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Mary Newsom

Biography

Mary is a lifelong newspaper journalist who spent several decades at The Charlotte Observer as an editorial board member and columnist, concentrating on Charlotte regional urban and suburban growth, planning, urban design, transportation and land preservation. She left the Observer and joined the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute in 2011. She had a year-long Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University 2007-08, and in 2005-06 was a Knight Fellow in Community Building at the University of Miami. Newsom retired from the insitute in 2018 as Director of Urban Policy Initiatives, and is now a freelance writer in Charlotte. 

Education

A.B. Journalism UNC Chapel Hill

Expertise

Urban and suburban issues, Charlotte region and North Carolina politics and government, writing, editing and journalism.

Stories by Mary Newsom

Growing congestion, empty tracks: Why there's still no Red Line to North Meck
March 29, 2021

A set of almost deserted railroad tracks runs from uptown Charlotte through Huntersville, Cornelius and Davidson.

Can a street help heal America’s fractures?
February 3, 2021

I’ll never again look at a city’s Main Street the same way.

Sun Belt cities are driving much of our urban growth. Let’s study them.
July 6, 2020
The U.S. population, like that in Charlotte, is growing, and much of the growth is in the cities of the Sun Belt. A new report from a Houston university research center says the country should be...

Post-coronavirus, everything will change in cities — or not
June 4, 2020
We who write about cities are quick to make predictions. Some will prove prescient. Some won’t. But nobody really knows. Cities aren’t all alike. New York’s texture, way of life and pandemic...

Review: In ‘A Delicious Country,’ an author rediscovers the Carolinas
July 22, 2019
You probably have never heard of John Lawson. Scott Huler aims to change that. Lawson was an Englishman and explorer who, over two months in late 1700 and early 1701, traveled almost 600 miles...