Podcasts

Michael Gallis is a longtime planner with a big idea for Charlotte: Throw out the city’s transit expansion plans and start from scratch. Gallis — who’s been involved in some of the big plans guiding Charlotte’s future, including the original five-corridor transit plan developed before the Blue Line light rail — doesn’t hold back when […]

Charlotte loves its trees. But are we willing to do all that we can to save them? That’s the paradoxical question confronting Jane Singleton Myers, executive director of TreesCharlotte. The city’s iconic tree canopy has shrunk from 49% to 45% coverage as of 2017, and likely more in the five years since the last comprehensive […]

From seemingly endless heat waves in the west to catastrophic floods from Kentucky to Pakistan, a drumbeat of extreme weather has dominated the news this summer. In Charlotte, it can feel like we’re not on the front lines of climate change — we’re not on the coast watching sea levels creep up, or out west […]

Let’s be honest: When you think “Charlotte,” the next words to pop into your head aren’t “creative powerhouse,” are they? People are more likely to think of Charlotte as a center of banking and finance, a busy airline hub, or a hothouse for the booming real estate market. But Charlotte is also a creative center […]

Charlotte’s seen rapid growth over the past several decades, but many say that boom has come at the cost of inclusivity and, perhaps, even a bit of the city’s soul. With the loss of many historic buildings and without much of an identifiable design vernacular — aside, perhaps, from the profusion of five-story apartment buildings […]

One of Charlotte’s quintessential suburban communities has big plans to transform itself into a dense, walkable, mixed-use center. Greenways, sidewalks, protected bike lanes and transit would replace the car-choked expressways and huge parking lots that dominate the auto-centric area now. We’re not talking about Ballantyne or SouthPark. Leaders in University City — Charlotte’s second-largest employment […]

When WFAE, The Charlotte Ledger and the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute launched a joint newsletter last year to cover transit and transportation, we assumed that the main focus would be the 1-cent transit sales tax vote. Well, that vote didn’t happen and the transit plan is in a bit of limbo, but we’ve still found […]

Corporate landlords like American Homes 4 Rent and Invitation Homes now own 40,000 single-family homes across North Carolina. In Mecklenburg County, they now account for one in four rental properties. That’s according to a new, months-long investigation by the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer. The series, “Security for Sale,” details how Wall […]

John Holmes III was a budding urbanist in Charlotte, reading books like “Street Fight” and wondering why we built our cities to drive everywhere. A U.S. Marine Corps veteran working at Chick-fil-A, Holmes was trying to reconcile his workplace’s busy drive-thru with his own ideas about building better cities. When he posted his opinion online […]

How do you make a sprawling city that came of age in the automobile era less car-dependent? One approach: Don’t devote so much space to cars. That’s the thinking behind the Joinery, a new, 83-unit apartment complex that’s opening just north of the Parkwood station on the Blue Line light rail. The six-story building has […]