General News

Over the years, some interesting birds have turned up at our farm in the Uwharries. Mama keeps her feeders stocked all winter, and she’s been rewarded with species that will set a Piedmont birder’s heart aflutter: an evening grosbeak, a black-headed grosbeak, and the extremely rare yellow-headed blackbird. This summer, she had another unusual visitor: […]

[highlightrule]What’s going on in our nation? Why? And what should we do about it?[/highlightrule] What’s going on in our nation? Though most of our systems aspire to fairness, people of color consistently experience disparate outcomes, compared to Whites. Racial disproportionality occurs across all systems – education, child welfare, health care, housing, employment, banking and finance […]

Although Brian Miller grew up in Charlotte, he always felt drawn to Gastonia’s Loray Mill village, where his mother lived as a child. The 30-block neighborhood with about 500 small houses surrounded the historic Loray Mill, site of a bloody 1929 labor strike that claimed the lives of Gastonia Police Chief Orville Aderholt and union […]

For workers in Mecklenburg County, it has become even harder to afford housing, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition’s latest Out of Reach report. The 2016 report documents the gap between wages and fair market rents (for standard-quality rental units) in communities across the United States.[i] The fair market rent takes into account […]

In August 1974, I was a rising junior in the College of Architecture at UNC Charlotte, and I had returned to school early to take advantage of the woodworking shop. One day, covered in dust, I passed one of the seminar rooms and noticed a good number of faculty as well as the dean had […]

According to the Solar Energy Industries Association, North Carolina ranks third in the nation in the amount of installed solar capacity, more than all other Southeastern states combined. At last count, 188 solar companies employed 6,000 people in our state. As a recent article in the Montgomery Herald noted, there’s now a 25-megawatt solar farm […]

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 […]

A stop by the Eldorado Outpost one recent morning included a sighting of a barn swallow that had built a nest on a ledge of the building under the eave. Barn swallows (Hirundo rustica) are fairly common, and you’ve probably seen them on your own property. A couple of years ago, kayaking on Mountain Creek, […]

From the woods surrounding her Lake Wylie home, Nancy Hayes watches turkeys, deer, raccoons and other animals, including a pair of bald eagles. The wildlife is threatened, she says, by a residential development proposed for more than 400 homes, and she’s angry about it. “It’s outrageous,” says Hayes, who moved to the area three years […]

“I love the sight of red clay.” Those words, from a professional colleague of my wife’s as he showed her the view from his high-rise office in uptown Charlotte, were jarring for her as a newly arrived preservationist. She had recently moved to Charlotte from Washington, where she had worked for the National Trust for […]