City Walks-Janes Walks

Baby boomers are not waiting around for someone to help them cross the street. The local organization of AARP sent out volunteers to assess how well some Charlotte intersections treat pedestrians, including those of AARP-membership age. As part of AARP Walkable Charlotte Week, about two dozen volunteers, armed with stop watches and digital cameras, evaluated […]

Baby boomers are not waiting around for someone to help them cross the street. The local organization of AARP sent out volunteers to assess how well some Charlotte intersections treat pedestrians, including those of AARP-membership age. As part of AARP Walkable Charlotte Week, about two dozen volunteers, armed with stop watches and digital cameras, evaluated […]

If you’ve been paying any attention to national politics in recent weeks, you’ve surely heard remarks like: Why don’t politicians listen to the people? How can we get through to them? Why can’t government get anything done? But when people say “the government,” what government do they mean? It’s likely they’re thinking of the sclerotic […]

Will Americans continue to be suburban creatures? The question has been widely debated by developers, planners and the press since the Great Recession. Surveys showing preferences for urban, walkable, in-town neighborhoods have been called fads by some, or hailed by others as the end of suburbia. Ultimately, it will be the attitudes of the Millennial […]

Mae Jones looks out her front door every day at the empty, massive Loray Mill, about a mile from downtown Gastonia, and remembers the rumble of machines, the acrid odors and her hard work there for 35 years. Once, it was the lifeline of the surrounding mill village, and Jones, 93, is thrilled by efforts […]

On a blustery March day last year, Syreeta Kitchen-Dukes and her neighbors in the Applegate Community of east Charlotte gathered in rainy front yards to meet the neighborhood’s newest residents: 177 young trees. See more tree photos at article’s end. The would-be forest arrived with a crew from TreesCharlotte, a public/private collaborative whose goal is […]

Julie Campoli’s new paperback, Made for Walking: Density and Neighborhood Form, is a must read for anyone in and around Charlotte who wants to know what it takes to make good neighborhoods into great ones. The book follows Campoli’s earlier Visualizing Density with photographer Alex S. MacLean; both were published by the Lincoln Institute of […]

After hearing concerns about some of the new apartment construction in South End, the Charlotte Planning Department has hired a local urban design consultant to recommend possible changes to city zoning ordinances. With 11 South End multifamily projects under construction, Historic South End director Ted Boyd at a public presentation in January urged “raising the […]

Brightwalk is unique among Charlotte’s new developments. Part of that is size and location. It’s on 98 acres of redeveloped infill property along Statesville Avenue, about 2 miles from uptown. It will offer more than 1,000 single-family homes, townhomes and apartments – including senior housing and a day-care facility, all of it arranged around green […]

While cities such as Memphis have gained national attention for proclaiming a bicycle-friendly goal, Charlotte has been quietly taking a number of steps to improve its own streets for cyclists. Its bicycle sharing program, B-cycle, the first in North Carolina, has gotten a lot of publicity, but several other small scale improvements have begun, designed […]