Sitting down with Charlotte’s new(ish) chief planner
Monica Holmes, a Charlotte native, on how the city's planning department will navigate its next phase of growth
The following article appeared in the Feb. 18, 2026, edition of Real Estate Whispers, a weekly newsletter with smart and original news about Charlotte real estate and development. It is part of The Charlotte Ledger, which offers free and paid subscription plans. More info here.
Q&A: Charlotte’s planning chief talks the UDO, TOD and how she’s thinking about the city’s growth
by Ashley Fahey
Monica Holmes has technically been director of the city’s Planning, Design & Development department for about a year now, but her job title is no longer “interim” as of last week.
Holmes’ personal story has carried her across Charlotte. She was born in 1980 at Carolinas Medical Center in what’s now called midtown, then spent her childhood in Dilworth and the Raintree neighborhood in south Charlotte. Her mom is from Villa Heights and went to Garinger High School, her dad grew up in Myers Park and attended Charlotte Catholic. She’s spent most of her adulthood living in NoDa.
Being the planning director for her hometown amid so much change, and a city where so few true local natives seem to exist, is important to Holmes.
“It’s exciting for me personally. I hope it’s exciting for other people in the city, that they know that I care deeply about this place and the success of this place. I take it very seriously,” she said.
If I can be unserious for a moment, I wondered if Holmes was Charlotte’s first millennial planning director, but alas, she’s on the younger end of Generation X and identifies accordingly. (She admitted that she could be considered an Xennial. She did know what Napster was — which, as the Ledger resident millennial, puts her in good company.)
Whispers spoke to Holmes this week about her role and goals as Charlotte’s planning director. Here are excerpts from that conversation, edited for clarity and brevity:
Q. What are you most excited about in this role?
I’m most excited about, with the mobility referendum passing, how we link together infrastructure and our growth and development. It’s just an amazing opportunity to be able to have this influx of infrastructure, whether that be transit, new transportation investments, new bus routes, and how we link together the infrastructure investment with land use and with our growth as a city.
Q. Especially given that the city has some precedent with Transit Oriented Development (TOD), what would you as a department maybe want to do differently? Are there lessons learned from the Blue Line, from the streetcar?
It’ll be an upcoming conversation for [Charlotte City] Council and for the next year ahead of us. But we’re slowly transitioning from transit-oriented development, where you think about the private investment, to what we’re calling transit-oriented communities, which is really how does transit add value to existing communities, existing residents and businesses?
And then what policies and programs need to be in place to support those communities once a transit investment is announced and then once it occurs? We’ll be doing station area planning for all of our transit system, having those conversations around what transit means for the community and how the community develops.