PLANNING

HOUSTON — One city was built on oil and shipping in a hot, humid swampy spot laced with small waterways. Its former biracial dynamics have changed, as immigration boosted Latino and Asian populations. It’s growing rapidly – and that includes rapid growth in income inequality. Another city was built on textiles and banking in a […]

The Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Department has begun a large public initiative to produce a new zoning ordinance – the first big rewrite since a contentious one in the 1980s-1990s. PlanCharlotte editor Mary Newsom met with interim Planning Director Ed McKinney to hear how the process is going. They talked about how to preserve neighborhood character, what […]

More cycling in Charlotte is good for you, even if you never mount a bicycle. More butts on bikes means less congestion and noise on local roads, cleaner air, fewer traffic fatalities and ultimately a lighter burden on our health care system. Purchasing, operating, and maintaining a bicycle is also many times cheaper as a […]

Charlotte for years has had a love-hate view of Atlanta, with civic leaders envying their fellow southeastern metro for its big-city status, achieved decades earlier than Charlotte’s. But sprawling growth and traffic congestion in the Georgia capital city fuel a We Don’t Want To Become Like Atlanta counterpoint. Last year a Charlottean became Atlanta’s planning […]

[highlightrule]Can lower South End survive the large-scale cookie-cutter development now ravaging South End and NoDa? Charlotte can learn some lessons from another Millennial magnet city, Des Moines. Yes, Des Moines. [/highlightrule] In post-election America, consensus seems as unreachable as the lost land of Atlantis. Republican “Middle America” has triumphed over the Democratic coastal regions, and […]

Imagine: Charlotte neighborhoods with their own master plans to care for their trees. A citywide initiative to pinpoint neighborhoods with few trees and then help get trees planted there. A dependable, dedicated source of public money to care for Charlotte’s street trees. Assistance for low-income homeowners who can’t afford to give proper care to large […]

By Mary Newsom Choices made decades ago ruled out the preservation of large-scale green belts or farmlands in Mecklenburg. This is the story of how that came about. You can drive south down Dixie River Road beyond the venerable Dixie Grill & Grocery and for 2 miles you’ll see only woods, a few driveways and […]

Is Jim Garges, Mecklenburg County’s normally ebullient director of parks and recreation, fretting right now? He might be, and for much the same reasons that Janette Sadik-Khan worried eight years ago as commissioner of the massive New York City Department of Transportation. For Sadik-Khan, the summer of 2008 was when her staff decided to gamble. […]

Are you new to North Carolina and looking to discover one of the state’s great main streets? Or are you a life-long resident searching for a new place to explore? Or do you want other North Carolinians to know about the great places in your town? Welcome to the fifth annual Great Places in NC […]

[highlightrule]You probably know places you like. And you probably don’t know whether they’re MUDD-O, R-22MF or UR-2(CD). A new approach to zoning lets us envision places we like and then come up with ordinances that allow us to build them—without the arcane sets of letters and formulas.[/highlightrule] If I described a well-known locale in Charlotte […]