Immigration

On Feb. 27, the Charlotte Mayor’s Immigrant Integration Task Force met for the first time. Around the same time, Charlotte Chamber President Bob Morgan signed a letter by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the Partnership for a New American Economy to House Speaker John Boehner, urging him to move immigration reform forward this year. […]

Is Mecklenburg County a welcoming place? Most people here think so, according to a survey from the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute. A majority of the 400 Mecklenburg County residents surveyed agreed or strongly agreed with five separate statements about Charlotte’s welcoming of people regardless of gender, race, sexual orientation, immigration status or economic status. But […]

The last five years have been among the most challenging in the nearly 250-year history of Charlotte. The Great Recession erased the mythology that our community was invulnerable to the vicissitudes of national economic fortunes. Home construction, property values, business investment, and community philanthropy plunged downward at rates not seen since the Depression. Unemployment rates […]

The last five years have been among the most challenging in the nearly 250-year history of Charlotte. The Great Recession erased the mythology that our community was invulnerable to the vicissitudes of national economic fortunes. Home construction, property values, business investment, and community philanthropy plunged downward at rates not seen since the Depression. Unemployment rates […]

Welcome, Democrats! You have received loads of material on restaurants, sights and the strange habits of the locals. Here is a primer quick enough for you to digest while you spoon through your breakfast grits. First and most important, Charlotte is not some other city. It is not by the sea (that’s Charleston), it does […]

In 2000, Hispanic/Latinos accounted for only 4.71 percent of the N.C. population. By 2010 the percentage was 8.39, making the state’s rate of Hispanic growth sixth-fastest in the nation. The latest data show that trend is continuing, with the Hispanic population growing from 8.39 to 8.6 percent from 2010 to 2011.* This continuing increase in […]

The rise in the number of Hispanic, Asian and multiracial residents has been the biggest change in population diversity in the Charlotte region for more than a decade. The growth and distribution of these groups has not been even, which creates notable differences among the region’s urban, suburban and rural communities. Explore a host of […]

Tom Hanchett and I have been having this discussion – some might call it a debate – over what’s the most “urban” part of Charlotte. Hanchett, staff historian at Levine Museum of the New South, contends that the most urban corner in the city is Central Avenue at Rosehaven Drive. For weeks I have respectfully […]

The late author and urban thinker Jane Jacobs tends to be pegged as a historic preservationist, an advocate who wanted to preserve her Greenwich Village neighborhood in amber. Although this great champion of cities wrote much about the importance of old buildings to a city, and as an activist fought valiantly to kill a proposed […]

Where are urban regions growing – in their cores or suburbs? What is happening in rural areas? New population figures have fostered speculation about what growth in urban regions will be like in the future. For rural parts of the Carolinas, the issue isn’t about growth at all, but widespread decline in population. The 2000s […]