Welcome to Charlotte!
Charlotte is a beautiful, clean community with high quality of life, Southern hospitality and forward-thinking, New South culture.
Charlotte offers the opportunities and amenities of a major urban center with the friendly feel of a close-knit community.
In Charlotte, we work together and partner to do well, do good and move forward.
Just over 900,000 people call Charlotte-Mecklenburg home and the area is now among 22 U.S. cities with at or near minority/majority populations. From 2000- 2010, Charlotte’s population grew by over 32%, to a regional population of over 2.6 million in a 16-county Carolinas region.
The Charlotte in 2012 Host Committee joins the people of Charlotte in saying, “Welcome” to everyone attending the 2012 Democratic National Convention!
More Facts about the Queen City and the Charlotte Region
Cultural and Recreational Opportunities
• A spectrum of artistic, cultural and recreational opportunities, from the newly-completed $83 million uptown Levine Cultural Campus to numerous indepen- dent galleries, theatre companies, performing and visual arts spaces and professional symphony and opera organizations.
• Sports amenities include the NFL Carolina Panthers, the NBA Charlotte Bobcats, NASCAR, AAA baseball, AHL hockey, professional lacrosse, the U.S. Whitewater Center, the ACC Championship, the Belk Bowl, and 36 golf courses, including Quail Hollow, home of the annual Wells Fargo Championship and the PGA Championship in 2017.
Living
• A four-season climate and an annual mean high temperature of 72 degrees. Housing costs are 80% of the national average.
• Located within a two-hour plane ride and one day’s drive to half of the nation’s population.
• Charlotte-Douglas International Airport handles more passengers annually than LaGuardia or Reagan National as the nation’s seventh busiest airport, with 138 nonstop destinations and 697 daily departures.
• The Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) recently added a 9.6-mile light rail line and plans for expansion continue.
Economy
• Nation’s second largest financial center, behind only New York with $2.3 trillion in assets; home to Bank of America headquarters and Wells Fargo East Coast headquarters.
• An emerging national energy hub, home to over 250 energy companies including Duke Energy. The Energy Production and Infrastructure Center (EPIC) at UNC Charlotte aims to create a talent pool that will fuel continued growth of the sector.
• Headquarters to 10 Fortune 500 companies and 950 foreign-owned firms, including 195 from Germany.
Civic Agenda: Public Education, Affordable Housing, Citizen Engagement
• The Charlotte-Mecklenburg School (CMS) system won the 2011 Broad Prize for Urban Education for showing the greatest academic gains among 75 large urban school districts. Over the next five years, a public/ private effort titled Project L.I.F.T. will bring $55 million and donated services together to close achievement gaps in one corridor of the CMS system.
• Charlotte is number one in the nation in per capita giving and workplace donations and is the third- largest arts fund-raiser in the United States.
• On January 3, 2012, a ten-year Affordable Housing Plan was boosted by the launch of “Souls of Our Neighbors — the Fears, Facts and Myths of Affordable Housing.”
• Numerous civic engagement efforts over the last decade including Community Building Initiative, Crossroads Charlotte, The Lee Institute, MeckConnect and others have built opportunities for thousands of Charlotteans from all socioeconomic, racial/ethnic, faith and political backgrounds to bridge and bond across differences.
Early History and Name
• Charlotte’s beginnings at Trade & Tryon streets are literally steps away from the site of the 2012 DNC at “The Square,” where two intersecting Native American Indian trading paths catalyzed a community that would later be named Charlottetown in 1762 in honor of the British Queen “Charlotte Sophia” while the county was named Mecklenburg to denote the region in Germany where she was born.
• Residents of Charlotte are called Charlotteans.
