Charlotte tour guide took a winding path
Plus: New drive-thrus under scrutiny by city panel; Nonprofit tackles repairs of affordable housing; Apartment construction at highest level ever; Garth pledges to start future tour in Charlotte
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The city’s lone ToursByLocals tour guide charges $200 for a 3-hour uptown walk; 5-star rating, ‘memorable and fabulous’
Colombian-born Ruben Ordonez enjoys showing tourists around Charlotte. He’s seen here by the sculpture Metalmorphosis in the Whitehall Technology Park in Charlotte’s Steele Creek area.
by Lindsey Banks
It’s common to book a tour when traveling to learn more about the place you’re visiting. One of the new trends is hiring a tour guide through a company called ToursByLocals, which connects travelers with on-the-ground expert guides in 189 countries.
New York has 30 such tour guides. London has 49. Paris has 54.
Charlotte has one, and his name is Ruben Ordonez.
Ordonez, 58, charges $200 to $780 per tour, depending on which of his three tours customers select, and includes transportation for up to four guests. And people pay it: He says he has given 15 tours since joining ToursByLocals in May of 2021.
Charlotte isn’t known as a tourist hotspot. Ordonez says a majority of his customers are people in town for work meetings, though he sometimes sees relatives of Charlotteans who are looking for something to do. The city’s hospitality industry struggled during Covid but has been making a comeback in recent months and has nearly regained all of the jobs it lost in the last two years.
‘Fabulous’ tours: Ordonez’s tours have earned him a 5-star rating and six glowing reviews on the ToursByLocals site. One reviewer called it a “memorable and fabulous and informative tour” that was “one of the best we have ever had on vacation.” Another called Ordonez “friendly, knowledgeable and entertaining.”
Ordonez has been living in the Charlotte area for only six years, but he quickly became a Charlotte expert by taking courses at a local tour management company and driving for Uber.
Giving tours is just a side gig for Ordonez. He primarily works as a medical interpreter for doctors in Charlotte.
Ordonez’s love for travel and exploring new places stems from his childhood. He was born in Colombia but moved around for his father’s job to Belgium and Manhattan. Ordonez said he’s fluent in English and Spanish, and because of his travels, he can have basic conversations in French. He’s also been teaching himself German for the past 10 years.
“When we lived with my parents in Europe, every opportunity, you just take your car and go anywhere,” he said. “We used to go camping as a family. Maybe that’s where I got this freedom-flying-bird thing.”
He took a winding path to become a tour guide and interpreter. After finishing college in Colombia with a chemical engineering degree, Ordonez sold textiles for an international chemical engineering company, then lived in a variety of cities chasing jobs.
While living in San Francisco, he took some courses at the International Tour Management Institute to become a tour manager. In 2014, he moved to Greensboro for a corporate position in chemical engineering but was laid off.
That’s when he turned to Uber and became a full-time driver. He wasn’t getting a lot of business in Greensboro, so a few days a week, he would drive to Charlotte for Uber rides and stay at Airbnbs in the area. Eventually, he decided to move to Huntersville to be closer to business.
From there, he began studying Charlotte’s history and applied to become a guide with ToursByLocals. Summer is his busiest time, so during the off-season, he became a medical interpreter to pay the bills.
He said ToursByLocals doesn’t require guides to be certified; however, they conducted several video interviews with him to make sure he knew his stuff. After several weeks of planning last year, he designed three tours: an uptown walking tour, a Charlotte beer tour and a full-day tour of the Piedmont.
His most popular tour is a $200, three-hour walking tour of uptown and popular neighborhoods. He shows off the Blumenthal Performing Arts Center, the Harvey B. Gantt Center for African-American Arts + Culture, the Mint Museum (his favorite place to talk about) and Bechtler Museum of Modern Art. He then piles the group into his car and slowly drives through the Fourth Ward, NoDa, Plaza-Midwood, Elizabeth and South End to share some of these neighborhoods’ history and popular attractions.
“The history of Charlotte is economic development, like the textile industry,” he explained. “NoDa was born as a neighborhood for the mill employees, so if you walk in the opposite direction of the mill, you’re going to see all of these that look the same. Those are the original houses, though some have been renovated.”
He also gives private tours to groups of students in Washington, D.C., and Puerto Rico.
What’s next? His beer tour hasn’t sold yet, so he’s designing a new tour that will cover Charlotte’s Black history to replace it.
In the immediate future, he plans to continue passing on his Charlotte expertise to visitors. Ordonez said he keeps an open line for his customers, so if they have any additional questions after his tour, they can give him a call, free of charge.
Lindsey Banks is a staff writer for The Ledger: lindsey@cltledger.com.
