I Visited the World Capital of Sprawl, and I Have Thoughts

out of all places, charlotte is essentially what got me into urbanism. it was the furthest place i had been by myself and the light rail was the first public transit i had used and it completely changed my mind on cities. it kind of goes to show how little urbanism there is for people to see here but also how important just the slightest bit of urbanism can be in changing peoples minds

As a Canadian, Charlotte is a weird city because it has zero international presence. It's so strange because it's a city you never heard anything about, despite it's quite large size. The average Canadian might have some lose but there conceptions of comparabily sized cities like San Diego, Austin, Detroit or Baltimore, but Charlotte is just a blank space honestly. I wonder if anyone else feels the same way, whether you are from the US or not.

It was great to meet you at the conference! I totally agree that even though Charlotte is sprawling there's a lot of good progress in the right direction for building better neighborhoods there.

I lived there for 35 years. In 1979, when I moved there for work, I said Charlotte was a sprawling mess. It is the L.A. of the South in so many ways. The reason it sprawls is, everyone with a little bit of money wants a neighborhood with cul-de-sacs and half-acre or larger lots. NC is the land of the American Dream for a lot of people. Charlotte is a modern American boom town that EXPLODED in population from the mid-1960s until now. We were there today, to visit my wife's elderly Mom, and traffic was gridlocked. What a surprise. But ALL of Piedmont NC is a giant sprawl. Even more sprawled than Metrolina (The correct name for Charlotte and all of the surrounding towns), is the Piedmont Triad of Greensboro, High Point, and Winston-Salem, with about a dozen small towns adjacent and in-between. It will fill in just like Charlotte did, over the next few decades. This is one of the most pro-business states in the nation, and it attracts people like flies to a picnic table. 20 years ago, people from NY would sell their little $500,000, 1500 square foot bungalows on Long Island and move to Lake Norman where they would build three times that much house for the same money, with a 3/4 acre lot. They didn't mind the 40-minute commute to uptown. But hey, getting ANYWHERE in Charlotte seems to take half an hour or more. I drove 12 miles to work every day in 25-30 minutes, and the same route home took 45-70 minutes. We are happy to have moved to the Piedmont Triad, where the roads are mostly empty, by comparison, and real estate is still semi-affordable.

This is one the best videos you've done recently! It was inspiring to see the good patches of urbanism in otherwise sprawling suburbia

As a Charlottean, it's surprising to see us turn up here! Charlotte is a really young city, it built up extremely quickly in the 90s and 2000s, and the city really wasn't prepared for that. CATS is chronically underfunded and has to build out its infrastructure itself (Norfolk Southern refuses to share lines), so setting up the networking to reduce car dependency is slow going. Those neighborhoods like NoDa and South End that ARE walkable are a really deliberate effort by the city and community to try and start creating an urban core and to prove out the system for skeptical NIMBYs. Raleigh also hamstrings us from time to time, like with the Cintra controlled toll-lanes on 77, or the byzantine CATS management structure required due to state anti-union policies. The Charlotte-State Gov't relations really are awful, despite the fact that it's unambiguously the crown jewel of the Carolinas. We're trying our best to catch up with the massive economic and population boom of the last few decades, but that's the big thing, we're trying. There's a chance to build something really special here, and turn this sprawl into a home, we just need time to put that into action.

I walked all over Charlotte for a year. Some neighborhoods have huge oak trees lining the streets. Beautiful and unique.

During college, I dated a girl from a distant suburb of Charlotte. Then after college, I lived in Asheville and had to go to Charlotte a few times for work or networking. What's so crazy about watching this video is that every single time I went, everyone always took me to the locations depicted in this video. I have been to each place exactly once and was also pleasantly surprised each time. Whether there for work, play, or something in between, I was brought to a place with urban amenities by people who like Charlotte for the space.

