Charlotte has all of the things you’d associate with a big city. Skyscrapers. Pro sports. The arts. A thriving culinary scene. Almost a million people, and lots of traffic, of course. But does Charlotte actually act like a big city? It’s a question longtime resident and journalist Mary Newsom examines in a four-part series published this week in the Charlotte Ledger. She joined WFAE’s Marshall Terry to talk about it for our segment, BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: You start off by saying Charlotte lacks a big-city mindset. What do you mean by that?
Mary Newsom: For years and years, a lot of people here, especially long-timers, didn’t want to be a big city. They didn’t want to be like Atlanta or, heaven forbid, New York City. There’s too many people there, too much traffic. But they didn’t really connect that, I think, with the fact that we need to grow. Growth is good for business. We want to have our businesses healthy. But there are also some government rules and structures that for decades created basically suburbia in Charlotte. You couldn’t build in an urban form because ordinances did not allow it. Suburbia is drive everywhere, distances, things are far apart — and that is not the way cities function. Cities function because things are close together…