Brendv7

I have no dog in this fight. I am a transplant from the Northeast. My girlfriend is a transplant from the West Coast. We have multiple grad degrees and could have accepted jobs in other cities, but are in NC because of Charlotte. I would not have accepted this same job in Mooresville out of school and probably not even now. If you are trying to recruit top millennial tech talent from outside the state, the majority are not going to view being located in Mooresville as a plus.

I love this proposed project. Whenever I would walk by this dilapidated property when out on the rail trail I would imagine buying it and doing something similar to what is planned. Right now the rail trail experience is really lacking after New Bern and this will go a long way to connecting the active, dynamic stretch from Bland to New Bern to what is planned at Scaleybark and then to the brewery district. Now just need the area around Carson station to develop and the pedestrian bridge across 277 to get built.

Bringing WholeFoods Uptown was great and all, but I think this development could have been so much better. It looks good if you are standing on Stonewall, but other than that. . . Poor execution imo. Just so many different components that could have been tweaked to produce a better final product.

There is literally another ice cream place just down Camden.

I don’t know, at first I thought it was because of all the rain, but it seems like they’ve been pouring footings for almost a month now.

I love the idea of light rail, and I am enthusiastic about its potential, but I am skeptical about spending billions of dollars on it when the system we currently have, which is only one north-south line, seems to function so poorly. I am writing this while standing at a light rail station wishing I just walked after waiting for a late train that is already on an every 20 min schedule.

Run that again in a few hours, if you can go 15 miles in 19 mins during rush hour you are using a flying car.

Beyond scoring pedant points or some notion of defending Charlotte’s honor against some “unfair” study methodology, I don’t see how one can argue with the broader point that I’m making that counting private green space maintained by HOAs as public park space would yes inflate our score, but at the expense of letting the City off the hook from actually having to feel the pressure and follow through on it’s broken promises regarding greenways and park space (especially in low income areas that don’t have HOA maintained green space and are the first to get shafted by funding shortfalls in the greenway for instance).

I think they are evaluating closeness to a public park. Not closeness to privately maintained green space that the public may be denied access to. I don’t see why this distinction is hard to grasp. If BOA and Wells created their own bus system just for their employees like the tech companies did, you don’t get to count that as public transportation. It just illustrates the degradation of the idea of a community and that services and benefits should be enjoyed by the public, not little suburban enclaves.

If it is not public, then why would it be counted? If a bunch of families from West Charlotte showed up to an HOA maintained green space in South Charlotte, how long until Barbara and Janet are calling the police? If the public at large can’t use it and it is being paid for by a private entity who can limit access to it, it’s not a public park. Good for the people who live there no doubt, but it’s not the same.

Not sure I would knock the methodology for not including parks maintained by HOAs. They aren’t public and doing so would let the city/county off the hook. A healthy city should have park space that all residents can easily access and utilize, not just the suburbanites.

I enjoy urbanization and density for Southend, but I hope it’s done well. Things can easily veer into the area being the bland generic cousin of uptown.

5 hours a week of hw? Is that typical for UNCC? Sounds like a breeze.

I am usually surprised at the lack of police presence. I live in Southend and they occasionally hang out in the lot across from All American and cruise around at night, but not as much as uptown and certainly lack the private security of uptown.

Even if the current model fails, it was worthwhile to introduce to how many people the possibility and potential for non auto based transit in central or more urban areas, and also because it forced cities to grapple with questions like how much planning should be exclusively auto focused.

I wish we could get together all the “police are terrorists” people along with all the “police are warriors whose boots should be licked” people and put them on an island where they can argue with each other and leave everyone else alone.

So is that a good sign for the office market?

What happens to this stadium and the Independence if Tepper brings MLS to Charlotte and they are to play in BofA Stadium? Does it change anything?

I’d prefer Southend retain some character and identity separate and apart as opposed to morphing into an extension of uptown. I don’t mind the Railyard and the like, but would prefer not to see ~20 floor buildings make their way too far south. There is still plenty of surface parking to be developed uptown.

Related, and also didn’t know where to post after it happened, but I was at UNC Chapel Hill a couple weeks ago interviewing candidates from one of their grad schools for positions in Charlotte, and it is standard for us to explore what is behind their interest in a move to Charlotte as opposed to staying in the triangle area. I was surprised how many of these millennial students said something along the lines of wanting to live somewhere that felt bigger and more like a real city and all that goes with it. For all we hear about the growth of the triangle, I think it is still more of a sprawling type of growth and they lack the NFL, NBA, big city skyline and uptown, and so on. It made me reconsider some of my thoughts on how I prioritize projects or developments that bring that intangible wow factor that can put a city over the top in someone’s mind compared to a peer.

I am a public transportation supporter, but CATS is an example of the institutional incompetence that people particularly to the right of the political spectrum are skeptical of when it comes to questions like “should we vote to increase taxes or borrow money to let CATS get even bigger.” It is pathetic. Do they not pay enough to attract competent staff? Is there no accountability? Bad culture?

I was always told that with steel you could have longer spans between columns and this enabled a more open office layout and bigger offices.

I wish, but it never seems to happen like this. I think logistically it would be a challenge to close and then reopen, but the bigger issue is that I bet the rent would be prohibitively expensive and/or the new owner would be more worried about keeping office tenants happy and not see a diner as a selling point.

I like Winston-Salem and think it punches above its weight as a small city.

I am having trouble visualizing where these are going. There are a couple old ones, but the houses in the block bound by kenilworth, pierce, waverly, and Romany are pretty nice and I wouldn’t have expected a bunch of them to sell to a developer.