What will a growing minority population mean for Charlotte?
Queen City leaders have spent years molding Charlotte into a destination city. Ask the average Charlottean a decade ago who the Queen City was a destination for, and more times than not, they’d have told you “bankers.” At one point, the leadership attempted to turn it into a destination city for tourism. But all the while, as the cranes lifted yet another story onto the condo towers that were supposed to house the Ivy League’s newest crop of shiny-shoed bankers, Charlotte was becoming a destination for others who barely attracted notice. They still don’t. Buried within the Brookings Institute’s State of Metropolitan America study last week was a destination description I’ve never heard anyone around here affix to Charlotte: Hispanic destination city. Brookings studied U.S. Census Bureau numbers from 2000 through 2008. If trends continued, the 2010 census data, when complete, will confirm a Charlotte more diverse than anyone could have fathomed in the 1990s. The city has become so diver
