City Walks-Janes Walks

If you drove down Belmont Avenue during one weekend in late September, you might have seen people in orange vests painting chairs, tables, kiosks – even crosswalks. They had come out to begin the transformation of Belmont Avenue. Community members, project leaders and employees of the nonprofit Better Block Foundation had come together to create […]

[highlightrule]“Typically, people look at abstract ideas and overwhelming macro-issues like poverty and homelessness. Often missed is the opportunity to tackle low-hanging fruit like sidewalks or improved lighting.” — Jason Roberts[/highlightrule] Sometimes, to build a better city – a city built for residents, not for cars or absentee landlords or development financiers – you start with […]

Did you know: ♦ At one time, if you lived on the north side of 37th Street in the NoDa neighborhood you could keep hogs and sell fireworks, but if you lived across the street on the south side you could not. The city limits line ran down the middle of the street. ♦ A […]

[highlightrule]Watch this space in early April for information on 2018 City Walks Thank you to our dedicated 2017 volunteer walk leaders and the approximately 350 participants. See a photo slideshow of the May 2017 City Walks.[/highlightrule] Charlotte neighborhoods have stories to tell – stories many residents have never heard. Explore some of the city’s neighborhoods […]

[highlightrule]Can lower South End survive the large-scale cookie-cutter development now ravaging South End and NoDa? Charlotte can learn some lessons from another Millennial magnet city, Des Moines. Yes, Des Moines. [/highlightrule] In post-election America, consensus seems as unreachable as the lost land of Atlantis. Republican “Middle America” has triumphed over the Democratic coastal regions, and […]

The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute and its PlanCharlotte.org web publication have been awarded a $15,000 grant from the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation to continue their work as citywide organizers of a series of Charlotte neighborhood City Walks each May. The walks are inspired by the work of urban observer and writer Jane […]

By 2040 Charlotte will grow by 400,000 people, city transportation planners project – an increase equal to the population of the cities of Minneapolis, Cleveland, Miami or New Orleans. How can Charlotte handle all those new daily trips? The city’s Department of Transportation is proposing the city spend $5 billion over 25 years to keep […]

Although Brian Miller grew up in Charlotte, he always felt drawn to Gastonia’s Loray Mill village, where his mother lived as a child. The 30-block neighborhood with about 500 small houses surrounded the historic Loray Mill, site of a bloody 1929 labor strike that claimed the lives of Gastonia Police Chief Orville Aderholt and union […]

Red clay. It’s the bane of Piedmont gardeners. Heavy and lumpy when wet, it dries as hard as a terra cotta pot. We spend bundles of money on soil conditioners to make it friable. We complain about it as much as the English do about chalk, the highly alkaline soil found throughout much of the […]

[highlightrule]You probably know places you like. And you probably don’t know whether they’re MUDD-O, R-22MF or UR-2(CD). A new approach to zoning lets us envision places we like and then come up with ordinances that allow us to build them—without the arcane sets of letters and formulas.[/highlightrule] If I described a well-known locale in Charlotte […]