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 i…