Articles
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 […]
Can Charlotte residents get used to development that looks different from what they’re used to – new houses on small lots instead of large lots, more apartments and condos? Charlotte Planning Director Debra Campbell, in a recent interview, described that as one of the challenges Charlotte faces in coming years. Another, she said, is to […]
The farmer points toward a long stretch of turned earth warming in the sun. Tomatoes and squash will grow well there, he says. More crops will be planted over there, he says, gesturing toward another neatly plowed rectangle. Behind him, small fruit trees cast shadows across the grass. It’s bucolic enough to make you almost […]
Our yard in the Uwharries always looks especially mangy in early spring. I wouldn’t presume to call it a lawn. That sounds much too manicured and highfalutin. The fescue is green, but it tends to get lost in a flush of winter annuals like chickweed, buttercups and henbit. These weeds will die back after setting […]
Twenty years after the last revamp of Charlotte-Mecklenburg’s zoning ordinance, a politically fractious episode, the city planning department is preparing to study whether – and how – to update it once more. Unlike the years-long, contentious process that resulted in the 1992 zoning ordinance rewrite, this time the process will be less extensive, said Charlotte […]
Recent headlines have trumpeted the U.S. Census finding that between 2000 and 2010, the Charlotte “urbanized area” was the nation’s fastest growing among areas with 1 million or more people, at 64.6 percent. But the statistic also highlighted the inconsistent, even chaotic, differences in how the so-called Charlotte region gets defined, based on who’s doing […]