This time it’s the UPoR that’s at it, arguing that:

Today, new apartments are sprouting all over uptown, but retail development still lags. City officials need to show more urgency in countering this longstanding problem.

Unlike cities such as Charleston and Asheville, we tore down many of our old center city commercial buildings. In so doing, we also tore down the retail spaces that made uptown Charlotte a shopping destination.

We replaced them with office towers that often lacked significant ground-floor retail space. Given how difficult it is to retrofit such buildings for retail, space for new shops uptown must come largely from new construction.

The city’s zoning codes need to be more aggressive on that front. They require street-level retail in large new buildings along the Tryon and Brevard street corridors, but don’t mandate it elsewhere uptown. Instead, they require street-level “activation,” meaning ground-floor facades that include windows, doors or other pedestrian-friendly design elements – anything but a blank wall.

Er, no. If there were actual demand for retail Uptown, then developers would cater to that need. That’s how a free-market works. The fact that there isn’t more retail Uptown suggests that retail isn’t the best use for scarce, expensive Uptown space. Put another way, it’s hard to sell enough stuff to cover the rent. Arguing that the city should, despite that harsh economic reality, force developers to subsidize Uptown retail is nothing more than special-interest politics, imposing significant costs on some (developers, other retailers) to benefit a group of favored, politically-powerful elites.