I think the worst part of this variety of development, is that despite living in the Charlotte metro area (Matthews), I've experienced about as much of the actual urban areas of the city in the last decade as you probably did just being here for a little bit. Those areas are nice to be in, but from the outside looking in they feel like little walled pockets of unattainable life. I've lived with family for over 30 years, I used to fire rockets off in a field that the 485 ring road goes through now, and while they've started building some denser housing out my way now, I'm no closer to affording moving into my own space now than I was when dense housing was an afterthought. I know friends who have lived in the Plaza area for going on 10 years now who've had roommates the whole time. If you're not one of the bankers here, a lot of the urban elements of Charlotte are an ethereal thing you experience on the fringes of your mostly strode centered day to day.

I moved to Charlotte this year and I could've sworn you were stalking me. Lots of those pictures are of places I bike and walk constantly. It's definitely a work in progress, but when your baseline is suburbs, even Charlotte is a paradise of walkability.

I lived in Charlotte for seven years, and while it was a nice enough place to live, I ended up returning to dense, walkable New England because I missed public transit. Individual neighborhoods in Charlotte are fairly walkable, but driving between them is extremely hazardous. And as other people mentioned, it was strange living in a place that had zero identity on the national or global stage. Many people thought for years that I lived in Charleston, SC because they forgot that Charlotte even existed.

Im a charlotean, a cool project you didn’t talk much about was the greenway which makes my favorite mode of transportation (biking) a lot more enjoyable and extends my range. Still got a longggg way to go but I think all the new development is going in a decent direction.

A video about red lining and the way it affects cities would be really interesting. The city I grew up in was really affected by it. Part of what made my neighborhood great was that no one cared enough about it to force it to be only single family housing so we had multifamily housing and a bunch of restaurants, a library, corner store and other small businesses. But on the flip side there was a lot less investment there compared to other areas. If you look at the performance of elementary schools there's still huge disparities that fall on almost the same barriers as the original red line maps. I would love to see more investment in this area but not as the loss of the character of the neighborhood.

I've actually found Charlotte not that terrible to get around. It's far from ideal, but I didn't find it as challenging as say places like the greater Phoenix area.

As someone who grew up in Mecklenburg county it's worth noting that what is circled as "Charlotte" is a bunch of smaller towns and communities. My town unincorporated to get a highway built without having to pay for it then reincorporated when it looked like Charlotte was about to take over. It's going to be hard to get the metro area to plan transit together when so many of those communities try so hard to be "not Charlotte".

As someone who's lived in Charlotte most of my life, I was always unhappy with the city, but I could never put words to why. After visiting Boston for a week back in March of this year and seeing just how much more developed transit and walkability was, not just in the heart of the city, but far out into the outskirts, it absolutely blew my mind, and really helped me to understand what I'd been missing and wanting for all this time. I really do hope that this city can improve, but right now even the proposed improvements never seem to make any progress (I've lived here 13 years and that whole time they've continuously said the Light rail line from Matthews to Huntersville would be done in five years - afaik they still haven't even broken ground.) Keep making great content- Cheers!

Longtime Charlotte resident and ‘urbanist’. My biggest frustration with charlottes great nodes is just that they’re all very upscale. It is still very much a city where good urban living is a luxury, and while the growth around downtown is good it has unfortunately pushed a ton of longtime residents out and concentrated poverty in inner ring subburbs around the city. South end for example has become mind boggling expensive in the last 10 years or so. If the city ever gets around to expanding the light rail hopefully enough walkable units can be built that they become an option for working class people in Charlotte rather than a luxury.

I am really impressed by that "rail trail" and the development around it – this really serves as a very long pedestrian area and is something you don't see every day, even in Europe.

Maybe I'm biased because I'm from the sunbelt but it was really encouraging and hopeful to see what these sprawling cities are doing WELL, vs. just dunking all over what they do wrong, which most of us who live here are already well aware of. Thanks for the video!

Charlotte may be sprawling but it really is a beautiful city and it's definitely improving. It's has some bright spots like the developing South End and Uptown.