Articles
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 […]
Eleven Charlotte neighborhoods have won grants of as much as $10,000 from the City of Charlotte’s for projects aimed at cutting energy use. The city’s Charlotte’s Power2 Live Green Special Initiative Neighborhood Matching Grant Program gave out $97,248 in federal Energy Efficiency and Conservation Block Grant money. Ten of the projects are home energy efficiency […]
The former mayor of Pittsburgh and the current president of the American Planning Association – who happens to be Raleigh’s planning director – are keynote speakers Thursday at a symposium in uptown Charlotte for urban design and planning professionals. The symposium, “Resilient communities, innovation for change,” will discuss the capacity for communities to manage change […]
The second quarter 2012 Charlotte Business Confidence Index report, released April 2, shows Mecklenburg County business leaders’ optimism about economic prospects in the second quarter improved compared to their expectations for the first quarter 2012. The overall index value of 58.8, an increase of 4.2 points compared to the first quarter, continues an upswing of […]
Photos by Nancy Pierce Brad Satterwhite wrote this article while interning at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute in 2012. Although some municipalities use their water towers to make a visual splash – such as the beloved Peachoid in Gaffney, S.C., and the baseball water tower in Fort Mill, S.C. – many others are more subtle, […]
Two of UNC Charlotte’s most visible institutes are merging to create a combined center with unparalleled research capacity to address social issues in the Charlotte region. On March 8, the Institute for Social Capital (ISC) board of directors and UNC Charlotte agreed to merge the ISC staff and operations into the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, […]
New York City and Gastonia don’t, at first glance, appear to have much in common. Yet both Manhattan and the much smaller city in the Piedmont of North Carolina can offer an example of “urbanism.” And both have suffered grave harm from well-intentioned “progress.” Charlotte architect Terry Shook, speaking last month at the showing of […]
As Charlotte’s real estate market continues to recover from one of the worst economic downturns in modern times, it might be easy to assume that housing affordability is no longer an issue of great concern. But in south Charlotte and other highly desirable parts of Mecklenburg County, home prices continue to remain out of reach […]
One of my fondest childhood memories is sitting on the front porch of my grandparents’ house, gentle breeze blowing, sweet tea in hand, listening to the buzz and flight of hummingbirds as they gracefully sipped sugar water from bright red feeders. Sometimes there’d be more than a dozen of them, dancing acrobatically in the air, […]
Proponents of bicycle sharing are striving to launch the state’s first system in and near uptown Charlotte as soon as this summer. The system would give paying members access to a fleet of 200 high-tech bikes secured at a network of 20 stations in and around uptown. Bike sharing began in Europe in the 1960s, […]