ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT

If Charlotte is a city of neighborhoods, what happens when almost 20 of those neighborhoods spend a half-day at a retreat to encourage goal-setting? To find out, I spent Saturday morning at the City of Charlotte’s fourth Neighborhood Boards Retreat. Not surprisingly, the neighborhood representatives emerged with a cluster of goals. Representatives from 18 neighborhoods […]

In this new series, PlanCharlotte visits planners from around the 14-county Charlotte region. In this second installment, we head north on I-85 to Salisbury in Rowan County. Salisbury, population 33,612, is the oldest city in the region. Its roots date to the 1750s, when colonial authorities established it as a county seat. Historic preservation remains […]

In this new series, PlanCharlotte visits planners from around the 14-county Charlotte region. In this first installment, we head east to Albemarle. Much of the Charlotte region is fast-growing, but Albemarle’s population has remained flat. Keith Wolf has been with the city’s planning department since 2004 and planning director since 2011. He talked about economic […]

I’ve been in and around the housing field for a long time, and I’ve seen mountains of housing statistics, data and quantitative analysis, everything from vacancy rates to under-construction tallies to eviction research. Often all these numbers, while important, get lost because they are just too voluminous and multifaceted to really comprehend. The average person, […]

Where there once were weeds, there is now a farm field, planted in potatoes, broccoli and greens. Where there once was a defunct greenhouse, there are now floating trays bursting with lettuce, fed by water circulating through a tank of tilapia. A year has passed since Friendship Gardens’ Henry Owen and his team of enthusiastic […]

For another 10 days the public can vote to choose North Carolina’s best Main Street and best public place, part of a statewide awards program. Four Charlotte-area places are among the contestants: Main Streets in Belmont and Mooresville, and North Davidson Street in Charlotte’s NoDa neighborhood are among the contestants for Great Main Street. Charlottes […]

Several recent newspaper articles have described the city’s plans to subsidize a new edge city west of Charlotte Douglas International Airport by spending about $45 million to widen and extend streets in the Dixie Berryhill area. City leaders want to build on the airport’s expansion and the new Norfolk Southern freight center at the airport […]

Just northeast of uptown Charlotte in the Tryon Hills neighborhood, in a previously abandoned and cluttered warehouse, is Lila’s Garden. There is graffiti on the entrance, but once you step inside, you are met with a garden that appears to be from the future. Rows of leafy greens and microgreens are bathed in purple light […]

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 […]

The last five years have been among the most challenging in the nearly 250-year history of Charlotte. The Great Recession erased the mythology that our community was invulnerable to the vicissitudes of national economic fortunes. Home construction, property values, business investment, and community philanthropy plunged downward at rates not seen since the Depression. Unemployment rates […]