General News

With the real estate market on the rebound, construction crews and renovators are hard at work in Charlotte neighborhoods. The city’s six historic districts are no exception. The number of applications for additions or renovations on properties within the historic districts, averaging about 200 a year, has risen every year since 2010. In 2014, says […]

I’ll admit it – I was a little delirious. The first day of summer year before last, I was out at first light, pacing the driveway and cradling our elderly Jack Russell in my arms. He’d been in a slow decline for months, but when he took a sudden turn for the worse, I knew […]

Is “urban agriculture” possible in a city like Charlotte? Can backyard chickens and rooftop gardens solve urban hunger? The public will get a chance to consider those questions – and sip martinis crafted from local ingredients – at the June 13 KEEPING WATCH Clean Martini Screens. The event, free and open to the public, will […]

I’ve been in and around the housing field for a long time, and I’ve seen mountains of housing statistics, data and quantitative analysis, everything from vacancy rates to under-construction tallies to eviction research. Often all these numbers, while important, get lost because they are just too voluminous and multifaceted to really comprehend. The average person, […]

Wilmore resident Kris Steele knew his neighborhood was a food desert, an area with little access to fresh food. But it didn’t hit him what that meant until he saw neighborhood kids streaming in and out of the corner convenience store carrying bags of candy. To get there, the kids walked past a rusting chain-link […]

PlanCharlotte.org is asking readers to nominate spots in the Charlotte region that need a design makeover. (See our first installment in this series here and our most recent installment here.) Urban designers Keihly Moore and Alex Borisenko have launched a website, www.completeblocks.com, where they’re proposing a series of urban design retrofits, many of them nominated […]

Think quick – where’s the closest public park to your home or office? If you’re in Charlotte, chances are you can’t walk to it. That’s one major takeaway from the Trust For Public Land’s ParkScore index report released Tuesday. The report shows Charlotte ranking 57th out of 60 cities, winning only one out of a […]

Can you identify 50 species of plants and animals native to your region? Naturalist Kenn Kaufman believes making the effort to do that will profoundly enhance your connection with the natural world. Kenn Kaufman has been an avid birder and naturalist since his childhood in the Midwest. In 1970, at 16, he dropped out of […]

A 10-foot-wide asphalt path that officially opened Tuesday offers a glimpse of what could be a more pedestrian- and bike-oriented future for some of Charlotte’s least pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares. The path, 0.9 miles along University City Boulevard from Mallard Creek Church Road to UNC Charlotte’s main entrance at Broadrick Boulevard, is the first bike-ped trail along […]

Recently, I participated in a survey of mussels as part of a post-dam removal monitoring effort at the Densons Creek Nature Preserve in Troy (60 miles east of Charlotte). I joined folks from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the N.C. Natural Heritage Program as we donned wetsuits or waders and carried viewbuckets (imagine […]