Articles About 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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

In 2012, local historian Tom Hanchett wanted to explore his fascination with Central Avenue. He led a community walk down the busy thoroughfare, bustling with new businesses, older neighborhoods and a growing immigrant community. “I was beginning to see Central Ave as an urban place, which at that point in time sounded like a contradiction […]

Everyone wants to be included and accounted for. This is no different for our homeless population, a group that often feels overlooked and ignored. Charlotte-Mecklenburg is doing their best to remedy this with their annual Point-In-Time Count. The Point-In-Time (PIT) Count is an unduplicated estimate of individuals experiencing homelessness on a single night in January. […]

Ryan Gravel, an urban planner, designer and author of “Where We Want to Live,” travels the country talking about the need for a bold and provocative approach to managing the growth of cities and its impact on lifestyles of residents. Gravel’s 1999 master’s thesis was the catalyst for creating the Atlanta Beltline, a 22-mile transit […]

“Change is the law of life and those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.” – John F. Kennedy As the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute prepares to celebrate its 50th anniversary in 2019, we are reflecting on how our history and growth mirror both the region we focus […]