Charlotte City Council voted unanimously to approve the city’s biggest new development in at least two decades, setting the stage to bring millions of square feet of new office space, thousands of homes and hundreds of shops and restaurants to a quiet corner of the county. Just west of Charlotte’s airport, the River District, as it’s known, will rise in an area that’s largely undeveloped and forested. Charlotte-based developers Lincoln Harris and Crescent Communities are partnering on the plan, which is expected to take 20 to 30 years to fully build out. It will basically be a whole new town, requiring miles of new roads to handle an estimated 120,000 additional vehicle trips per day, new schools, a new police station and new sewage facilities for dealing with the millions of gallons of additional wastewater. The plans currently includes single family home neighborhoods, several office towers, retail corridors, hotels, and waterfront parks.
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It will be split up into 3 distinct ‘districts’:
Gateway District
Will include several office buildings, totaling 500,000 square feet, at least 50,000 square feet of retail space, and several new hotels. 250 hotel rooms.
Transitional District
Will have 300 multifamily units, 1 million square feet of office space, and 25,000 square feet of retail.
Town Center District
The heart of the new community. It will extend up to the Catawba River and will feature 1,250 multifamily units, 300 single-family units, 2 million square feet of office space, 300,000 square feet of retail and 500 new hotel rooms.
The next step: figuring out exactly who pays for what. The development will be broken down into phases, with specific infrastructure required before each phase and the developers reimbursed for some costs from tax receipts. The preliminary estimated cost for road improvements, such as extending West Boulevard and enlarging the I-485 interchange, was $131 million, city staff said at a
meeting last month. The total is likely to change. Preliminary plans show the developers would pay for $53 million, with the rest paid for by state and local governments or financed through a tax increment grant subsidy. The city’s capital investment program currently calls for spending $44.7 million worth of bond money to improve roads in the area. City staff will fine-tune the agreement with the developers and bring it to City Council next spring.
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