There is Austin. There is Seattle. There is Denver. And now there is Charlotte. It is America’s new hot spot and darling city. The place to be. The new #1. The only such city in the South. The challenge now: stay on top and grow the lead. Here are three ways to get it done.
By Alex Díaz, Business Development
alexdiazeco@integra.design
The excitement is palpable. Inescapable. Thrilling, even. For all the growth Charlotte has had since 1990, more than doubling its metro-area population to 2.5 million, North Carolina’s largest city will welcome another million by 2035, according to U.S. Census projections. That’s just two decades from now.
The pace during the last two decades (keep in mind, that takes us back only to 1996) moved the city’s planners and developers to focus on building a full Uptown (downtown) from virtually nothing to accommodate its Fortune 500 corporations and all the service companies coming in, create mass transit and light-rail lines from scratch, expand the Douglas International Airport (now the 6th busiest in all the world) and build new housing like mad.
That was the rule book then, really up until this year. The one for the next 20 years and beyond is being written…now, today, as we speak.
The Charlotte Chamber of Commerce, fresh off an Annual Meeting last week that featured a major strategy pivot, will soon launch a new Real Estate Council to “give thought to and guide future development across the city,” Council coordinator and Chamber SVP Kris Kellogg told us at a recent meeting, where we agreed to join the group as part of