BJKM

Update from my perch

The Ballantyne skyline as seen from Uptown.

Update from today :)

That’s the floor I work on. Someone shot a bullet from the street into a few windows. Thankfully it was the weekend and no one was here. It’s been months so idk why it hasn’t been replaced yet. They’re using the same windows in all the buildings in LU but I assume it’s an insurance hangup.

Goodnight south end!

We can count this as officially vertical right??

Different point of view today. Top of the Honeywell garage to be exact.

Ok I hear you about the other reasons but as someone who used to teach the classes taught at that particular school I can promise you their needs are low as far as space is concerned. Have you ever been in their current building? It is OLD as dirt. They’re not performing surgery. They learn a very basic intro to the medical world that at best qualifies them to be a CNA. The lab equipment uses regular outlets and all of their content is on their laptops. There is no need for anything other than normal ventilation as those classes are taught at other schools as well. Arguably it would be the safest school in CMS given the difficulty to access in a tower. Take south Meck as an example. Multiple entry points across 13 buildings. Very hard to secure. Most of those kids at Hawthorne do not do athletics and if they do, they do it at their home schools or in private leagues. I agree that we need to think outside the box for building repurposing though. I will say CMS typically likes to own their buildings so that’s another hiccup but I would just end with a changing world requires a change in thought. Just my 2 cents.

These buildings are rising fast.

Crane going up

South End rising today

Apologies for the hyper filtration. These windows are really hard to take pictures through.

@tozmervoMostly because my info is 2nd hand and I was more trying to provide context for how/why the Y spends the money the way they do since I had an inside man so to speak. The Y is still heavily influenced by dogma despite their inclusivity efforts and the irony that the Dowd is basically a gay bathhouse. I fully admit this comes from me just hearing my husband complain and my own participation in some of their planning meetings. My husband did work on their DEI team so he had access to more insight from leadership as well. The director of CE I am referring to no longer works there and the anti pride board member is associated with Coca Cola Consolidated. His pushback was brought up a lot at DEI planning meetings.

My husband worked for the Charlotte area ymca group for about 6 years in their marketing department up until about 4 months ago. They pay their employees 30-40% below market value (he doubled his salary doing the same job at his new company) but people like the c-suites make well into the 150-500k mark. People also are less inclined to pay $70 a month for a gym when there are cheaper options. Yes their whole thing is “more than a gym” and there are a lot of benefits to membership, but it can be pretty pricey long term. Anyway all of that to say they struggle to attract talent because of their low pay and they have high overhead costs. What projects get allocated money is determined A LOT by WHO donated to them and what their wishlist includes. Johnston was actually on the decline before covid (ironically a lot of people that live in that area now can no longer afford it) and yes Covid saw the clt Y lose about 40,000 members across 19 branches. They are close to being back to their original count but my husband was furloughed for 2 months in 2020 with 12 people on his team laid off permanently. They still rely heavily on donations from some big names around Charlotte to keep them operating and so because of this, they prioritize the wishes of those donors. In the Ballantyne case, they are trying to attract members back because of a new Y in Indian Trail/Land that took a lot of SC members. That Y is not part of the Charlotte group and they lost a couple hundred members there alone. I know that they were looking forward to the Johnston sale because it would save money and they could prioritize other branches but who knows now. As another example, the y doesn’t participate in the pride festival (even though many Ys in the area do) because of the pushback from a big multimillion dollar donor and board member. He threatened to pull all of his future donations if he heard about them having a booth or being in the parade. He’s best friends with the “Director of Christian Emphasis” (Another 6 figure job) which is not really surprising.