Articles

The city, instead of holding its traditional spring summit conference for neighborhood groups, will offer them space and time with facilitators in July to encourage strategic goal-setting and planning. The meetings will be in Foundation For The Carolinas’ uptown meeting rooms, which can accommodate as many as 17 organizations. Trained facilitators from the city and […]

At a rural crossroads 30 miles from Charlotte, an experiment is under way that could reshape the national retail landscape. Walmart, famous for its ubiquitous supercenters averaging 185,000 square feet, is testing a much smaller, 15,000-square-foot format called a Walmart Express store in the Stanly County town of Richfield, population 516. The Richfield store, newly […]

The Charlotte neighborhoods of Belmont and Villa Heights are experiencing an influx of white, professional residents in search of affordable housing close to uptown. Piedmont Courts, a housing project that dates to the 1940s, is gone, and crime is declining. Click here to read the article about the neighborhoods’ revival. Photographs by Nancy Pierce.

How has uptown Charlotte changed in the past century? Launch the map below for an interactive graphic that depicts the dramatic change since 1911. A century ago, uptown’s urban pattern was fine-grained, with numerous small buildings on small lots. Today that fine-grained fabric has been lost. The modern projects have giant-sized footprints, often taking up […]

In February, The LandTrust for Central N.C. contracted with the N.C. Forest Service to conduct a prescribed burn on a portion of the Low Water Bridge Preserve. Approximately 250 acres were included in this burn area, and a main reason for this burn was to promote a particularly interesting species down along the river here […]

In the McEniry building at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, students moved out the chairs on a recent afternoon to clear the room for guests and presentations. Pizza boxes, soft drinks and ice arrived for a reception for students in Janni Sorensen’s social inequality and planning class. It was time for a celebration. […]

Over a decade ago, developers sought to build a downtown in a town that did not have one. Harrisburg, N.C., which is four miles east of Charlotte, was a collection of subdivisions and highway retail without a traditional center. Today, the 97-acre site remains incomplete. These photos show the state of the development in spring […]

If you could travel back in time to the Carolinas Piedmont before European settlement, some of the landscape might look a bit like this clearing in northwestern Mecklenburg County, tucked under swooping Duke Energy power lines. Here, a spring breeze whispers through slim brown stalks of last season’s little bluestem and Indian grass. Wild quinine […]

Driving east on busy N.C. 49 through Harrisburg, the scene is repetitive. Farmland, suburbs and strip shopping centers blur at 50 miles per hour until a two-story, 27,000-square-foot, neoclassical building peeks over an Advance Auto Parts’ bright red roof. This massive building greeting the highway’s 40,000 daily travelers is Harrisburg Town Hall. It is the […]

The headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington bears a quote from former U.S. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes: “Taxes are what we pay for civilized society.” Given the sticker shock many of us received when we opened our property revaluation notices, I imagine plenty of folks wouldn’t mind our society being a […]

I’ve been struggling with the question of what exactly makes a place feel like “a place.” You may be baffled by that language, but if you think about it, you probably recognize that being in different kinds of places imparts a different feeling. Some locations feel artificial; others feel authentic. Age and beauty aren’t necessarily […]

The late author and urban thinker Jane Jacobs tends to be pegged as a historic preservationist, an advocate who wanted to preserve her Greenwich Village neighborhood in amber. Although this great champion of cities wrote much about the importance of old buildings to a city, and as an activist fought valiantly to kill a proposed […]