Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Charlotte: Airport-less and hip-less?

N.C. legislative leaders are swooping in for the kill in the takeover of the Charlotte Douglas Airport. The Senate on Tuesday approved transferring from city ownership (stealing it from the city fits as well) the airport to an appointed regional airport authority. The senseless power grab is putting frowns on the faces of locals.

But maybe this will cheer them up - or not.

Drum roll, please. Charlotte has made another elite list. It's in the top 10... of the least hipster-friendly cities.Yeah, yeah. The list is a publicity ploy - at least partly. But we couldn't resist this top 10 national ranking for the Queen City though some won't find it anything to crow about.

This ranking comes to us from a real estate service called the Movoto blog. The bloggers used this criteria - young people, walkability, bikeability, vintage stores, dive bars, vegetarian restaurants, artsy jobs and vinyl stores (that is, stores that sell the old-style vinyl records; the sound is better) - and ranked the nation's 30 most populous cities accordingly.

The top 10 list? 1. El Paso, TX; 2. Jacksonville, FL; 3. Fort Worth, TX; 4. Oklahoma City, OK; 5. Houston; 6. Ta-da! Charlotte; 7. Memphis; 8. San Antonio, TX; 9. Indianapolis; 10. Dallas.

The raters give some pretty interesting assessments of places that place high on the hipster-friendly scale while dogging those of us at the bottom. For instance, Columbus, Ohio, edges out Boston on the youth scale because of Ohio University. All those students at Harvard and MIT just couldn't match the numbers. Portland beat Seattle in bikeableness. New York beat San Francisco for most walkable. On dive bars (those cheesy, cheap beer places), Portland again comes out on top squeaking past San Fran. And on the sellers of vinyl, Seattle gets the crown over, guess who, Portland.

Any places on your hipster list? Or your least list? How about most meddlesome N.C. lawmaker in Charlotte-Mecklenburg affairs? Given the airport drama and other issues, we're sure you might have a few people to nominate for that list.




5 comments:

misswhit said...

Fannie, Ohio University is in Athens, Ohio. The university you are referring to in Columbus is Ohio State University.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I think the process to set up an authority happened too quickly and more time should have been provided. Yes, I'm still convinced an airport authority was the right move.

We have a mayor that decided bringing in CMPD to handle airport security at an additional $5m in annual expenses to USAir was a good idea.

This decision was made as a newly created USAir-American airline merger was in the works. Imo, job 1should have been to protect and sell the strengths of our low-cost hub to a newly created USAir-American merger. Instead, Foxx sticks it to USAir and creates a new $5M payday for CMPD.

If its not politics and favors, its another bad judgement call by Foxx.

Tom said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Shamash said...

There is NO WAY Houston should be on that list.

Maybe for the restaurants and vinyl shops in some parts of town inside the loop 610.

But Houston is practically unwalkable and unbikeable everywhere else.

It is spread out all over the place.

And getting more crowded with automobiles all the time.

Jim said...

Here's a possibility for ya: Most predictable Editorial Board.