When Cora Lanier and her son, Jumaane, rallied their East Chattanooga neighborhood a few years ago and helped form the Boyce Station Neighborhood Association, they were worried.
All across the city, longtime Chattanooga families were finding themselves in a housing crisis, said Lanier, a former program director at Girls Inc. who has been a volunteer community organizer in East Chattanooga since 2001.
Property owners in neighborhoods in and around downtown were watching their property tax bills escalate, but many couldn’t increase their income to cover the jump. Others were displaced when landlords sold their rental property to developers. Others were forced to move when they couldn’t afford their skyrocketing rent. And thanks to increasing property values, nearby affordable housing was nearly impossible to find.
“Vulnerable families are trying to hold on, but they are being pushed further and further out,” she said.
The wave of gentrification, rippling from Chattanooga’s downtown renaissance and population boom, was coming, Lanier believed. Homeowners in East Chattanooga were receiving letters and visits from real estate agents offering to help them sell, and some neighborhood leaders in East Chattanooga were beginning to notice an exodus of legacy homeowners and an increase in short-term vacation rentals.