Related Ledger article:
“Conventions mount a comeback” (🔒, June 29)
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City zoning committee cites Charlotte’s 2040 Plan in rejecting new drive-thrus; Chick-fil-A plans imperiled?
A city advisory committee on zoning says Charlotte’s 2040 Comprehensive Plan adopted last year encourages rejecting most developers’ applications for new drive-thrus — even though the plan doesn’t say that explicitly.
The Zoning Committee, made up of residents who advise the City Council on rezoning requests, gave a thumbs-down to developer Piedmont Capital’s request this month to add a Chick-fil-A and Starbucks in Grier Heights, on Wendover Road.
The committee found that adding the two restaurant drive-thrus “does not support environmental sustainability policies contained in the Charlotte 2040 Plan.”
The City Council is scheduled to vote on the matter tonight and will consider the negative recommendation but is not bound by it. The Ledger reported that Grier Heights residents at a community meeting last week largely opposed the redevelopment of the Wendover Plaza shopping center, citing concerns about traffic. The developer said that without the restaurant additions, the center would likely lose its Food Lion, which is the only grocery store in the economically fragile neighborhood.
Proponents of the 2040 Plan, which passed the City Council last year on a narrow 6-5 vote, said at the time that it was an aspirational document outlining a vision for Charlotte’s future. But the Zoning Committee’s interpretation of it as discouraging new drive-thrus shows how the plan is already affecting actual land-use decisions.
The 122-page 2040 Plan does not explicitly frown upon new drive-thrus. It mentions drive-thrus only once, saying they are features of commercial areas — which are defined as places that sell goods and services “in locations readily accessible by automobile.” It also calls generally for sustainable and environmentally friendly development practices and land-use planning and encourages more walking and biking.
‘Heavily scrutinized’: In an interview Sunday, Planning Commission Chairperson Keba Samuel, who was one of the votes against the Grier Heights project, said the advisory panel also follows its own environmental and sustainability policies. Asked about where drive-thrus fit in, she said:
I think the message to any landowner, petitioner or petitioner’s agent that’s looking to come through the Zoning Committee with the addition of a drive-thru is that those will be heavily scrutinized and challenged. We’re not going to approve a petition just because it’s in a heavily auto-centric area. Is there an option for a walk-up window? How are we connecting walkability? How are we encouraging pedestrian-friendly environments?
She acknowledged the 2040 Plan does not mention drive-thrus but said: “It speaks about creating an equitable environment. It speaks toward multimodal mobility.”
A lawyer for the developer has referred to the proposed Chick-fil-A as a “relief Chick-fil-A” that would draw traffic from the often-congested one in Cotswold.
The vote this month was 5-1 to recommend denial of the Grier Heights plan. City staff is recommending approval. —TM
Related Ledger article:
“Grier Heights residents pan plans for new Starbucks, Chick-fil-A; ‘safety issue’ because of possible traffic” (🔒, July 13)
Charity spotlight: Instead of building affordable housing, one local nonprofit works to repair it
Charlotte is often focused on the need to build more affordable housing. But one local nonprofit is focused on a slightly different idea: repairing houses of low-income residents so they can stay where they are.
Rebuilding Together of Greater Charlotte has been at that task since 2010, and it is growing alongside the need of affordable places to live. It’s the local affiliate of a national nonprofit, Rebuilding Together.
“We have to take displacement seriously,” executive director Beth Morrison said. “That means helping to provide resources to people so they can stay in their neighborhoods and homes without living in really hazardous conditions or selling to one of the Wall Street investors that we’ve been hearing about that are buying up all of the more affordable properties in Charlotte.”
Rebuilding Together’s “Building a Healthy Neighborhood” program partners with other neighborhood organizations and leaders to identify homes that need repairs. They work with volunteers and contractors to correct health and safety hazards that are common in older homes, including falls, fires, moisture and mold, asthma, allergies and toxic exposures like carbon monoxide.
Since 2018, Morrison said Rebuilding Together of Greater Charlotte has repaired almost 80 homes. Throughout the year, they work with more than 500 volunteers on certain projects like floor and carpet replacements. Larger projects, like bathroom remodels, and roof and HVAC replacements, are completed by contractors.
Rebuilding Together of Greater Charlotte has repaired nearly 80 homes since 2018, with the support of grants, donors and partnerships with construction companies and nonprofits. (Photo courtesy of Rebuilding Together of Greater Charlotte.)
For the past year and a half, Rebuilding Together has been working in the Lakeview neighborhood, near the intersection of Brookshire Boulevard and I-85. Morrison said they are finishing a couple of projects there and then will transition to Hidden Valley (near Sugar Creek Road and I-85), where they’ve already received 30 applications since April. Before Lakeview, they served Druid Hills (off Graham Street north of Camp North End).
