Associate Director
Urban and Regional Affairs
Mary is a lifelong newspaper journalist who spent several decades at The Charlotte Observer as an editorial board member and columnist, concentrating on Charlotte regional urban and suburban growth, planning, urban design, transportation and land preservation. She left the Observer and joined the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute in June 2011, where she works on strategic community and university partnerships and oversees the institute’s online communications. She had a year-long Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and was a Knight Fellow in Community Building at the University of Miami.
A.B. Journalism UNC Chapel Hill
Urban and suburban issues, Charlotte region and North Carolina politics and government, writing, editing and journalism.
Will a new name, a new tie-in to the county’s overall transit plan, and a new funding scheme using no property tax money mean a new outcome that puts an expanded streetcar project into the “yes” column with the Charlotte City...
From Philadelphia to San Francisco, from Hinesburg, Vt., to Morrilton, Ark., on Saturday, May 4, people around the country were getting together to explore parts of...
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. – On the day much of the Boston area stayed indoors for the manhunt of a Boston marathon bombing suspect, I was in town for a conference on “The Resilient City.”
Like almost everyone in Boston, most...
When PlanCharlotte.org decided to hold a photo contest to celebrate our first birthday, we expected we’d receive plenty of snapshot-caliber photos. We were delighted to be wrong. Among a number of strong photos evoking a powerful sense of...
A moody night-time shot of a more than 200-year-old house outside Huntersville, and a sliver of a moon over uptown Charlotte. Those photos, by Kevin J. Beaty, were what took the top honors in PlanCharlotte.org's one-year anniversary photo...
The implied threat Monday from Charlotte City Council members, to withdraw support for the proposed Monroe Bypass, is more fallout from an increasingly fractious local political battle over control of Charlotte’s airport. And now,...
If you know who Jane Jacobs was and understand the role her work has played in revolutionizing thinking about cities and planning since the 1960s, you'll understand why her birthday is a time to encourage city-dwellers to get to know their...
In January, Charlotte had 1.8 million people. Today it has 2.3 million people. And no, there was no airlift of half a million residents from the Rust Belt or anywhere else. How can a city gain a half-million people almost overnight? How can a...
