Quality of Life

New data on the Quality of Life Explorer mapping tool paint a picture of how demographics are changing across Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, as well as other measures such as bicycle friendliness, voter participation and average water consumption. The Quality of Life Explorer is a joint tool of Mecklenburg County, the city of Charlotte and […]

Did you know… 10,390 new housing units got permits for construction in Mecklenburg County between July 1, 2016, and June 30, 2017. That’s up 35 percent from the year before. 77 percent of Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools students attended their neighborhood (assigned) school in the 2015-16 school year. In many neighborhoods, nearly all children attend their neighborhood […]

In January 2017, 400 Charlotteans responded to a 15-minute phone survey. The survey was representative of the Mecklenburg County population and, among other questions, asked respondents, “When thinking about Mecklenburg County as a place to live and the opportunities and amenities it provides, how would you rate Mecklenburg County for the following groups of people?” […]

Owen Furuseth, UNC Charlotte’s associate provost for Metropolitan Studies and Extended Academic Programs, is retiring June 30 after a career researching land use, urban and neighborhood planning topics. During those years he has been an advocate for open space preservation, has worked with Charlotte-Mecklenburg local government to create and refine an extensive set of neighborhood-level […]

Poverty is a critical social and public policy issue nationwide, but there is considerable variation by state, municipality, and neighborhood. What is the state of poverty in our community? How pervasive is it? How deeply is it ingrained? The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute is working with the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Opportunity Task Force to present data that […]

Three months ago my family and I moved into our first home. Something about buying a house makes you feel like a bona fide adult, and with that come adult decisions. When my husband and I were deciding where in the city we wanted to live, like many young families we fell into the trap […]

Residents, community leaders, government officials and local advocacy groups have long recognized the need for vibrant, healthy communities. However, there is no single way to define “healthy community.” One neighborhood might be considered economically healthy but not environmentally healthy, and vice versa. Neighborhoods with young populations might be facing different challenges than neighborhoods with older […]

The 115 ideas for creating a more livable Mecklenburg range from protecting more historic buildings to better training the local workforce to rethinking local residents’ reliance on fescue lawns. They’re all part of the latest draft of the Mecklenburg Livable Communities Plan, unveiled to the public last week. The plan, which is being shown to […]

You don’t attend many conferences where the first question you are asked is, “What’s your favorite dataset?” However, that was the question we heard when we represented Charlotte at the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) conference in Denver. The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, along with the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County, partnered to join […]

Talk of the Towns is a PlanCharlotte series visiting planners from the 14-county Charlotte region. This installment takes us to Rock Hill in York County, S.C. The former industrial town of about 68,000 people is searching for a new image. Bill Meyer has been planning and development director in Rock Hill since 2006. He talked […]