Charlotte, it’s time to grow up

North Carolina's largest city doesn’t believe in itself the way it used to. Here's how we start to fix that, the right way.

By now, you’ve probably heard that I didn’t get picked for the Charlotte City Council seat. That’s OK — I didn’t expect to. The guy who got the appointment, Edwin Peacock, is an old friend of mine, a good man, and he’ll do a great job.

The process itself was … eye-opening, to say the least, but it’s a privilege to have taken part.

During media interviews that week, I kept getting asked about civic pride. In my application for the seat, I wrote that one of my goals in office would be to reinvigorate it. Charlotte has long been an aspirational city, I wrote, but has lost its momentum. The natural questions followed: Why? And how?

Answering those properly doesn’t fit well in a TV soundbite. So let’s spell it out here.

Not a trifling place

I first came to Charlotte in 2009, the tail end of an era. The Duke Energy Center was still under construction, Ken Lewis was still CEO of Bank of America and The Charlotte Observer was still a dominant institution.

Our group of cub reporters was steeped in the culture created by people like Doug Smith, the legendary business columnist who chronicled the city’s development for a generation. His most famous column was talked about in the newsroom constantly: In 1993, Smith tried to buy a candy bar on Tryon Street after 5:30 p.m., a test of the city’s downtown vibrance. He couldn’t.

The column touched off a wave of city-building, starting with a makeshift street scene for the 1994 Final Four in Charlotte.

It wasn’t a new dynamic. Ever since George Washington described Charlotte as a “trifling place” during a tour of the new country’s Southern states, the city had been desperate to prove him wrong. In fact, the Observer itself was founded specifically to promote the region’s growth out of the ashes of the Civil War.

That sort of attitude gave us the Panthers. It made us a banking powerhouse. It gave us civic projects and stadium deals and arts initiatives and the light rail.

In the post-Great Recession recovery, the civic focus was all about big events. Anything to get eye balls and recognition was fair game.

The City Council pondered how to land a Super Bowl. We went after the NCAA tournament, the CIAA tournament, and Major League Baseball. There was a public discussion over how to get people to stop using “, N.C.” after the city name. Heck, Charlotte even celebrated hosting an NRA convention (can you imagine that happening today?).

That era culminated in the push for the 2012 Democratic National Convention. The city’s civic bigwigs all joined together in the bid, with then-Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers even pledging $10 million of the company’s money to sweeten the pot.

“How do you put a value on the positive exposure?” then-Charlotte Chamber president Bob Morgan reflected afterward to the Observer.

Charlotte won, of course, and the convention went off largely without a hitch. Over at the paper, it was all hands on deck for weeks. And when President Barack Obama departed Bank of America stadium after his acceptance speech, we all gathered in the newsroom for a celebratory champagne toast.

Going south

Once the Democrats left town, though, Charlotte could never summon the same spirit. Some of it was hangover, to be sure.

Mostly, though, it was due to a series of long-simmering shifts finally coming to a head — punctuated by a string of confidence-shaking events.

We’ll start with the headlines, since they’re easier to pin down.

Mayor Patrick Cannon was indicted on corruption charges in 2014, quickly entering a guilty plea and reporting to a federal pen. Soon after, Harvard researchers put out a report ranking Charlotte dead last for economic mobility — the likelihood that a child born in poverty would ever make it out.

Protestors filled the streets in summer 2016 after the police shooting death of Keith Lamont Scott, which was later ruled to be justified. Charlotte lost the 2017 NBA All-Star Game over House Bill 2, and in 2019, two UNC Charlotte students were killed in a mass shooting on campus.

All along the way, broader social trends reshaped the city as well. The big banks that once funded the city’s dreams either got gobbled up or became global in scope. New Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan hung his hat in Boston and commuted to New York City, where most of his top lieutenants resided. Wachovia, of course, got swallowed up by San Francisco’s Wells Fargo.

Like most newspapers, the Observer hemorrhaged talent and then bulldozed its Uptown office. People moved on or aged out. Long-time Charlotte Chamber CEO Bob Morgan decamped for South Carolina. Hugh McColl turned 80, then 85. Cam Newton busted up his shoulder.

The newcomers filling their seats were in a different mold. Young professionals flooded Charlotte by the hundreds each day. At first, this brought in an exciting crop of new restaurants and breweries, but it also meant that a growing percentage of the city’s population had little stake in the city as a whole. After a while, it’s hard to get excited about every new beige apartment complex.

Politically, the election of President Donald Trump in 2016 made it virtually impossible for a Republican to get elected within city limits and radicalized a large portion of the Democratic base. A county that helped vote its former mayor, Pat McCrory, into the governor’s mansion became deep blue. Decisions behind the dais became less about recruiting new businesses and more about resistance.

Before long, the far left took over the Democratic party primary. Moderate, constructive Democrats — people like Julie Eiselt, Larken Egleston, Pat Cotham — couldn’t win anymore. The politicians who survived cared much more about “equity” than prosperity. That made growth a zero-sum game instead of a rising tide.

The civic mood didn’t sour all at once, but in dribs and drabs over the decade following the DNC. The COVID lockdowns more or less put the final nail in the coffin. The closure of Price’s Chicken Coop was a spit on the grave.

Cities run on stories. They run on shared myths and common goals. For decades, Charlotte’s story was bold and confident: We’re a Southern city on the rise. We’re punching above our weight. Come help us build.

