General News

When WFAE, The Charlotte Ledger and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute launched a joint newsletter last year to cover transit and transportation, we assumed that the main focus would be the 1-cent transit sales tax vote. Well, that vote didn’t happen and the transit plan is in a bit of limbo, but we’ve still found […]

With rents and home prices shooting up to record levels, it’s not news that finding a place to live in Charlotte is getting more expensive. Last week, the Charlotte Journalism Collaborative brought together local and national experts, advocates and community members in search of policy solutions that could help ameliorate the situation. One takeaway: There’s […]

Charlotte transportation leaders laid out an ambitious goal this week: By 2040, half of all trips in the city should be taken in something besides a car. That would be a major shift. Right now, somewhere around three-quarters of trips within the city are currently made using single-occupant vehicles, transportation staff said at the City […]

Corporate landlords like American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes now own 40,000 single-family homes across North Carolina. In Mecklenburg County, they now account for one in four rental properties. That’s according to a new, months-long investigation by the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer. The series, “Security for Sale,” details how Wall […]

March 2022 is arguably when Charlotte and the country turned the corner on the pandemic. With Omicron waning, Charlotte’s major banks brought back their employees, at least on a hybrid schedule. Bank of America returned vaccinated workers on March 1. Wells Fargo came back two weeks later. March is a good baseline for what a […]

Violence impacts all of Charlotte-Mecklenburg, but the toll doesn’t fall equally across members of our community. There are pronounced disparities along racial lines. A new, data-focused learning community will help local leaders across sectors find collaborative solutions to prevent and address violence in Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. Housed at the University of Pennsylvania, Actionable Intelligence […]

The future of transportation has arrived in Charlotte — but the future comes with a few asterisks. This year has already seen a slew of announcements about futuristic transportation options in the Charlotte region (to say nothing of a new robot security guard uptown and bots writing local media stories). It feels like we’re nearing […]

Maybe it’s because I’ve spent the past two years obsessing over the squiggly lines charting COVID’s peaks and troughs. I began to imagine the shape a graph might take if I plotted the occurrence of spring wildflowers and neotropical migrants. I envision the wildflower display as two gentle but significant peaks – one in mid-March […]

John Holmes III was a budding urbanist in Charlotte, reading books like “Street Fight” and wondering why we built our cities to drive everywhere. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran working at Chick-fil-A, Holmes was trying to reconcile his workplace’s busy drive-thru with his own ideas about building better cities. When he posted his opinion online […]

Your access to medicine, lifesaving COVID-19 vaccines and other pharmacy services might depend on what part of town you live in. The Urban Institute recently updated the Quality of Life Explorer data maps to include several new metrics, one of which is particularly relevant as we enter year three of the global pandemic. “Proximity to […]