There’s a fight brewing in Charlotte’s NoDa neighborhood. Some business owners want the city to start regulating street vendors who set up along North Davidson to sell clothing, jewelry and artwork. Some of those street vendors, though, see potential regulation as a threat to their livelihoods. For more we turn to now Tony Mecia of the Charlotte Ledger Business Newsletter for our segment BizWorthy.
Marshall Terry: OK, so these street vendors there in NoDa are a common sight and they can bring a lot of life to the sidewalk. So why are some business owners pushing for them to now have a permit?
Tony Mecia: Well, Marshall, it seems as though everybody in NoDa agrees that these street vendors are part of the fabric of NoDa, that they are bringing sort of an artistic vibe that they like having them there. NoDa used to be more of an arts district and this is, you know, having that sort of feel to the neighborhood.
The issue though is that a lot of times the booths and the tables that they set up block the sidewalks, or the customers that are at the tables block the sidewalks. And so a lot of the brick-and-mortar businesses that are there, they don't want their entrances or their signs blocked by large crowds. And you know, on the weekends you can get a lot of people walking through on the sidewalks, and so it gets very congested. So they would like to have a little bit of regulation to make it a little bit more orderly.
Terry: Now the city already requires some street vendors to have a permit, but not in NoDa. So what's different about those places where it is required?
Mecia: Well, the city ordinance specifies several places where you need a permit to set up, and it's mostly in uptown — although this ordinance also says all of Independence Boulevard — (where) you can't just set up tables and sell things without a permit. NoDa is not on that list. Frankly, this isn't really an issue in most other parts of the city. Right now in NoDa anybody can just, for the most part, set up a table during the day and sell things.
Terry: All right. Well, let's move over to another neighborhood now — Plaza Midwood. That's where neighborhood leaders want to create a mile-long drinking district. That would be quite a bar crawl, Tony.
Mecia: You could crawl quite a long ways from the Two Scoops all the way down to Morningside Drive. So that would go past Thirsty Beaver, the train tracks, the main business district in Plaza Midwood, and finish up just beyond that. And it would envelope any number of bars, breweries, restaurants. It would also sort of shoot off toward Independence Boulevard, down Pecan and Thomas, part of Commonwealth. So it would be a pretty good-sized area.
What it would allow people to do is walk with open containers on sidewalks from place to place. You know, obviously right now under current North Carolina law, that's not legal. There are more than 40 of these in other municipalities in North Carolina. This would be the first for Charlotte. Plaza Midwood leaders told me that they intend to get the city's first application in this week. It might be pushed back to next week, but there are also other areas of town — like uptown, South End and NoDa, that are also looking at this sort of thing. But it looks like Plaza Midwood is going to be the first one out of the gate.
Terry: Well, on to some development news now. The developer behind a residential project in south Charlotte has slashed the number of apartments the project would include by 40%, but neighbors who had pushed for the change are still opposed to it. So why is that?
Mecia: Well, there's some opposition that has been brewing for a number of months about this proposal that would be in the Piper Glen area. It's sort of near the shopping center with the Trader Joe's, between Elm Lane and Ray Road. Residents in that area are concerned. They say about the environment that this is mostly a wooded area near Greenway. Home to they say eagles, egrets, blue heron, different kinds of birds. And then, of course, there's also concerns about traffic. And so the developer reduced the number of housing units from 1,100 to 640. But there was a community meeting last week in which neighbors really were not satisfied, really wanted it to be reduced even further, or some of them really would like nothing to be built there at all.
Terry: And we end this week with an update to a story you had last week. You've heard back from senior living community Aldersgate about its financial troubles. Now, I do want to point out Aldersgate as a financial sponsor of WFAE. First, give us a recap of what's going on and then what you heard from the company.
Mecia: The Charlotte Ledger reported last week that state regulators have stepped in and are now supervising the finances of Aldersgate. And that comes after auditors had raised some concerns about Aldersgate's liquidity, its availability of cash. (A) couple of the things that apparently troubled regulators was that Aldersgate’s liabilities exceed its assets, and that it has had a string of operating losses over the last few years. Aldersgate has acknowledged it has had trouble repaying entrance fees that are supposed to be refunded to residents. They said they're working on that. We heard back this week from Aldersgate’s CEO, who said she's proud of the steps they're taking at Aldersgate, that they're working very diligently to improve their finances. And she said that they're taking some steps to ensure Aldersgate’s short-term and long-term financial viability.
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