The 10 Most Dangerous And Worst Neighborhoods In Charlotte, NC

The 10 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods In Charlotte For 2024

Located just northeast of the city center, Tryon Hills has its benefits. You have a string of stores and restaurants along both Tryon Street to the south and N. Graham to the north. You’ll even find the small Tryon Hills Neighborhood Park and the Little Sugar Creek for a bit of nature.

What won’t you find? Well, exciting employment prospects for one thing. In fact, residents are lucky to find a job at all, with an unemployment rate of 10.4%. The available gigs don’t do much to push away financial worries. After all, the median income tracks at just $26,519.

The two main landmarks in Pinecrest: the New Shiloh Baptist Church near the southern edge of the neighborhood and the Carolina Golf Club just off to the northeast. You can put together a pretty good weekend with those two spots. It’s the rest of the week when things get sticky.

Jobs are extremely hard to find in Pinecrest. The unemployment rate stands at 8.7%. Meanwhile, most of the local employers hand out extremely low wages. The median income hovers at $37,206. Also, aside from the church and the golf course, you won’t find much else in the community. The scarcity of retail space leads to a short supply of amenities.

Smallwood has character and community spirit. You’ve got Martin Luther King Jr. Park. You’ve also got the Savona Mill, a textile mill that’s more than 100 years old and being converted from a local landmark to a suite of office and retail space.

The area needs this kind of revitalization effort. As it stands, the residents face a difficult economic situation. The area’s unemployment rate runs at 8.8% and its median income only reaches $36,891. At the same time, the largely residential character of the neighborhood leads to a lack of amenities.

So, there is a park in the neighborhood called Reid Park. It’s relatively nondescript. However, the neighborhood has more than its fair share of green spaces, with the Carolina Golf Club taking up a huge chunk of the northern part of the neighborhood.

Otherwise, the story here is the same as most of the other worst places in Charlotte. You’ve got a frighteningly high unemployment rate of 9.2%. At the same time, you’ll find a skimpy median income of only $35,703.

Methodology: How we determined the most dangerous Charlotte neighborhoods in 2024

To figure out how bad a place is to live in, we only needed to know what kinds of things people like and then decide what places have the least amount of those things. We plugged the following criteria into Saturday Night Science to get the worst neighborhoods in Charlotte:

• High crime (Estimated)
• High unemployment (Less jobs)
• Low median income (Less pay)
• Low population density (No things to do)
• Low home values (No one’s willing to pay to live here)

Then, we ranked each neighborhood in Charlotte, North Carolina for each of these criteria from worst to best.

Next, we averaged the individual rankings for each criterion into a “Worst Score.”

The neighborhood with the lowest “Worst Score” ranks as the most dangerous neighborhood of Charlotte.

The article is an opinion based on facts and is meant as infotainment. We updated this article for 2024. This report is our time ranking the worst neighborhoods to live in Charlotte.

Skip to the end to see the list of all 138 neighborhoods ranked from worst to best.