General News

A few minutes after noon on a recent Friday, a single customer waited for lunch at the Halal food cart parked on the sidewalk at Trade and Tryon streets. A couple of workers in construction vests and a handful of security guards were the only other people in the plaza. The lunchtime crowd that would […]

Charlotte’s notorious “50-out-of-50” ranking for economic mobility has many roots, ranging from systemic discrimination to gaps in education, health and jobs training. But one of the most consequential factors for intergenerational economic mobility is likely wealth, and the simple fact is that some families have much more than others. A key component of wealth is […]

I’ll never again look at a city’s Main Street the same way. In Mindy Thompson Fullilove’s newest book, Main Street: How a City’s Heart Connects Us All, she does something relatively rare for books about urban issues. Some focus on cities’ physical attributes, such as low-density single-family sprawl, building design, street grids, auto-dominated transportation, and […]

In January, a month when birders across the state and around the world launch headlong into a rigorous endeavor called a Big Year — in which they rush around a given geographic area trying to see as many species as possible — I hunkered down in the Uwharries and became obsessed with a single species. […]

Parks in Charlotte can be a bit of a touchy subject. The system took a decade to recover funding and staffing levels after the Great Recession, and we’ve consistently placed near the bottom in national rankings for park space, spending and accessibility. So last week, Park & Recreation Director Lee Jones laid out three scenarios […]

The multibillion dollar Silver Line light rail is years away, but Charlotte is moving closer to a final vision for the east-west transit line that could reshape much of Charlotte. This week, the Charlotte Area Transit System presented a more detailed map of the proposed routes and stops. It’s an ambitious undertaking: At roughly 26 […]

It’s obvious that there were a lot fewer cars on the road last year, as we worked from home, kept kids out of school and stopped driving to sports games, concerts and dinners with friends. But you still might be surprised just how much time Charlotte drivers recovered from congestion: Nearly two full days. That’s […]

How do you plan for the future and dream big while attending to the pressing needs of the day? It’s a question that came up pointedly during Charlotte City Council’s annual planning retreat this week. With 385,000 people projected to move to Charlotte over the next couple decades, the city is grappling with increasing congestion […]

Almost eight decades ago, Charlotte had just topped 100,000 residents, World War II raged, legal segregation was the law of the land and most of Mecklenburg County was still farmland. But despite the obvious differences from today, an urgent call in 1944 for the city to develop a plan to manage its growth still resonates […]

In addition to everything else in 2020, we had more than our fair share of rain. In fact, by early November we had already seen 53 inches of rain in the Triad region of North Carolina, which is well over a foot above our normal rain level for an average year. Charlotte received almost 59 […]