PLANNING

How can the city of Charlotte boost both the value of its neighborhoods and their quality of life? What national trends should developers, planners and neighborhood residents be aware of? How do different development patterns affect the need for city spending? Those questions and more will be part of the discussion at a public lecture […]

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – On the day much of the Boston area stayed indoors for the manhunt of a Boston marathon bombing suspect, I was in town for a conference on “The Resilient City.” Like almost everyone in Boston, most conference attendees obeyed the April 19 “stay indoors” order. And the whole bizarre experience – seeing […]

If you know who Jane Jacobs was and understand the role her work has played in revolutionizing thinking about cities and planning since the 1960s, you’ll understand why her birthday is a time to encourage city-dwellers to get to know their own places a little better. For example, she wrote that new ideas must use […]

Charlotte ranks near the bottom in a recent study of access to jobs via automobiles in the top 51 U.S. metro areas. Raleigh ranks even lower. The study, Access Across America, by David Levinson, the R.P. Braun/CTS Chair in Transportation Engineering at the University of Minnesota, ranks the Charlotte metro area No. 40, with the […]

Understanding the wealth of publicly available data can be both exciting and overwhelming. But plenty of people are eager to try. More than 150 neighborhood organizers, nonprofit leaders, local government staff, academics, and interested citizens gathered Tuesday at UNC Charlotte’s Center City building for the inaugural Charlotte Data Day. Hosted by the UNC Charlotte Urban […]

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 […]

The N.C. House is scheduled to vote this afternoon on a bill, “Zoning/Design & Aesthetic Controls,” (House Bill 150) that has enthusiastic support from the state’s home-building industry but that gravely concerns planners around the state, as well as some local elected officials. (Update: The N.C. House on Tuesday passed the bill 94-22 on second […]

In recent years, progressive developers have made an important discovery. If they incorporate design features into their development proposals to make them look and function better, communities will allow them to build more product. But their investment can be fundamentally devalued if communities aren’t allowed to establish basic design standards to ensure a similar quality […]

The debate over “Zoning/Design & Aesthetic Controls,” (House Bill 150) concerns two basic issues: first, how much control we want government to have over our power of consumer choice, and second, whether we want government in North Carolina to function as its founding fathers intended. Let’s address the latter issue first. To understand why the […]

After hearing concerns about some of the new apartment construction in South End, the Charlotte Planning Department has hired a local urban design consultant to recommend possible changes to city zoning ordinances. With 11 South End multifamily projects under construction, Historic South End director Ted Boyd at a public presentation in January urged “raising the […]