General News

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 […]

Wall Street-backed companies are buying thousands of single-family homes and turning them into rentals across the Charlotte region. Local officials are worried about the effects on affordability, home ownership and equity — but there isn’t much they can do to directly stop the trend. That’s what Mecklenburg County commissioners heard this week from county staff […]

Charlotte’s $13.5 billion transit and transportation plans might be on hold, but plans for how to build the signature Silver Line light rail are still pushing ahead. Officials from the Charlotte Area Transit System reviewed a new study about how to facilitate transit-oriented development around each of the Silver Line’s 31 planned stops. The 29-mile […]

For the first time in three years, Charlotte City Walks are back with a full line-up of free, in-person, community-led tours to introduce Charlotteans to new sides of their city. City Walks were canceled in 2020 and went virtual-only in 2021 because of the pandemic. This year, we are excited to welcome people from across […]

We often paint Charlotte’s housing market in broad strokes: rising prices, bidding wars and gentrification reshaping neighborhoods. Updated data on the Charlotte/Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer lets you can dig deeper into the story told by those aggregate numbers. Charlotte’s neighborhoods are starkly different when it comes to characteristics such as what percentage of homes […]

How do you make a sprawling city that came of age in the automobile era less car-dependent? One approach: Don’t devote so much space to cars. That’s the thinking behind the Joinery, a new, 83-unit apartment complex that’s opening just north of the Parkwood station on the Blue Line light rail. The six-story building has […]

As investors — including Wall Street-backed single-family rental companies — buy more homes across Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, the city of Charlotte is considering changes to some of its homeownership assistance programs. Buyers in the region face record-high prices and record-low inventory. In January, the median sales price in the Charlotte region was almost $350,000 […]

Bradford pears are a problem. For years, I didn’t want to admit it. I’d drive the highways of the Piedmont and the backroads of the Uwharries in early spring, noting the occasional white-blooming tree at the edge of the woods and trying to convince myself they weren’t as invasive as privet. And then came the […]