the money I made freelancing.
So I said, “I think I’ll have more fun just doing what I want to do: spending time with the grandkids and my wife and doing things together.” That’s what I’ve done mostly since. I’ve done a little bit of consulting for friends who need something.
Q: Public relations kind of stuff? Or real estate stuff?
Yeah, a friend of mine, for example, said, “I want the mayor to come to my restaurant to see what a great restaurant I have. I’m an immigrant, and she’s all about immigrants, and I’ve been in Charlotte my whole life. I came here from Greece, and I don’t know how to write her a letter inviting her to come and have lunch with me.” And I said, “I’ll write it for you.” I wrote her a letter, and he says, “How much you want for it?” And I said, “If you pay for my lunch, you’ve paid.”
Q: Did the mayor show up?
A: Yes, she did.
Q: Which mayor are you talking about?
The present mayor [Vi Lyles], the one [joking] I trained when she came in as a rookie.
When she first came to work for the city, I was covering City Hall. She was hired as a budget analyst and eventually became an assistant city manager.
In those days I would drop by the budget office trying to get newsworthy information out of her. She’d explain things in the budget, but she never gave me anything confidential. I still take credit for giving her early experience on how to handle the press. She’s a good person, and I’m glad to see her as mayor.
Q: She did go to the restaurant?
Yes, she did. The owner brought his family, and she met his family and spent a good bit of time talking with him about things: politics and his immigration status and how he got here from Greece.
Q: Do you still run into a lot of people around town who say, “Doug Smith! Hey!”
Sometimes I do. Linda and I went to the mall and were going to have some lunch at the food court. And so the security guard came up and said, “You’re Rolfe Neill, aren’t you?” [the former Observer publisher]. And I said, “No, but I worked for him.”
And we talked for a few minutes. Then we went to order something, and the maintenance guy comes up to me and says, “You’re Doug Smith, aren’t you?” More people than you would think, after 10 years.
I talked to [former Observer business editor] M.S. Van Hecke one time after he retired, and he said, “Well, you have like a three-year afterlife where people recognize you and know that you exist, and once that’s over, you’ll just be an ordinary citizen. You’ll just be one of the crowd.”
Q: What’s that like being one of the crowd versus having a front-row seat to everything that’s gone on in Charlotte for decades?
I really enjoyed it, because I got tired of people focusing on me. Wherever I would go when I was in the paper, they would ask me questions about development and “what does it mean?” and “what are you going to do next?” and “what do you think of so-and-so?” And they’d want to start a conversation. That’s OK once in a while, but the more people recognize you, the more of that you get day in and day out.
The ultimate was when I was at a Hornets game, and I was going to the urinal to relieve myself, and they have dividers on both sides. And this guy beside me says, “You’re Doug Smith, aren’t you?” and he reaches over to shake hands. [laughs] You don’t always want to be recognized.
Q: I’m going to ask you some of those questions about development that you probably used to get all the time. What do you think is the biggest story in Charlotte right now as it relates to growth and development?
I think it’s going to have to be transportation and access. People want to live in places where they can get to work in a hurry. The only way you can do that now is with roads, and the money is tight.
The I-77 toll roads show that, that they had to contract that out to somebody to own it for 50 years. So we have to have a system of connecting people: people who buy, people who sell, people who shop, people who go to school. The belt road did a lot, I-485. I remember writing about that in the early days when they were debating it and where it ought to go, and one group of people on the City Council said, “Well, we’ve already got a belt road. We’ve got Pineville-Matthews Road. We ought to just widen that. That will be cheap.”
And I drove it one time and wrote a story about what that would be like, and it took me almost an hour to get from one end to the other. This was back in the early in the early ’80s or late ’70s. The more they talked about it, the more that became known, they said, “Well, that doesn’t make sense because we have a lot of development going on inside 51 now.”
Realtor Allen Tate then was the chairman of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission, and he was pushing the route that it eventually took. It just so happened that I-485 passed in close proximity to land owned by some of Charlotte’s wealthiest landowners and investors, whose property values increased almost overnight. What a coincidence that was.
Actually, it turned out to be a good decision, because it has connected the city. But so much of the growth now is occurring beyond that in outlying areas, in what sometimes are called bedroom communities. Bedroom communities don’t want to be known as bedroom communities. They want to be known as themselves: Mint Hill, Matthews, Rock Hill, whoever.