In the new era, the dominant narrative had become: Charlotte is broken. Charlotte is unequal. Charlotte has failed.

There’s a kernel of truth there, of course. But when you focus solely on what’s wrong, there’s no time left to build on what’s right.

Navel-gazing

One of the things I appreciate most about Charlotte is its endless self-reflection. From time to time, our literary minds look inward and try to sum up the tenor of the city. I devour every such piece.

Invariably, Charlotte is cast as a teenager. Back in 2012, a month before the DNC, Our State’s Jeremy Markovich¹ put it this way:

“Charlotte is a teenager about to take her next step in life, where she’s going to have to choose what she wants to be when she grows up. Remember that feeling you had when you finished high school? You could do anything. You could go anywhere. You could be whoever you wanted to be. … And right now, at this moment, at this point in history, that is Charlotte. We’re on the verge of something.”

You can argue it’s a bit too rosy — hey, it’s Our State — but it did capture the zeitgeist. After all, this was the era where we unironically shared DJ Complete’s anthem “I Love Charlotte” and then dabbed.

Contrast that with what’s written about the city now. Last month, my friend (and brilliant writer) Michael Graff used the launch of his new media brand, The Charlotte Optimist, to publish an update. While the name betrays his perspective, there’s still a palpable shift in tone.

“Over time the economic winds have attempted to blow Charlotte down. The gold rush braked. Textiles became undressed by trade. Banks went belly-up. Somehow we’ve never gone the way of the Rust Belt. Charlotte not only escaped despair all those times, but people here still say Charlotte feels like an awkward teen that doesn’t know what it wants to be when it grows up.

They mean it as a criticism but it’s a compliment: Charlotte still feels young and full of promise, even though she’s been through a string of economic development surgeries in two and a half centuries.”

While a little trite, the adolescent metaphor is a useful one. It tells a story. To Markovich, Charlotte was a teenager full of potential. To Graff, Charlotte is a promising but emotionally volatile young adult in something of a quarter-life crisis.

That’s not quite right. Charlotte is indeed still a teenager — an angsty, brooding one. We’re in the phase where we roll our eyes, yell at our parents, and mope about aimlessly. We’re the kind of kid who thinks her life is the most difficult ever lived. The kind of kid you just want to take by the shoulders and say, “Grow up!”

Perhaps this was inevitable. Pretty much every kid goes through this phase, and maybe all cities do, too. Eventually, though, it has to come to an end².

An adult city

It’s easy to be overly romantic about the past. I don’t want to come across that way. The old Charlotte establishment had its blind spots, and plenty of its decisions were driven by self-interest.

But it also had something we desperately lack today: a sense of purpose. Leaders in business, government, and media were aligned around big civic goals — and things got done.

“It’s not complicated,” McColl told former Observer reporter Jim Morrill (another local legend) for a 2023 Charlotte magazine piece. “We had a plan, and it was a shared vision. … We could really use a vision for this city.”

That mindset is what we’re missing.

We don’t need to go back to the pure booster spirit of Old Charlotte. To torture the metaphor a little more, that would make the city like the 5th grader who thinks he’s going to make the NBA. That attitude brought a lot of great things to the city, but it also papered over some real problems.

Today, though, the pendulum has swung way too far in the other direction. A mature city doesn’t indulge in self-flagellation or activist theater. It builds. And that requires competence, confidence, and clarity of mission — three things in short supply right now.

To be an adult means to be realistic and self-confident about your place in the world. An adult city knows its strengths. Charlotte isn’t New York or Chicago, and it never will be. We’re not as cool as Austin. Not as flashy as Nashville. But so what?

An adult city also has a direction and a purpose. We are a place where people can build a life. A city with good bones and better people. A city where we can acknowledge past mistakes without dismissing past successes. A city with the wisdom to say, “Maybe our parents did know something.”

We don’t need to be “world-class,” whatever that means. But we do need to be forward-thinking again.

It’s time to grow up, Charlotte. And when we do — we’ll be proud of who we’ve become.

Growing up

So, what does growing up look like? To bring things back to the original question: How do we reinvigorate civic pride?

Of course we should confront real problems — the breakdown of the family, the hollowing out of middle-class jobs, rising prices and an education system that too often fails our kids. But constantly tearing down the city without offering a way forward isn’t justice. It’s nihilism.

Civic pride isn’t a luxury, it’s a prerequisite for improvement. Building it takes more than flags and festivals, though those are important. MeckDec Day should be a city holiday.

It’s fostering the belief in your city as a project worth the effort, a home worth defending, and a place where things are decent and getting better.

It’s celebrating the people doing big things, from medical researchers at The Pearl to black cowboys in west Charlotte, without feeling the need to apologize.

It’s setting big goals again, and aggressively pursuing them. When’s the last time you heard a leader declare that we were going to do something like:

• Cut Charlotte’s average commute time in half.

• Lower the cost to build a home by 20%.

• Bring our murder rate below New York City’s.

• Build a destination public space in every district.

• Construct a signature bridge over I-277.

Doing all this wouldn’t mean pretending Charlotte is perfect. It means believing it’s possible.

1. Jeremy doesn’t live in Charlotte anymore, but he is truly a treasure. If you don’t read his newsletter North Carolina Rabbit Hole, start doing so now.

2. I say that, but there are way too many adults out there who live in perpetual adolescence. It’s a real problem.