Urban Growth

Before John Muir became known for his ramblings in Yosemite and the Sierra Nevada, he trekked through the South from Kentucky to Florida. In 1867, at the age of 28, Muir suffered a workplace accident he feared would leave him permanently blind. Within a few months, he had fully recovered, but his experience prompted him […]

Where you can afford to live influences much of the rest of your life: Access to schools, medical care, fresh groceries, air pollution levels and, ultimately, your chance to get ahead and climb the ladder of economic mobility. The Charlotte region continues to grapple with rising housing costs that contribute to segregation and inequality. That’s […]

Debbie Williams grew up in Charlotte’s Brookhill Village, a neighborhood of one-story duplex and triplex apartments built for black families in the 1950s. She has watched while its owners let the buildings deteriorate as luxury apartments began rising nearby. Two decades ago, she moved away. But her mother and sister remained in the low-rent housing […]

This is the first in a series of articles that will periodically explore regionalism, interconnectedness and other issues examined in the institute’s Carolinas Urban-Rural Connection report, published in fall 2019. We are living in the age of the “metropolitan revolution” in the U.S.: the city as the crucible of change in the wake of waning […]

A vacant park in a bustling downtown. A waterside bandshell and lawn that sit empty most days of the year. A busy intersection thousands of people drive through every day without a pause. In a fast-growing city that lacks parks and other public gathering spaces, planners are looking at ways to make these places into […]

The 2010s in uptown Charlotte were a decade with a split personality, starting with an epic crash and swinging to a huge boom that transformed the skyline and left an enormous mark on the city. At the start of the decade, rusting rebar poked up from the EpiCentre, a reminder of a condo project that […]

Charlotte faces a wide range of needs, from affordable housing to more police, bigger parks and better transit, but they all share a similar root cause: growth. That was one of the main themes at City Council’s annual planning retreat, held this week over four days in Durham at the Washington Duke Inn. There was […]

A new, mixed-income housing development is set to take the place of a long-troubled, low-income housing complex in South End. Brookhill Village is a paradox: An oasis of affordability in the midst of a booming and fast-gentrifying part of the city, but full of run-down units, many of them boarded up and visibly decaying from […]

From an agrarian system to an economy based on rural mills and factories drawing workers from former farms and sending goods to Charlotte for distribution, the region undergoes rapid change. 

Clayton Hanson & Laura Simmons | Aug 26, 2019 Click anywhere on the map below to pause and play. Each dot represents 500 people. The dots are distributed randomly within each county and are not intended to correspond to specific places, but instead to give a general sense of the number of people residing in […]