Articles About Environment and Planning
[highlightrule] Three environmentally minded Charlotte entrepreneurs believe they can make a profit by diverting food waste into compost.[/highlightrule] Fact: Mecklenburg County residences generate some 60,000 tons of food waste annually, with only about 2 percent to 5 percent diverted from landfills by home composting. Fact: In Mecklenburg County, 22 percent of commercial solid waste (not […]
[highlightrule] Charlotte’s strong urban planning is torpedoed by weak urban design. To change that, the city needs a new type of zoning ordinance.[/highlightrule] Add together Charlotte’s apartment boom plus the reinvention of urban districts such as South End, Plaza-Central and NoDa, and you come up with a lot of questions. Residents complain about the neighborhoods’ […]
Density alone does not equate to good urbanism. Density is a necessary ingredient, but raw density of jobs, housing or retail does not create a great street, much less a great place. Parts of downtown Atlanta are a classic example of this. Those tall towers empty at 5 p.m., creating an employment ghetto in the […]
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 […]
Last September, a group of enthusiasts pulled together a series of eight small parks-for-a-day in on-street parking spots along Tryon Street in uptown Charlotte. Now, the city’s Department of Transportation is offering its official stamp of approval to these “parklets.” Or at least, it’s offering a process for you to get a permit to install […]
[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 […]
The average American city zoning ordinance could win a contest for most boring book, and a book about zoning might normally be a close second. However, Sonia Hirt’s closely reasoned new book, Zoned in the USA, makes a seemingly dull subject resonate beyond a professional audience. Hirt, a professor and associate dean in the College […]
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 […]
A bill has passed the N.C. House that would do away with a decades-old provision for rezonings, the protest petition, which lets nearby property owners petition for a supermajority vote by a city council or town board on whether to approve the rezoning. In this pro/con package of opinion articles, Dilworth resident Jill Walker discusses […]
The N.C. House in March passed a bill to do away with the use of protest petitions in rezonings statewide, and neighborhood groups in Charlotte and other fast-growing communities fear they will lose their voice in shaping development. They are mistaken. The majority of rezonings in Charlotte do not generate valid protest petitions from neighboring […]
It is exasperating that, once again, North Carolina homeowners face the prospect of losing the ability to file a protest petition in rezonings. The most recent effort – a bill that has passed the N.C. House – represents the third time in less than three years that our state has been threatened with the loss […]