DEVELOPMENT

Envision a small town Main Street, and a town hall or courthouse square probably comes to mind. But in the Charlotte region, that image may need updating. Several local governments around the N.C. Piedmont are considering moving offices out of older downtown buildings to outlying areas with underused retail and office space. Those proposals worry […]

Local streets have jammed with back-to-school traffic this week, as Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools opened for a new year. In most parts of the city, the start of UNC Charlotte’s academic year has not been as noticeable. But those of us at UNC Charlotte’s 1,000-acre campus 8 miles northeast of uptown see our own back-to-school jams, as […]

With the long-delayed final leg of Interstate-485 set to open soon, residents near the new interchange at Prosperity Church Road are bracing for growth. The question is, what will that growth look like? A 15-year-old plan calls for an “urban village” of compact streets and walkable, mixed-use neighborhoods. When envisioned in the late 1990s, it […]

Could a bottle shop and tap room be the stimulus Cornelius needs to follow in the footsteps of Charlotte’s NoDa arts district, Raleigh’s Warehouse District, or Asheville’s River Arts District? The Old Town Public House will open Sept. 13 on Catawba Avenue in Cornelius, a onetime cotton mill hamlet in fast-growing north Mecklenburg County. The […]

After the approval of a controversial rezoning in one of the city’s oldest historically black neighborhoods this spring, City of Charlotte officials are looking at the changing face of many of the city’s close-in neighborhoods. At a June meeting, members of the City Council’s Housing and Neighborhood Development Committee told city staff to study ways […]

In this new series, PlanCharlotte visits planners from around the 14-county Charlotte region. In this first installment, we head east to Albemarle. Much of the Charlotte region is fast-growing, but Albemarle’s population has remained flat. Keith Wolf has been with the city’s planning department since 2004 and planning director since 2011. He talked about economic […]

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, […]

Does your business or nonprofit use housing data? Would you like to learn more about how to use local and national housing data more effectively? The second annual Charlotte Data Day kicks off at 8:30 a.m. June 17 at the UNC Charlotte Center City campus, 320 E. Ninth St. in Charlotte. This year’s event will […]

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 […]