Homeowners pay nothing for the work on their homes. Funding comes from government grants, individual donors, company partnerships and foundations. Some construction companies, like Swinerton, will donate their expertise and services. They also partner with corporations, like Lowe’s and Wells Fargo; and local companies, like Charlotte ToolBank, a tool-lending nonprofit, and She Built This City, a women-focused workforce trades organization.
A 2020 commitment of $1M over three years by Lowe’s Foundation allowed Rebuilding Together to grow its staff.
“Housing is such a major social determinant of health, that providing those repairs that address those safety and health hazards are really helping them in all parts of their life lead more healthy, successful, happy lives,” Morrison said. —LB
Building boom: Charlotte has a record number of apartments under construction
You’re not imagining things: There really are a lot of apartments being built in Charlotte.
In fact, there are more apartments in Charlotte under construction now than at any time in the city’s history, according to a new report from real estate data service CoStar.
Figures from CoStar show that there were nearly 20,000 apartments in Charlotte under construction in the 2Q of this year — the equivalent of more than 10% of all the apartments in the city. Apartments are going up all over the place, but the biggest concentration is in … drum roll … South End, which has more than 2,000 under construction at the moment.
New starts slowing, rents moderating: Demand, though, seems to be cooling off, and groundbreakings have slowed since April, wrote analyst Chuck McShane. But there will still be a ton of apartments coming on the market in the next couple years, which should lead to lower increases in rent.
And by lower, we mean less than the 14%-18% annual increases of the last few quarters. —TM
In brief:
Speeding crackdown in neighboring states: Five Southern states — South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Florida and Alabama — plan to crack down on speeders this week in an initiative called “Operation Southern Slow Down.” State troopers will beef up traffic enforcement on highways and interstates through Friday. (WIS-TV)
Community college president ousted? The head of the N.C. Community College System, Thomas Stith, is expected to depart his post following a vote Friday in closed session by the system’s board, according to anonymous sources who spoke to The Assembly. An announcement could come as soon as today, the publication reported on Sunday afternoon. (The Assembly)
Early voting: Early voting continues this week for Charlotte mayor and City Council races, with polls open 8 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. today through Friday and 8-3 on Saturday. The election is next Tuesday (July 26). Democrats and Republicans are battling it out in races for mayor, at-large City Council seats and several district races. With nothing else on the ballot, turnout is expected to be low. Voting details here.
Housing sales fall: The number of homes sold in Mecklenburg County in June fell by 16% compared with a year ago, while inventory rose 7%, suggesting a softening of demand, according to figures from Canopy Realtor Association. “We expect to see sales decline further as buyer demand cools due to the affordability challenges from rising rates and continued inflation challenges,” Canopy’s president said in a news release.
Gun fired inside The Comedy Zone: A man was arrested Saturday night after firing a gun inside The Comedy Zone at the AvidXchange Music Factory, police said. The incident happened before a show featuring actor and comedian Craig Robinson, who played Dunder Mifflin warehouse worker Darryl Philbin on the NBC hit “The Office.” (WBTV)
UNC pays professor after hiring flap: UNC Chapel Hill reached a settlement with journalism professor Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose back-and-forth hiring saga last year made national news. The school hired her but without tenure, which some critics said was because of her writings on racism and the intervention of a donor. Hannah-Jones is now at Howard University. The university said the settlement was for “less than $75,000.” (WRAL)
McClatchy editor settles defamation lawsuit: A North Carolina journalist has reached a settlement in a defamation lawsuit against a top McClatchy editor. The lawsuit from former News & Observer reporter Anne Blythe alleged that an editor’s note in 2018 that accused her of plagiarism didn’t give her a chance to respond, defamed her and prevented her from earning a living as a journalist. The note was written by then-editor Robyn Tomlin, who is now McClatchy’s vice president for local news. Tomlin said in a statement: “I’m glad we can put this dispute behind us and move on.” (Associated Press)
Garth’s pledge: Garth Brooks on Saturday, toward the end of his second concert at Bank of America Stadium this weekend: “After last night and the high that I was on, I said if Saturday night comes and does the same thing Friday night did, then I should show them my appreciation. It’s taken us 24 years to get back here — 24 long years. … I don’t know if we’ll ever tour again like this, but if we do, you have my word: If you’ll have us, we’ll start it right here in Charlotte, North Carolina!” He added on Twitter on Sunday: “I meant what I said!!!!”
Taking stock
Unless you are a day trader, checking your stocks daily is unhealthy. So how about weekly? How local stocks of note fared last week (through Friday’s close), and year to date:
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Executive editor: Tony Mecia; Managing editor: Cristina Bolling; Staff writer: Lindsey Banks; Contributing editor: Tim Whitmire, CXN Advisory; Contributing photographer/videographer: Kevin Young, The 5 and 2 Project