How Charlotte's biggest corporate players bought in on solving economic challenges

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — Find someone involved in local business for the past 20 years or more and it’s all but guaranteed that, at some point, talk will turn to the glory days of Hugh McColl, Ed Crutchfield and Bill Lee. They were the CEOs of, respectively, NationsBank/Bank of America, First Union and Duke Power who, for much of the 1980s and 1990s, drove the civic agenda: what was built, what was targeted, what was funded.

Pro sports franchises, office towers, museums, light rail and a slow-but-steady campaign to create a vibrant center city all took shape during the reign of that small group of corporate executives. Much of what they did set the foundation for the region’s growth, but, at the same time, gauzy memories tend to cover up what must also be recognized: Charlotte wound up with a deeply segregated community of haves and have-nots that, by 2013, ranked as the nation’s most statistically hopeless place to be born into poverty.

By 2001, McColl, Crutchfield and Lee had retired; their successors, faced with larger companies and concerns spanning well beyond Charlotte, could not devote as much time to local causes. And, seven years later, the Great Recession came along and made corporate survival a primary concern for the big banks, shoving aside or, at least, minimizing civic campaigns.

Now, though, a combination of circumstances — years of consistent business growth, embarrassment over economic and racial inequities — have laid the foundation for a resurgence in what might best be called corporate activism. Community engagement, as companies like to call it.

Whatever the label, Charlotte nonprofit and government leaders, as well as the executives themselves, see cause for optimism when it comes to tackling protracted, complex issues such as affordable and workforce housing, education and access to good-paying jobs, health care and reliable transportation.

CBJ's Erik Spanberg offers an in-depth look at what's changed — and why.

Cox Media Group