From food to fun, everything’s close

Here’s a typical weekend day in the Rothacker household:

I get up early and head over to the Harris YMCA, a sprawling, seemingly constantly renovated fitness center that’s just five minutes from home. I know half the people there.

Later that morning, the whole family hits the rec baseball complex, just five minutes up the street. We know just about everybody after six years playing in the same league.

In the afternoon, we might take a bike ride down the greenway that runs through our neighborhood. If it’s summer, we head over to the neighborhood pool and hang out with friends.

And that night, if we’ve managed to secure a sitter (a teen from the neighborhood), we’ll go to a restaurant in SouthPark; hopefully we have a reservation because just about every place is hopping.

More than likely we’ll run into somebody we know – we’re just 10 minutes from home.

Notice a theme here?

To me, south Charlotte living is about having everything I need within a 10-minute radius. If we want to go out to dinner, we have plenty of hip local eateries right around us. (In fact, it would take about 15 minutes to find a TGIF or Applebees.)

SouthPark mall is the epicenter of South Charlotte, and while that may sound horrible to build life around a mall, it’s not like that. Small centers have cropped up around the high-end shopping mall where eclectic businesses have thrived. There’s also an Earth Fare and the soon-to-open Whole Foods (and I so wish Trader Joe’s would open a fourth Charlotte location here, too).

The YMCAs in Charlotte really are terrific – vanquish the old images of dated cement buildings. The Harris Y and its adults-only Harris Express anchor the SouthPark area, while the Morrison Y and its fabulous water park draw thousands in Ballantyne, a thriving community in deep South Charlotte.

We have top-rated public schools in south Charlotte, and some of the county’s best private schools. It’s hard to go wrong if you have kids. If you work uptown, it’s 20 minutes to get there if traffic is moving. Of course, many folks don’t have to go to uptown because SouthPark and Ballantyne have become key employment centers.

South Charlotte is also beautiful. We wanted a neighborhood that felt established, with lots of trees, and that’s what south Charlotte has. No clear-cut fields of starter homes here. Our immediate neighbors range from young singles to families to empty nesters. The greenway runs along Little Sugar Creek (not as lovely as its name suggests, but still nice).

I guess the best part is that it’s easy to get to know folks. South Charlotte isn’t transient. So if somebody asks you if you know so-and-so who lives in south Charlotte, you probably do.