ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

HunterWood and several surrounding neighborhoods were carved from 200 acres once owned by the Hunter family, whose homestead still stands on Charlotte’s Sardis Road. The Rev. John Hunter, installed as the minister at nearby Sardis Presbyterian Church in 1859, began assembling the property during the Civil War in the 1860s and lived there until he […]

This is the second part in a two-part series. Read the first story here

This is the first part in a two-part series. Read the second story here

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 […]

In the years after World War II, my dad could roam the Uwharries with his .22 and his trusty squirrel dog, a feist named Spot. A boy didn’t have to worry about trespassing on a neighbor’s property; he only had to avoid the occasional moonshine still. Deer and turkey were virtually extirpated in the region, […]

Bill Graves and Jeff Michael served as co-principal investigators for the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection project. Dr. Graves is Associate Professor and a J.H. Biggs Faculty Fellow in the UNC Charlotte Department of Geography & Earth Sciences. Michael is Director of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. Two years ago, we set off on a journey to […]

There’s a common narrative about people in rural areas seeking opportunities: they should go to the big city and leave the country behind.  Rural counties are often seen as hollowed out or in decline, while cities and their adjacent suburbs boom. While population in the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection study area has become much more concentrated in the urban and suburban core, the story is […]

In Gastonia, construction is underway on the Parkside on Hudson apartments, an 80-unit, garden-style affordable housing development that will offer a gazebo and picnic shelter — for monthly rents mostly ranging from $600 to $800. Early next year, work is expected to start on the first project in Mooresville under the town’s new zoning ordinance, […]

We don’t often think about crossing state lines. Other than changes in gas prices or the availability of fireworks, there’s little visible difference as you cross from North Carolina into South Carolina, or vice versa. This similarity was one of the fundamental assumptions of our Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection project – we expected our 32-county region […]

Cities boom while rural areas struggle. People seeking opportunity leave the countryside for urban areas. Small towns left behind after the local mill or factory closes down are hollowed-out shells. We’ve heard these tropes before; cliches about the urban-rural divide abound. But the Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection project is built on the premise that there’s more […]