East Charlotte

4 neighborhoods east of uptown, and the widest internal range of any side here. Plaza Midwood and Elizabeth are early streetcar suburbs a mile out, with bungalows, front porches and the shortest walk to uptown of anywhere in the city; both have gentrified hard since 2010. Cotswold is 1950s ranch houses on quarter-acre lots just outside Route 4, being torn down and replaced one at a time. The Central Avenue corridor beyond it — the blocks around Eastland — is where roughly a third of Charlotte's foreign-born population lives, and where the city's best food is.

East Charlotte is the part of the city where the two Charlottes are most visibly adjacent. On one side of Eastway Drive a 1,400-square-foot bungalow trades for three-quarters of a million dollars; on the other, strip malls hold Vietnamese, Salvadoran, Ethiopian and Cambodian businesses and the housing is among the cheapest inside I-485. Two things to weigh. Transit: the Gold Line streetcar reaches Elizabeth and Plaza Midwood but goes nowhere else useful, and the long-planned Silver Line east–west light rail has no funded date. And schools: assignment east of Route 4 varies more block by block than anywhere else in the county, so check the actual address rather than the neighborhood.