General News

When you hear that a new book “opens my eyes to an entirely new way of thinking,” as “Better! Cities & Towns” editor Rob Steuteville wrote, you may want to pay attention. Dead End: Suburban Sprawl and the Rebirth of American Urbanism, by Benjamin Ross (Oxford University Press, 2014) has the potential to change the […]

When the flush of spring ephemeral wildflowers begins to fade, several shrub species come into their own. Mountain laurel ought to be at its peak in the coming week. Their enchanting masses of light pink flowers are found throughout the Uwharries, but some of our most interesting and attractive spring-blooming shrubs aren’t nearly so abundant. […]

Charlotte City Council members will consider strategies for lobbying against a state bill expected to be introduced that city officials fear would all but gut the city’s tree protection ordinance. The proposed bill won approval on April 30 from an Agriculture and Forestry Awareness Study Commission, a group of legislative and gubernatorial appointees. Officials with […]

In Charlotte, one neighborhood more than any other came to represent the housing crisis. Built between 2002 and 2004, the Windy Ridge neighborhood of 133 small, single-family homes fell victim. By 2008, 60 percent of the neighborhood’s homes were in foreclosure. Crime rates rose, property values plummeted and the homeowners association couldn’t afford to keep […]

When we turned from Mayflower Road onto Hendren Avenue, it hit me. This Revolution Park neighborhood in west Charlotte was a dead ringer for the neighborhood in southeast Charlotte where I bought a tiny house when I first moved to town three decades ago. That neighborhood, Chantilly, built in the 1940s, has now gone upscale, […]

Americans use an average of 60,000 plastic bags every minute – single-use disposable bags that we mindlessly throw away. It takes an estimated 12 million barrels of oil a year to make the plastic bags that Americans consume. And that’s just bags. Plastics surround us. Although Mecklenburg County now accepts most types of plastics for […]

The term “parasite” may bring to mind something that at best is an ugly nuisance, and at worst is a gruesome horror story – everything from common ticks and chiggers to one particularly disturbing story that popped up in my Facebook feed recently with images of a botfly being removed from someone’s eyeball. I did […]

In Charlotte-Mecklenburg, local ordinances do not require all businesses to recycle, and even when large companies provide space for employees to toss materials into bins, officials are unable to determine how much they recycle. In Charlotte and the county’s six towns, there is no requirement that apartments, townhouses, condos and other multifamily communities provide on-site […]

Recycling containers sit in classrooms in every Charlotte-Mecklenburg public school, and students at nearly half of them make the extra effort to dump leftover liquid from milk and juice cartons before tossing them into bins. “The recycling systems are in place in the schools,” says Laurette Hall, environmental manager for Mecklenburg County Solid Waste Services, […]

Where there once were weeds, there is now a farm field, planted in potatoes, broccoli and greens. Where there once was a defunct greenhouse, there are now floating trays bursting with lettuce, fed by water circulating through a tank of tilapia. A year has passed since Friendship Gardens’ Henry Owen and his team of enthusiastic […]