General News

Three months ago my family and I moved into our first home. Something about buying a house makes you feel like a bona fide adult, and with that come adult decisions. When my husband and I were deciding where in the city we wanted to live, like many young families we fell into the trap […]

During one of my college English classes, the professor told us Southern literature is distinguished by a heightened sense of family, history and place. (In a cheeky paper published years later, another UNC professor offered evidence to suggest the signifier can actually be reduced to a single entity: the presence of a dead mule.) Recently, […]

Two weeks ago I beamed with pride for Charlotte as U.S. Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx and Mayor Dan Clodfelter cut the ribbon to begin the CityLynx Gold Line streetcar service. I’ve lived in and visited cities with streetcar lines and often longed for an America where tracks once again crisscross our cities. The past can […]

Each of us has a different image in our minds of what constitutes a place. Is it the road network? The buildings? The people? One UNC Charlotte geography professor has been asking students on the first day of class to draw a map of Charlotte. He doesn’t tell them what type of map, or even […]

[highlight]Charlotte leaders have been talking about the outerbelt, Interstate 485, for decades. While most residents were concerned primarily with what it would mean for drive times, planners and others spent time contemplating the highway’s effect on the area’s growth. A sampling of comments over the years.[/highlight] “We’re going to have to get far more serious […]

In 1995, the year the Land trust for Central North Carolina was founded, our state’s population was 7.35 million. Remember those days? Back when we bought CDs by Coolie and Joe Diffie (really?) and drove to video stores to rent copies of Toy Story, Clueless and Braveheart? When we flocked to AOL for this newfangled […]

As an urban planner with a national practice, I am frequently asked by friends and colleagues for an opinion on the Interstate 77 toll lane discussion. I’ve been all across the country this past year in areas that were either growing fast or dying slowly. So when I return home to see how a seemingly […]

Since the 1990s, the NoDa neighborhood surrounding North Davidson and 36th streets in Charlotte has been branded as the city’s arts district. But in recent years the galleries that once clustered there have dwindled. Is NoDa still an arts district? Or has South End, along South Boulevard near uptown, overtaken it? Morgan Hamer, an artist […]

The following is excerpted, with permission, from Margins of a Greater Wildness: Nature Essays on Stanley Creek and Beyond, a collection of essays by Richard Rankin on local topics from the Stanley Creek community in eastern Gaston County, where the Rankin family has lived for many generations. One person is primarily responsible for the rediscovery […]

Ever wondered … what’s the oldest building in uptown Charlotte? If one were to compare the Charlotte skyline of 1975 with today’s, the city would be almost unrecognizable. Charlotte’s exponential growth over the past 40 years has produced a city much different in size and shape than even 20 years ago. But in creating this […]