Downtown Revitalization

We know North Carolina is filled with great places: both natural landscapes and cultural and historic treasures, from main streets to parks to neighborhoods. Here’s your chance to suggest places that deserve public recognition and celebration. The N.C. Chapter of the American Planning Association wants nominations from the public for Great Main Street and Great […]

Whether you want to look up data or understand an issue or trend affecting the Charlotte region, the online resources of the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute are available to help you. There are also many other programs on campus that work with local groups. The institute offers articles and data on a range of issues […]

An artists’ colony in downtown Gastonia? Sounds far-fetched. But after studies, surveys and a yearlong fundraising campaign, it’s getting closer to reality. In May, the Community Foundation of Gaston County signed a pre-development contract with Artspace, a Minneapolis nonprofit that builds and maintains affordable live-work units for artists, to build a project in Gastonia by […]

Any day now, I figure the term “inner city” will go the way of “carbon paper” and “adding machine.” Already, it has a sort of disco, big-hair-and-shoulder-pads aura – a relic of a time when to many Americans the heart of the city was a place of poverty, crime and social dysfunction. Compare that image […]

Two of the region’s main streets have won this year’s Great Places in North Carolina competition. Union Street in Concord and Main Street in Davidson were recognized among the state’s top downtowns in the competition sponsored by the N.C. chapter of the American Planning Association (APA-NC). Concord’s Union Street competed with more widely recognized main […]

A group of local brewers and beer lovers is working with the city’s planning department to make Charlotte a more beer-friendly city in an unusual way: zoning amendments. The group held its second meeting at NoDa Brewing Co. last week, continuing a process craft brewers hope will adjust the city’s zoning ordinance, which currently restricts […]

Containment policies, such as Urban Growth Boundaries (UGBs), are becoming more widespread as metro regions try to control sprawl and revitalize central cities. Mecklenburg County’s northeastern neighbor, Cabarrus County, has tried such an approach in hopes of preserving small town atmospheres and farmland. Disappearing farmland and mounting pressure from developers reached an apex in 2004. […]

It’s that time of year again – when the ghosts of Christmas past, present, and yet to come arrive to haunt the old miser, Ebenezer Scrooge. It is nearly impossible to extricate Charles Dickens’ works, including his beloved A Christmas Carol, from the city in which they are set: Victorian-era, dirty, industrial London. You can […]

The big picture may have gotten buried Tuesday as Charlotte City Council members chewed – and chewed and chewed – on different alternative revenue strategies that might enable the city to build the second leg of its proposed streetcar. Most of the discussion was about finding ways to pay for the streetcar project that weren’t […]

When Allen Nelson moved to Charlotte’s Commonwealth-Morningside neighborhood in 2007, he was drawn to the area’s bungalow-style homes, the graceful, mature shade trees and the tucked-away location so close to downtown. But in Nelson’s view, Commonwealth has some of the same problems of many Charlotte neighborhoods – overflowing trash bins, energy-leaking older homes, a scattershot […]