So the biggest growth, I think, is headed beyond the outer belt. We’re filling in so much inside it now. If you look inside the city, there’s not that much vacant land to build on, and there’s not that many places you can rezone and rebuild. That’s happening some, especially in South End and NoDa. But those opportunities are going to be even more limited as the population increases.
Q: You think you’ll see it spreading out in residential or all kinds of development?
Everything. I think mixed-use is here to stay, but what’s in the mix may be different. Actually, I should use the word “multi-use.” I used to correct people on this, now I’m misusing it myself.
Mixed-use is actually two or more uses within the same building, like restaurants on the bottom, condos or apartments on top. Multi-use is many different things on the same site. Waverly, for example, would be a multi-use project. It’s almost a little city within the city.
I think you’ll see that as suburban growth continues, people will be looking for those kinds of things. You’ll see that type of development follow them, multi-use and mixed-use.
Q: What do you think’s going to go on in the closer-in neighborhoods – South End, Dilworth, Myers Park, NoDa. What do you see happening?
People still want to live in those neighborhoods, but it’s going to become more and more expensive. It’s supply and demand. As supply gets tighter, demand for it will go up, so what might be a $700,000 house today in a few years will be a $1 million-plus house, especially in upper-income neighborhoods like Eastover and Myers Park. I doubt you can buy anything in that area today for less than $750,000.
We will still see the gentrification of close-in properties, like in Wilmore, on the opposite side of South Boulevard from Dilworth.
Q: You grew up in Wilmore. What do you think about what’s going on there?
Well, I wish my mom had kept her house there longer before she sold it! She didn’t get anywhere near what they’re going for today. My mom moved out in the ’80s when things started to change. There were a lot of drug problems and stuff happening in the neighborhood, and she was afraid to live by herself. She decided to sell the house.
But that’s how Charlotte changes. It has flipped now. I’m sure they still have some problems, but nothing like it was then. It was dangerous.
Q: Are there any parts of town when you’re driving around and you say, “Gosh, that’s sort of surprising, that’s not how I thought it would play out”?
The stuff that’s happening out near the airport now. I think they’ve renamed it the River District. That was a lot of farmland, open land out there, almost nothing going on. To drive out there now and there’s all kinds of shopping, housing, everything going up. I never expected to see it. I thought it would happen some day.
The other part is north toward Concord. There used to be nothing between Charlotte and Concord except a couple service stations. It was wide open. My cousins lived on a farm. In the summer, my brother and I would spend two weeks with them up on the farm, stealing their dad’s watermelons and apples. For some reason, it never occurred to me it would be developed. Once they sold their property, it was sold for a housing project.
All the things that have happened in Kannapolis have prompted some of it, people wanting to get closer to jobs there with housing.
The other would be toward Gastonia, out that way. It was pretty much the airport and some service stations and some small business, but not much of anything was happening out that way. It took a while to get there, also, then I-485 came along and made it more accessible. Gaston is in a good situation now with growth.
Q: I worked in the Observer’s newsroom in Gastonia in the late 1990s, so I know that people have been saying that for at least 20 years.
Yeah, I think I wrote that several times. You can probably go back and find three or four stories I did that say, “This is Gaston’s time!” [laughs] But now there’s nowhere else people can go, so maybe it really is.
The other area is Freedom Drive. I wrote the same story about Freedom Drive several times. A project would come and I’d say, “This is going to be the one.” I don’t know why that hasn’t taken off. I thought it would have taken off long before now. With the accessibility to uptown, it’s really close.
Q: If you were a real estate speculator, where would you be putting your money?
There’s a lot of opportunity in Lancaster County, along 521 especially. We see it going that way now.
And maybe a little farther beyond Gaston County, maybe Cleveland County, Lincoln County. Transportation connections are going to be a problem.
I would be looking more in the outlying areas where it has yet to happen. In the places where growth has happened, prices are up to levels where you probably wouldn’t be able to make a profit on it. You wouldn’t be able to show much of a profit for what you got, unless you could consolidate a lot of open acreage and make an industrial site, headquarters site, something like that.
