General News

Breweries, apartments, hip food halls, creative offices, coworking spaces: Charlotte developers keep finding new uses for the city’s old mills. As a post-war, Sunbelt boomtown, Charlotte has garnered a reputation for tearing down its old buildings and replacing them with sterile plaques to make way for the city’s glittering new skyline. But while many once-grand […]

Reading the essays in Tom Mayes’ book, Why Old Places Matter: How Historic Places Affect Our Identity and Well-Being, one comes away with the sense that he’s not only seeking to understand the innate pull of old places that compels us to protect our historic fabric, but also appealing to a new generation of preservationists […]

Since Charlotte City Council approved TOD Article 15 – the new Transit Oriented Development ordinance – last April, land use consultants, architects, real estate attorneys and other insiders have had ample opportunity to sort out these new rules. As for laypersons, gleaning what they need to know from TOD’s eighty-one page assemblage of definitions, rules, […]

Fifty out of 50: That’s where the Charlotte area ranked in Harvard economist Raj Chetty’s influential 2014 study of economic mobility. The study found that a Charlotte child born into the lowest one-fifth of the income distribution had the worst odds of moving into the top fifth of the income distribution over their lifetime, compared […]

After visiting a city with a waterfront, maybe stopping for a drink and a bite to eat along whichever river or ocean it’s built along, I’m usually left with one overriding thought: “Wow, Charlotte could really use some of this.” Water plays a prominent role in the design and history of most cities, whether it be a river, bay or ocean. And Charlotte’s skyline and downtown sit tantalizingly close-but-yet-so-far from a major river and lake system. So, the question looms: Why isn’t Charlotte built on the water? 

Hellbenders – a species of large salamander with an evocative name – can tell us something about the health of a river. Macroinvertebrates are good indicators of water health across the state. Insects, crustaceans, molluscs, and arachnids can all tolerate water quality in different degrees. Mayflies, caddisflies, stoneflies, hellgrammites are all highly sensitive to pollution. Their presence anywhere indicates good water quality. Dragonflies, damselflies, crayfish and clams are somewhat tolerant of pollution. Black fly larvae, lunged snails, and leeches are all pollution-tolerant.

“I call rushes the final frontier,” says Paula Gross, former associate director of the UNC Charlotte Botanical Gardens. “That’s because I know so little about them myself!” A 19th century botanist described the genus as “obscure and uninviting,” she notes. As with so many other plants, my interest in rushes lies at the intersection of […]

What can a board game – especially a wonky, policy-oriented board game – teach us about how Charlotte should grow over the next two decades? Local officials are hoping the answer is quite a lot. As work on the Charlotte Future 2040 Comprehensive Plan rolls on, and city officials rework the rules governing development into […]

Author Scott Huler will be interviewed on the “Charlotte Readers” live podcast at 3 p.m. Saturday, July 27, at the Charlotte Museum of History. The event is free and open to the public. More information is available here. Earlier that day, 11 a.m.-2 p.m., the museum will host a free symposium showcasing research by museum […]

If planners, developers and other leaders in Charlotte have a favorite word, it might just be “vision.”

In a city defined by its growth, local leaders aren’t shy about throwing the word around,. and there are plenty of visions being promoted in Charlotte at any one time. Visions, of course, don’t always become reality – and if they do, they often take far longer than the original planners imagined, and mutate from their original form. But visions can also set the stage for development patterns that persist for generations.