Community Development

Charlotte is a fast-growing city where the skyline changes by the month and neighborhoods are reshaped at a disorienting pace. But there are a multitude of data sources to help you understand the city and your community. You can start with interactive maps like the Quality of Life Explorer (produced by the Urban Institute in […]

As Charlotte continues its quest to become a more urban and cosmopolitan city, is it possible that the small towns and former mill villages dotting the land around Charlotte have something to teach us about how to solve some of the biggest and most pressing needs facing our big cities and suburbs today? Bill Fulton, […]

Leaders from across the region gathered Monday in a conference room at Charlotte Douglas International Airport with an ambitious goal: Creating a comprehensive plan for public transit, covering a dozen counties and setting the transit agenda for decades. Called CONNECT Beyond, the 18-month planning effort by the Centralina Council of Governments is, to put it […]

There’s a growing consensus that if we want to get out of the housing affordability mess we’re in, we need to hear a lot more swinging hammers. While local governments, including in Charlotte, have raised more money to subsidize affordable apartments and low-income rent payments, the scale of the problem is daunting. Mecklenburg County is […]

A new, mixed-income housing development is set to take the place of a long-troubled, low-income housing complex in South End. Brookhill Village is a paradox: An oasis of affordability in the midst of a booming and fast-gentrifying part of the city, but full of run-down units, many of them boarded up and visibly decaying from […]

Rural communities around Charlotte are looking for new economic engines. Urban residents are looking for more outdoor recreation. That provides an opportunity for communities around Charlotte to use their public lands and waterways to fuel growth. And two areas in the region that were ahead of the curve offer lessons for other communities trying to […]

Charlotte has struggled with housing affordability in recent years, as the city faces rising rents and home prices driven by rapid growth and low supply. But urban areas are not the only places grappling with these challenges, even though affordable housing is typically seen as an urban problem. Rural areas in the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection […]

This story is one of seven vignettes in the series Rural by Choice: Navigating Identity in the Uwharries. Newsom’s Jewelers was a fixture on Main Street in Troy for almost 50 years. Tracy Newsom Garner’s grandfather moved from High Point to start the business in 1952, following in the footsteps of his brothers, who’d opened […]

“The more successful towns have a champion. The really successful ones have multiple champions.” We visited Liz Parham, director of North Carolina’s Main Street Program, to learn about how communities across the state are capitalizing on their cultural and natural assets to revitalize local economies. But it was a different type of asset – people […]

From an agrarian system to an economy based on rural mills and factories drawing workers from former farms and sending goods to Charlotte for distribution, the region undergoes rapid change.