Text Box: Uptown booming with growth Living Here 2007-08 The Charlotte Observer By Binyamin Appelbaum   Uptown Charlotte is the region’s largest, and most successful, mixed-used development. There is a rapidly expanding office district employing about 55,000.  There are several rapidly expanding neighborhoods housing about 11,000.  There are supermarkets, drugstores and in October, a Target.  There is entertainment, for all tastes:  A symphony hall and a strip club, fine dining and hot dog stands, professional sports and Saturday-night buskers.  And bars.  Lots of bars. It is nearly possible to live without a car, though many people commute to jobs in the suburbs.  It works because it wasn’t planned by a single company or build in a single moment.  It is a jumbled collection of ideas good and bad.  It is a place where Charlotte’s communities mix and sometimes collide. The oldest residential district is Fourth Ward. It is a neighborhood of mid-rise apartments and Victorian homes, as close to historic as Charlotte gets.  I have lived since 2004 in the boiler room of the city’s first hospital.  My front patio was the coal hopper. A decade ago, this was basically the only residential area in uptown Charlotte.  Now it is possible to live in nearly any corner of the area surrounded by the I-277 beltway.  And in nearly any style.   There are luxury flats in old office buildings and trendy flats in old warehouses.  There are single-family homes and high-rise penthouses. There are plans to roughly double the housing stock over the next decade.  There are plans for a movie theater, a baseball stadium and several new museums.  There are plans for more offices, more hotels, more restaurants, more stores. There are only a few remaining old buildings, and there are probably plans to knock them down.                  The boom is making uptown increasingly expensive.   Housing projects for the elderly or poor are in danger of being replaced with projects for the young and the rich.  It is getting harder to find a condo for less than $200,000.  Or a free parking spot.  It has never been easy to find a cheap, decent dinner. But growth has brought new diversity by way of compensation.  There are the students of Johnson & Wales University, some of who buy alarming quantities of junk food at my neighboring supermarket.  There are the weekend revelers who crowd the expanding range of nightspots.  There is even an occasional tourist. In short, there is a deepening carnival on the streets around my home, and if it doesn’t match the beautiful chaotic frenzy of greater cities, it is certainly moving in the right direction.