DEVELOPMENT

With the real estate market on the rebound, construction crews and renovators are hard at work in Charlotte neighborhoods. The city’s six historic districts are no exception. The number of applications for additions or renovations on properties within the historic districts, averaging about 200 a year, has risen every year since 2010. In 2014, says […]

I’ve been in and around the housing field for a long time, and I’ve seen mountains of housing statistics, data and quantitative analysis, everything from vacancy rates to under-construction tallies to eviction research. Often all these numbers, while important, get lost because they are just too voluminous and multifaceted to really comprehend. The average person, […]

It’s not easy getting around the Charlotte region on foot. It can be deadly, too. The Charlotte-Concord-Gastonia area ranks 10th most dangerous metro for pedestrians, according to a study, Dangerous by Design, released this week by the National Complete Streets Coalition and Smart Growth America. Last month, Smart Growth America ranked the Charlotte metro as […]

Want to know more? Concord and Davidson Main Streets named ‘Great Places’ in 2013 Download presentation on 2012 Great Places contest. See list of this year’s nominees If you want to see this years’ “Great Places” in North Carolina, you’ll have to head west. In the People’s Choice category, voters picked Morganton’s East and West […]

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 […]

Several recent newspaper articles have described the city’s plans to subsidize a new edge city west of Charlotte Douglas International Airport by spending about $45 million to widen and extend streets in the Dixie Berryhill area. City leaders want to build on the airport’s expansion and the new Norfolk Southern freight center at the airport […]

Charlotte city planners are moving forward with a plan to look – in stages – at revising the city-county zoning ordinance, hoping to finish that multiyear process by 2018. A city-hired consultant last July reported that the ordinance, adopted 22 years ago, too often works against the goals of the city’s adopted plans. Plus, said […]

A North Carolina Department of Transportation letter has planners and officials in several Union County towns scrambling to figure out how they’ll maintain new subdivision streets in what has long been one of the fastest growing counties in the state. The September letter from Division 10 engineer Louis Mitchell said NCDOT would no longer accept […]

It’s a quirky fact about all three of the most recent directors of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute: We all came, not from large urban centers, but from small, rural communities. Jim Clay, director from 1979 to 1984, was from Crum, W.Va. Bill McCoy (director 1985-2001) hailed from Ekron, Ky. And me? My friends are […]