Articles
Owen Furuseth, UNC Charlotte’s associate provost for Metropolitan Studies and Extended Academic Programs, is retiring June 30 after a career researching land use, urban and neighborhood planning topics. During those years he has been an advocate for open space preservation, has worked with Charlotte-Mecklenburg local government to create and refine an extensive set of neighborhood-level […]
A stop by the Eldorado Outpost one recent morning included a sighting of a barn swallow that had built a nest on a ledge of the building under the eave. Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) are fairly common, and you’ve probably seen them on your own property. A couple of years ago, kayaking on Mountain Creek, […]
From the woods surrounding her Lake Wylie home, Nancy Hayes watches turkeys, deer, raccoons and other animals, including a pair of bald eagles. The wildlife is threatened, she says, by a residential development proposed for more than 400 homes, and she’s angry about it. “It’s outrageous,” says Hayes, who moved to the area three years […]
“I love the sight of red clay.” Those words, from a professional colleague of my wife’s as he showed her the view from his high-rise office in uptown Charlotte, were jarring for her as a newly arrived preservationist. She had recently moved to Charlotte from Washington, where she had worked for the National Trust for […]
In the booming South Carolina communities nudging the southern edges of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County a civil war of sorts is erupting over how to manage growth. It is not unusual for intense passions to shape local dialogue over what should and shouldn’t be built, and what it should look like. But in Lancaster and […]
Two years ago, over Memorial Day weekend, I witnessed a phenomenon in the Uwharries that has proven difficult to explain. I stepped out of the house after dinner and looked toward the grove of majestic oaks surrounded by our fields of native warm season grass. Thousands of lights were flashing in the canopy. It was […]
[highlightrule]Charlotte neighborhoods have plenty of stories to tell, and during a month of City Walks hundreds of participants heard some of them. See photo slideshow at end of article.[/highlightrule] The secret inscription on a statue of an almost forgotten Charlotte heroine. A teacher who gave her life in 1931 trying to save a student. The […]
Cohousing is a concept that tries to fit an unusual form of housing into current-day development regulations—a square peg in a round hole is how Robert Boyer puts it. Boyer is an assistant professor in the UNC Charlotte Department of Geography & Earth Sciences where he teaches classes in urban and regional planning and sustainability. […]
Kannapolis is unlike any other municipality in North Carolina. Founded in 1906, for much of its history it was owned by Cannon Mills, which by 1914 was the world’s largest producer of sheets and towels. Kannapolis was the largest unincorporated community in the United States in 1984, when it finally incorporated as a city two […]
When we think about jobs coming to Charlotte, we may think of the flurry of press releases, photo ops, and political backslapping that all accompany a big announcement. Yet despite the role the city plays in promoting job growth, jobs are not spread evenly across the city’s seven Charlotte City Council districts. Since jobs are […]
Red clay. It’s the bane of Piedmont gardeners. Heavy and lumpy when wet, it dries as hard as a terra cotta pot. We spend bundles of money on soil conditioners to make it friable. We complain about it as much as the English do about chalk, the highly alkaline soil found throughout much of the […]
The most recent count of homelessness in Mecklenburg County—undertaken on one night in January— found overall homelessness had decreased by 36 percent since 2010. The same count also found a 9 percent decrease since last year, even as the county’s total population grew. Click on image to download the full report. The findings are outlined […]