PLANNING

Most of the ideas about SouthPark offered last week by a group of out-of-town development experts were what you’d hope to hear from 21st-century planners: create connections, try public-private partnerships, build a better public realm. But a few of their comments might raise questions or even baffle some Charlotteans. The advisory panel from the nonprofit […]

When Mayor Pro Tem Vi Lyles convened the Charlotte City Council’s five-member Transportation and Planning Committee on Feb. 8, the City Council members may not have realized just how much Ed McKinney, the city’s interim planning director, was about to reveal in his progress report on a new city zoning ordinance. At the last update […]

Could the SouthPark mall area of Charlotte ever grow into a collection of neighborhoods that more resemble a city than suburban developments? What would it look like? What are the possibilities? The question is timely. Already, about 2,400 new apartments, as well as office towers and mixed-use projects are proposed or in the works. Tuesday […]

[highlightrule] “ ‘Status quo,’ you know, is Latin for the mess we’re in.” — President Ronald Reagan [/highlightrule] The tension and rhetoric about whether to build toll lanes on Interstate 77 is something I’m watching with dispassionate interest. I’m familiar with North Mecklenburg after work there some years ago, but my professional stake in the […]

The old planners’ joke is that Americans hate two things for their cities—urban sprawl and high density. The joke, of course, is that developing at low densities, such as one house per acre or half acre, spreads the same amount of housing across more acreage—in other words, sprawl. Higher-density development—typically multifamily—has been a topic of […]

You can add the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission to the local voices expressing concern about development moving rapidly as the city’s process to rewrite its aging zoning code moves far slower. At its monthly work session Monday, members of the planning commission spent several minutes discussing what some see as rising community concern over new developments […]

It’s been only six weeks since globe-trotting “complete streets” advocate Gil Penalosa deplaned in Charlotte in October, wearing a slightly rumpled suit and armed with little more than a flash drive and a 500-slide PowerPoint. But what a week it was. By the end, I had a sense—no proof of course, but an intuition—that an […]

A proposal working its way through the city zoning process could create something new for Charlotte: a special kind of zoning designed specifically for one neighborhood. The proposed Gold District would give a section of the larger South End area its own zoning standards, tailored to what businesses and property owners in the area say […]

The following is an edited version of a talk I gave Sept. 23 to a gathering of folks concerned about changes in the Plaza Midwood neighborhood. The event was organized by the group Plaza Midwood Shows Up in cooperation with the Plaza Midwood Neighborhood Association and the Charlotte section of the American Institute of Architects. […]

[highlightrule] “We mourn the small stores lost and the neighborhood neutered, even as we recognize that cities depend for their future on new ways of selling and buying and living. Cities often produce whatever the next wave of social change is going to be, and then violently reject it for altering the nature of the […]