Social Well-Being

It’s happening across Charlotte: Apartments, office buildings and restaurants are popping up in parking lots, as dense, mixed-use developments, connected by bicycle paths and walking trails, invade suburbia. Within the past month, major plans have been announced for densifying and transforming chunks of Ballantyne, SouthPark and University City – three of the biggest bastions of […]

Tens of thousands of people a year are evicted in Mecklenburg County, but the full impact is hard to see. Court data on evictions is often incomplete or accessible only in paper files, difficult to compile and access. Demographic data on who is evicted, and for what reasons, is not comprehensively collected. There’s little tracking […]

Are youth who are disengaged from school more likely to enter the juvenile justice system – and does this vary for youth of different races and ethnicities? That was the question UNC Charlotte professor Dr. Susan McCarter set out to answer. Using data from the Institute for Social Capital, an integrated data system that’s part […]

Bilingual food tours, immersive experiences of Charlotte as a visually impaired or homeless person, strolls through cemeteries, public art and mural exlporations, visits to historic neighborhoods and connections with new people: All that and more was on tap at Charlotte City Walks this year. The UNC Charlotte Urban Institute organized a record number of free […]

Data often lives in silos. At the Institue for Social Capital, part of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, researchers can find the links those silos might otherwise hide. The institute was profiled this week by EducationNC, as part of a series on data in education. The wide range of data available at the institute – […]

As Charlotte grows denser and more urban, parts of the city built decades ago on an auto-centric, suburban framework are struggling to both absorb more traffic and adapt to new beliefs about how people should get around. A one-mile stretch of congested road in fast-growing University City illustrates the tensions between balancing the needs of […]

Charlotte is familiar with the so-called “crescent” and “wedge,” the longstanding pattern of race, income and wealth distribution that shapes much of the city. Wealthier, and often more white, residents are concentrated in the wedge-shaped slice of south Charlotte, while an arc of lower-income communities stretches to the north, east and west. It’s an oft-referenced […]

It’s a familiar story: A new transit line opens, spurring gentrification in nearby neighborhoods and pushing out long-time residents. But is that always what happens? New research from Dr. Elizabeth Delmelle, Dr. Isabelle Nilsson, Dr. Claire Schuch, and Tonderai Mushipe – all from UNC Charlotte’s Department of Geography and Earth Sciences – shows that the […]

Thousands are expected to gather in Charlotte’s historic Plaza-Midwood neighborhood this weekend, attracted by bold visual art and nontraditional performances representing a diverse array of artists. The three-day BOOM festival, a self-described “movement born from a belief in the explosive power of art to unite and strengthen our community,” enters its fourth year buoyed by […]

Charlotte’s arts scene is growing, as well as becoming more diverse and even, some say, edgy. It’s a big change in a city long known more for its financial firms than its cultural assets. But the city still lacks what many see as a dedicated arts district, and some advocates say the Charlotte arts community […]