The Washington Post’s Binyamin Appelbaum – whom you might remember as a business-staff reporter at the Observer until 2007 – weighs in today in the Post with a look at Charlotte: “The Bust Hits the Boomtown that Banks Built.”
He writes that the opening of the cultural campus uptown “may be a last hurrah.”
An excerpt:
“Few American cities prospered more over the past two decades than Charlotte, its growth propelled and gilded by Wachovia and its crosstown rival, Bank of America. Executives shoehorned gaudy mansions into old neighborhoods around downtown. Workers poured into vast subdivisions on the city’s ever-expanding periphery. With coffers overflowing, giddy public officials spent tax dollars on a manmade river for whitewater rafting.
“Now Charlotte is suffering. Unemployment has spiked to 12 percent, well above the national average.”
Appelbaum was one of the key investigators in the Observer’s lengthy, multi-year look at mortgage fraud, foreclosures and Beazer Homes. Read the “Sold a Nightmare” series here.