Always courting growth

Good morning! Today is Tuesday, September 8, 2026. You’re reading The Charlotte Ledger, an e-newsletter with local business-y news and insights for Charlotte, N.C.

by Mary Newsom

Since Charlotte’s first days as a hamlet, its residents courted growth. They named the place for the queen of England, angling to win royal favor. They built a courthouse in hopes of being named the county seat, which worked. Folks in town still repeat George Washington’s dismissal of their hamlet as “a trifling place.” How dare he?

That growth zeal did not fade. An early 20th-century Chamber of Commerce leader known as “Booster” Kuester for his vigorous promotion even formed a Watch Charlotte Grow drum and bugle corps and handed out red-and-white Watch Charlotte Grow buttons. 

He’d be delighted to know Charlotte is now, with a population of 965,000 as of 2025, unquestionably big.

But this place has had an uneasy time reconciling “big” with “big city.” Charlotte folks wanted to be big and get noticed, but not to act like a big city. Especially not like Atlanta.

Consider this 1975 remark from then-Mayor Ben Douglas Jr.: “I want Charlotte to be a real, honest-to-goodness city — not like Atlanta — but with planned growth.” 

We’re big and proud of it. We can’t be dismissed as “trifling.” But with the growth have come missed opportunities to help the city improve in ways beyond just larger population numbers. Charlotte — meaning the city, not the region — has not yet achieved the look, feel and functionality of a big city.

I came to Charlotte in 1978, and I’ve pondered all this for years. My mental shorthand is “Why We Can’t Have Nice Things,” but that’s not really accurate. Charlotte has many nice things: a lively downtown, a light rail line, trendy areas reborn from fading industrial buildings, pro sports teams, restaurants with cuisine from around the world, parks and greenways, and locally owned coffee shops.

But the city has sometimes struggled to do things you’d think would already be done.

This series looks at some historic, cultural and structural realities making it hard to accomplish things this now-much-bigger city needs. 

First, a disclaimer. Obviously, Charlotte suffers with ills including poverty, racial injustice, crime and sometimes cringe-inducing officials. But those things aren’t unique to Charlotte. 

This series focuses on Charlotte-specific qualities: A peculiarly confusing government structure. How so few neighborhood streets seem to get you anywhere. A scarcity of parks residents don’t have to drive to. The outsize role business has played on our civic stage.

Charlotte’s Amtrak station, about 2 miles from uptown, is on an uninviting stretch of North Tryon Street dotted with knee-high weeds and grass. The passenger depot was built in 1962 by what was then the Southern Railway. 

Its mustard-colored terrazzo floors are dull with age. Restrooms are locked to all but ticketed customers; a peek into the handicapped-accessible one reveals a large, mysterious stain on the floor. Hungry? Visit two vending machines.

Fast-forward from 1962 to 2026 in downtown Raleigh. The eight-year-old Raleigh Union Station is stylish and functional, sleekly designed with plenty of daylight. Its deli serves hot breakfast and lunch, plus takeout. The city of Raleigh manages the spacious lobby, which is rented out dozens of times a year for events: weddings, awards ceremonies, galas and fundraisers. It’s also used for community events such as concerts, movie nights, even a Santa Workshop.

Why does Raleigh get a gorgeous train station with sparkling restrooms open to the public and an upstairs patio with a view, while Charlotte makes do? 

For the past 25 years, Charlotte officials have planned a new passenger rail station uptown, a transit hub for the streetcar, a commuter rail to Davidson, future light rail lines and a Greyhound station now on an adjacent site. In 2005, transit officials were saying the new station could open by 2009. The city owns the land. The state four years ago finished preparing tracks and building platforms. Despite some bad luck at timing, the city could have moved forward.

Why not? The big hold-up has been an impulse that would make Booster Kuester proud.

City leaders and uptown advocates have a grand vision: a large, mixed-use project, a public-private partnership development that includes a new train station. They contracted six years ago with a development partnership.

No train station or other development has broken ground.

To be sure, some bad timing has caused problems since those optimistic days of 2005. The 2008 recession amputated transit sales tax revenue, squelching most transit expansion here for a decade. An anti-transit Republican majority took power in the state General Assembly. Then came the 2020 pandemic and remote work, which chilled the market for new offices uptown. 

The mixed-use development, for now at least, is not visibly moving forward. The city this year extended that 2020 contract.

Why not just build a public train station, as Raleigh did? Its total cost, packaging city, state and federal funding, was approximately $111M. Why turn the fate of a long-needed public amenity over to a private business?

You must not be from around here. Charlotte is a business town. “A Good Place to Make Money” was even a city slogan in the 1970s. Growth and development, and developers, for years have received the red-carpet treatment.

Bill McCoy, longtime director of the Charlotte Urban Institute at UNC Charlotte, now retired, said developers in Charlotte have had what he termed “extraordinary power.” Developers have clout in many places, he said, but when you compare those places to Charlotte, “there isn’t a counterpart.”

One uptown Charlotte official who’s been involved in the station discussions and didn’t want to be named said the idea of simply building a train station that wasn’t part of a large development was not discussed in recent years. And to be fair, a large, mixed-use development would add substantially to the tax base, unlike a publicly owned train station.

