Annexation policy is all about $. This is Knoxville TN overlaid on Knox County. That weird appendage in the Southwest? It’s a high end shopping complex.
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Yeah the metro populations seemed a little sus to me. It looks like Charlotte’s 1950 (and 1960) MSA figures only included Mecklenburg County, which seems strange since Gaston County right next door already had 111k residents in 1950. If you added that, Cabarrus (64k), Iredell (56k), Lincoln (27k) Union (42k), and Lancaster (37k) and York (71k) from SC, the Charlotte region would have been around 605k. But I don’t think there was nearly as much commuting between Charlotte and the surrounding counties back then, as the road network was pretty sparse and there was very little between cities.
One city I always wonder about is Salisbury, which is the oldest existing city in the western half of NC. It was established in 1753 when Rowan County extended all the way to the Mississippi River. It was about the same size as Charlotte in the mid-1850s, and satellite view shows an impressively large grid for a city of its current size. Charlotte began outpacing it towards the late 1800s and pulled away in the early 1900s, but Salisbury kept growing consistently until WW2, when it fell into a decades-long slumber (only about 3k residents added between 1950 and 1990). Despite that, the best soda ever made (Cheerwine) was created there, as was Food Lion and Rack Room Shoes. I read somewhere that so many Salisbury residents bought Food Lion stock early on in its history, that when Food Lion hit its stride, its stock rose high enough to create more millionaires per capita in Salisbury than anywhere else in the US for a short period.
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Some info on the city council meeting in Charlotte about Dave Tepper’s newest project (read: attempt to get regular people to donate him money) here
Man…say what you will about our city council but I am glad they wouldn’t blindly approve $600 million in public funds to a shady billionaire for his stadium upgrades. Upgrades that don’t even seem to improve the facility that much. And without public comment until the day of the vote.
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And it’s probably producing more $$ in long term liabilities than $$ in tax revenue per acre, given how far horizontally it sprawls from the core of the city, and all the associated linear footage of road, pipe, and city services.
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I feel like we’re not getting much for our money. The existing BofA Stadium has (I think) a nice classic appearance that for the most part has aged reasonably well. Adding a bunch of screens everywhere and replacing graceful curves with right angles everywhere will not look good in a decade or so, and the price seems excessively steep for mostly cosmetic changes.
To be fair to the city, its portion is coming from the tourism fund which has to be used on tourist-related things, and currently there aren’t a lot of other things that are needed that would fall under that umbrella. Maybe a larger hotel for the convention center at some point, but that’s about it. Unfortunately, infrastructure and transit projects cannot be funded by the tourism tax.
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Yeah I think that’s where my major gripe comes from.
I’m a panthers fan, but will this change my gameday experience at all? Probably not. Feels like a ton of money to get some glass outside, a couple large screens, and a 500 level club that doesn’t make sense.
My experience would be made 100x better by doing nothing to the stadium except adding a roof. Make it possible to go to games in September. Happy for them to use allocated money to improve the stadium, but this feels like making it look better and not actually function better.
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The only Panthers game I’ve been to was at BOA for the home opener the season after we went to the Superbowl. Packed house, Cam Newton doing laps around the field getting the whole stadium HYPE AF, and one of the few wins of that season (good god I miss the 2015 Cam Newton Panthers 
) - aside from that, the game was MISERABLE in the seats we had, as we were BAKING in the sun for essentially the entire time. I’m talking BUCKETS OF SWEAT pouring down my shirt. A roof or ANY sort of shade structure covering some of the seats would be the most sensible change.
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I will die on the hill that legislators in Raleigh hate Charlotte far more than any of the other NC cities.
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Well, it’s THE “Big City” in NC. Of course they hate it 
Politics in this sate are so eff’ed up. Country bumpkin state legistlatures passing laws against cities to block things like transit and other progressive ideas, for no other reason then to assert their power and to "own the libs’ in the big cities.
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Sheesh that is awful. Hopefully they plan to do it anyways but exclude Mooresville.
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Well. Ideally Mooresville would remember the Pineville situation in the 2000s, and be willing to play ball. The tracks are already there so it’s not like a brand new rail line would have be laid through downtown.
(For those unfamiliar, when the Blue Line light rail was being planned, it was originally designed to terminate in Pineville, which is about two miles south of where the southern terminus sits today. Pineville freaked out about all the “crime” and “issues” that the light rail would bring to its town…CATS rightly played hardball and eliminated the final ~2 miles from the southern end of the line, and now Pineville wants the Blue Line extended into its town limits which will probably never happen)
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Republicans are the cause of all of North Carolina’s problems.
The unfortunate thing is after getting demolished in 2010, the Democrats lost all motivation to show any fight or ruthlessness whatsoever. The lack of leadership or long term vision coupled with bad candidates, bad campaigns, and abysmal luck with timing (e.g. Blue Waves in non-Senate years, COVID in a redistricting year) hasn’t helped.
If someone goes “but Anderson Clayton”, what happens if the effects of the last week lead to the Democrats getting demolished in November?
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I’m not sure this is the board for political hot takes that aren’t strictly related to urban form and function.
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Republicans are anti-urbanism and the NC GOP is openly hostile to cities.
If they could move the capital to some town in a red county, they would.
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It’s not as much of a poison pill as it sounds like. The planned route only goes about two miles over the county line; the only impacted municipalities outside Mecklenburg are unincorporated Iredell County and Mooresville, and it sounds like they might give permission. The station proposed in Mooresville is in a suburban area. Downtown Davidson is firmly within Mecklenburg County.
There are a bunch of things that transit agencies like to put at the end of a rail line, like train storage, crew rest areas, and park-and-ride facilities, which don’t really fit in at Davidson but also don’t have to be right at the end of the line.
The city of Charlotte running CATS service into Iredell County makes it unusual among transit agencies, most of which are separate agencies running under multi-county jurisdiction.
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The world isn’t black and white. The founder of strong towns is more Republican than Dem. Turns out property rights to build densely on your land if you choose is a libertarian/fiscally conservative ideal
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Something things that are motivated by profit overlap with things that are motivated by progressive ideals. …and vice versa.
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And sometimes (usually) Dem-property owners are NIMBY (profit-driven)
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That falls under the vice versa I mentioned.
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