Q: One of the other big stories of Charlotte in the last few decades has been the number of new people moving here. You’ve been in town for decades. Are there things that people who are newer to town don’t understand about Charlotte’s history or its growth?
Charlotte has always been one of those cities that has thought of itself as an up-and-comer. I remember in the earliest days of reporting here – in 1967, I guess it was – I went to a Chamber of Commerce meeting and they were saying, “We’re going to catch Atlanta. This is going to be the year we catch Atlanta.”
Charlotte has always been growth-minded and competitive. They get accused of not being active enough or sitting back and not taking a firm enough hand to control development, and that they’re too much in the pockets of developers, that they don’t take care of people. But they really have over the years. Many of them have tried.
We’re seeing the gap right now. Affordable housing is the gap. I don’t think anybody ever realized it was going to be at the extreme that it is now, that average working people might not be able to afford to live in Mecklenburg County. I’m not sure outsiders would be plugged into that.
Even with all its problems, Charlotte has always been a leader in diversity. There was the potential to be a lot of problems here when black people were trying to integrate restaurants. There were a lot of riots in other cities. The mayor went down and invited one of black leaders to go to lunch with him in a restaurant, and they sat down. I wouldn’t say there was never another problem, but it eased the way for people to find it acceptable.
Uptown housing, a lot of people say, “Well, finally we have uptown housing.” Well, we had uptown housing. First Ward, Fourth Ward, Third Ward — there were a lot of houses there. Brooklyn got destroyed for urban renewal. I was a reporter writing about most of that, covering the redevelopment commission. I probably drank the Kool-Aid. I said, “Well, yeah, those are ugly houses.” It was called “blue heaven” because they had wood stoves. A cloud of blue smoke would be over the neighborhood in the wintertime. It got the nickname “Blue Heaven.”
I probably could have written stories the opposite way, but it never occurred to me. I was thinking it’s probably a good thing, that people who had to live in those slum houses would finally have a nice place to live. And they got Earle Village, which turned out to be worse than anything they ever lived in because of the crime problems. City leaders got smart and tore down most of Earle Village.
Not many people know that history or care about it, but it is worth making an effort. I tried to encourage young reporters I worked with to try to learn more about what happened in Charlotte, and meet some of the old-timers. That’s probably what I would be called now, or something worse. But you can learn things from them that you probably wouldn’t know about the city. It might come in useful to you and might enlighten you about the culture here.
During World War I, we had an army base here, Camp Greene, where soldiers trained and went overseas. We had a Ford plant here on Wilkinson Boulevard that hired a lot of people back in the day. I lived in Wilmore, which was close to uptown. A teenager didn’t really have to ride a bus. Your parents would give you 15 cents for bus fare, and we could walk to town. It was a little over a mile. And you could save the money, spend it at the movie theater and buy more popcorn.
Uptown really had more life comparatively then that uptown today has, because you had 24-hour people living in close proximity. There were no high-rise condos uptown or widespread apartment living to speak of. That didn’t come until the ’90s, when Jim Gross and the Uptown Development Commission decided to take a shot and see if anybody would buy a condo uptown.
Q: It looks like they will.
They converted the Ivey’s store and son of a gun. One of the bankers involved told me it wasn’t a huge project, but it made everybody in Eastover and Myers Park take notice, because many of the people who moved there came from Eastover and Myers Park. By moving there, they made it an acceptable way for people in their income level to live. So you saw a lot more of those people come into newer condos built in Fourth Ward.
Q: Has the mentality and psychology of Charlotte changed? You mentioned it has always been a striving city, it’s always sought to be in that band of top cities. Are there still elements of that?
I think there is, but I think it’s probably more with the older city leaders. I’m not sure the younger people think that way about it. They’re thinking on a different plane. They’re probably saying, “What difference does it make? What’s important is that I have two iPads, a smartphone and a place to live uptown.” [Laughs] They don’t put the same value on that. If you look at that, it’s really an intangible anyway.
Q: What are some of the challenges Charlotte still has as it relates to growth and development?
Affordable housing should be handled as a serious challenge. Back in the old days, when Myers Park was created, Myers Park owners created Cherry as affordable housing to make sure the people who work for them, their domestic employees, were close enough to come to work every day. In a way, they were the ones who said we need to have affordable housing uptown – maybe for the right reasons, maybe for the wrong reasons – but they at least saw a need to have working people close by.
