Neighborhood

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 […]

Wilmore resident Kris Steele knew his neighborhood was a food desert, an area with little access to fresh food. But it didn’t hit him what that meant until he saw neighborhood kids streaming in and out of the corner convenience store carrying bags of candy. To get there, the kids walked past a rusting chain-link […]

A 10-foot-wide asphalt path that officially opened Tuesday offers a glimpse of what could be a more pedestrian- and bike-oriented future for some of Charlotte’s least pedestrian-friendly thoroughfares. The path, 0.9 miles along University City Boulevard from Mallard Creek Church Road to UNC Charlotte’s main entrance at Broadrick Boulevard, is the first bike-ped trail along […]

When we turned from Mayflower Road onto Hendren Avenue, it hit me. This Revolution Park neighborhood in west Charlotte was a dead ringer for the neighborhood in southeast Charlotte where I bought a tiny house when I first moved to town three decades ago. That neighborhood, Chantilly, built in the 1940s, has now gone upscale, […]

Where there once were weeds, there is now a farm field, planted in potatoes, broccoli and greens. Where there once was a defunct greenhouse, there are now floating trays bursting with lettuce, fed by water circulating through a tank of tilapia. A year has passed since Friendship Gardens’ Henry Owen and his team of enthusiastic […]

Just northeast of uptown Charlotte in the Tryon Hills neighborhood, in a previously abandoned and cluttered warehouse, is Lila’s Garden. There is graffiti on the entrance, but once you step inside, you are met with a garden that appears to be from the future. Rows of leafy greens and microgreens are bathed in purple light […]

An expert in planning neighborhoods for walkability will speak Thursday at the UNC Charlotte uptown campus. Julie Campoli, author of Made for Walking: Neighborhood Density and Urban Form, gives a presentation at a 5:30 p.m. event that will also see the launch a new regional group focused on transportation choices, the Transportation Choices Alliance. The […]

Want to guess the large U.S. city rated worst for walkability by Walk Score®, the national rating system? That would be the Queen City. Here’s a link to its 2014 report. The top-rated city was New York, followed by San Francisco, Boston, Washington and Miami. Essentially, Walk Score measure how many amenities are within easy […]

An artists’ colony in downtown Gastonia? Sounds far-fetched. But after studies, surveys and a yearlong fundraising campaign, it’s getting closer to reality. In May, the Community Foundation of Gaston County signed a pre-development contract with Artspace, a Minneapolis nonprofit that builds and maintains affordable live-work units for artists, to build a project in Gastonia by […]