Another delay: The Charlotte Area Transit System is being merged into the new Metropolitan Public Transportation Authority after the 2025 passage of the extra one-cent sales tax for transit and roads. It’s an ongoing process, CATS said. But when finalized, the city’s 20 acres at the station site will belong to the MPTA.

MPTA chair David Howard prefers waiting on a large project. Earlier this year, he told WFAE/The Ledger that he would advocate for a big mixed-use development. “A standalone building (station) is the fastest,” he said, “but I don’t know if that’s what we want in uptown Charlotte.”

Meanwhile, up on North Tryon Street on a recent afternoon, passengers had just arrived from one of the five daily Raleigh-Charlotte trains. It wasn’t Grand Central Station. The ambience was not that of Raleigh’s sleek new station, with black-eyed Susans blooming on its green roof, its spotless restrooms and the Triangle’s regional bus system next door.

Workers at the Raleigh station seemed to think Charlotte was building its new train station. I felt bad having to correct them.

Why the zeal to be big? Theories abound but generally converge on: “We’ve always been that way.”

W.J. Cash, the late Charlotte journalist who wrote the oft-quoted “The Mind of the South,” theorized that the city’s early white, Calvinist Presbyterian settlers “looked upon industry and the getting of goods as pious exercises peculiarly pleasing to Heaven.”  

But if we’re so big now, why don’t we look like other big cities? If you list standard amenities you’d expect in a big city, you can check many of them off: skyscrapers, pro sports teams, a ​convention center, ​freeways and so on.​ Still, most of the place feels ... suburban. Neighborhoods are "developments" behind fancy entrance signs. Shops aren't next door but a few miles away by car in shopping centers overlooking large parking lots.

Timing matters. Charlotte is not simply a newcomer among cities, but a New South city. 

The 19th-century New South movement, trying to distance itself from the Old South of slavery and perceived backwardness, celebrated growth — but not big cities. “The New South cities were built by country-born entrepreneurs who knew little about urbanism and were skeptical of its value,” architectural historian Mary Alice Dixon Hinson wrote in a 1981 Observer article. For decades, Charlotte has reflected that skepticism.

Charlotte growth sped up in the mid-20th century. In 1940, its population was barely 100,000. As an Observer writer wrote in 1979, when Charlotte was about 400,000, “Although residents perceive Charlotte as a small Atlanta, the outside world sees Charlotte as a big Spartanburg.” Ouch.

Automobiles started to rule cities. Suburbia flourished. New neighborhoods were restrictive single-family areas with large lawns, long blocks and disconnected streets. Charlotte became a place of cars, highways and distance.

But urban patterns, in contrast to suburban ones, evolved as a way to manage when large numbers of people live, work and travel alongside large numbers of other people. One thing that makes it all work is that things and people are close to other things and people. Yet a huge chunk of Charlotte’s physical footprint is suburban, not urban. That large-scale pattern creates large-scale problems.

Those suburban streets, winding and disconnected, add even more traffic to already clogged streets and roads. They make building any alternative, such as a mass transit system, significantly more expensive and sometimes not even feasible. They’re tough to retrofit for walkability. They even raise the cost of providing public safety services.

As Monica Holmes, Charlotte’s planning director, said: “We’ve spent 20 years trying to right the wrongs of the past.” 


Those wrongs had many causes, and elevating business needs over other needs is not new here. As longtime Observer columnist Kays Gary wrote in 1968: “The truth is that Charlotte power is business, first and last. That’s the bone and blood and altar.”

A few decades after he wrote that, efforts to fix a few “wrongs of the past” were thwarted by the area’s robust real estate development lobby, with help, in some cases, from neighborhood activists.

A connected network of neighborhood streets can help disperse some traffic congestion, but in the mid-1980s, during a rewrite of the decades-old city-county zoning and subdivision ordinances, planners pushed for more street connections. Residents resisted.

McCoy, the retired Charlotte Urban Institute director, served six years on the city-county planning commission in the 1980s. “The topic of connectivity came up frequently, for obvious reasons,” he said. “Developers were totally opposed to providing connections from one subdivision to another, and they particularly opposed in the strongest fashion building streets that crossed creeks, which, as you know, we have an abundance of.”

Or as former county transportation planner Bill Coxe remembered, when requiring some creek crossings was mentioned: “Suddenly all the developers became environmentalists.”

Neighborhood activists also opposed street connections. “The people don’t like cut-through streets anyway,” McCoy said. “That was kind of a dead duck.”

So here we are. The city is still attracting development and people from around the world. A new zoning code in the past few years is, as Holmes said, trying to right past wrongs. It requires more street connections in new developments. In most of those places, developers must either spare more trees or pay into a city initiative to save and restore the city’s dwindling tree canopy. The county is spending more money on its park system.


Those initiatives are new and well-intended, but their effectiveness has to be measured over time.

Meanwhile, we’ll keep watching Charlotte grow. Booster Kuester’s zeal lives on.

Coming tomorrow: Analyzing Charlotte’s traffic issues, confounding road network and infrastructure challenges

➡️ What do you think about Charlotte’s growth? Drop us a line and let us know.