You do have to have that diversity. You can’t have all the wealthiest people in town in one place. You need to have that diversity of working people and make the workplace and the shopping available to them as much as anybody else.
Q: Why don’t developers just build more affordable housing?
Because they want to make more money. From time to time, there’s been talk about giving developers incentives. There have been some. Some of the current ones, they are going to give them free land or a tax-reduction incentive if they build affordable units. I don’t know that’s enough to turn the tide. It would have to be something bigger than that.
If you put in 500 units for the most needy people, what have we done? Have we helped the problem, or have we begun to create another Earle Village by putting everybody in one place? The answer seems to be to disperse it more within neighborhoods.
I don’t know how you do it. Nobody in Eastover, Myers Park or an established country-club neighborhood is going to say, “We’ve got a vacant lot over here. Why don’t we go build some affordable-income apartments?” You’ve got to get past that. I don’t know how the hell to solve it. If the best minds in the city can’t solve it, I know Doug Smith is not going to do it.
Q: You covered developers for a number of years. What are developers like?
It’s totally mixed. There are some developers who really want to do the best by the city, and their goal is to make this a better place to live. A lot of them came to town later and always feel in their own minds that they are doing things that are improving Charlotte.
And there are others, some here and some from outside, who are in it for profit solely. They’re here to make a buck and they’re going to make their money and they may leave after that. You actually can spot them after a while. You know who’s in it for the long haul and who’s in it for short-term profit.
There really isn’t a particular type, a stereotypical developer, even though in movies and everywhere else, developers get to be the bad guys. [Laughs]
Q: If you were a reporter today with a lot of energy and gusto, what would you be going after? What stories would you be telling?
One of the things I always did – and I had to write The Next Big Thing column every week, whether I had a Next Big Thing or not – is I would take a map. I’d spread that map out on my desk – when I could make room on my desk, which wasn’t too often – and look around and say, “What is happening in this community?” I would walk around that map in my mind and see what I could write about.
If I wanted to write something about uptown, I’d just walk the neighborhoods, walk around stores, see what hadn’t been developed and see what might be coming next.
Uptown is on a roll right now. I thought it was hot when I was there, but it is way beyond that now. What is the next big thing beyond what has happened there at this point? Is it mixed-use? Is uptown finally going to get that shopping center? I think there is something that will happen eventually to lure stores on the level of Whole Foods back to uptown. Somebody will have a vision, but the vision won’t be the traditional shopping center. Everything runs its course.
I think it will be interesting to imagine what form it would take. If retail comes back to uptown, and the people don’t want to have to get an Uber to go shop at a department store, how do you give them that without taking an Uber trip?
I think there’s going to be a new type of retail services center that develops that hasn’t been developed yet uptown. It may already be in other cities. A lot of what Charlotte did in the ’80s and ’90s came from somewhere else, like the Overstreet Mall, which turned out to be pretty much of a disaster as far as getting people uptown.
I always tried to find things other people had overlooked or were not writing about. If they were interesting to me, they were probably going to be interesting to other people.
I liked to do a lot about South End and Wilmore because I grew up there. The original Charlotte Hornets played baseball in South End. My grandpa would walk me up to the ballgames through the mill. We’d stop at the ice cream store and get an ice cream cone on our way to the ballpark and sit in the bleachers where all his friends sat. And they could cuss the players from the other team. I learned a lot of vocabulary from sitting in the bleachers with Grandpa!
I really like most of what’s happening in Charlotte. I like that they have started to think about affordable housing. That was a step up for the big banks and the people who put money into it. They at least realize the problem. They want to get employees working close to them. If they want them, they better find some place. It’s reminiscent of the old days in the mill – the mill came in, and the first thing they did was build the owner’s mansion, then they built the mill housing and rented it to employees, which took half their pay. Then they opened the company store, which took the rest of their pay. They were captive to the mill for the rest of their lives. But even back then, they had the idea that if you wanted people to work in the mill, you had to make the mill accessible to them, and the easiest way was to put the housing next to the mill.
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The Charlotte Ledger is published by Tony Mecia, an award-winning former Charlotte Observer business reporter and editor. He lives in Charlotte with his wife and three children.
