About the Regional Explorer
A shared starting point.
Difficult problems are harder to solve when people are working from different pictures of reality. The Carolinas Regional Explorer brings neighborhood-level data about fourteen counties into one place, so that residents, planners and partners across the region can start from the same view.
The map
Carolinas Regional Explorer
The Carolinas Regional Explorer is a community-data analytical platform developed by the Charlotte Urban Institute. With roots in the Institute's longstanding collaboration with the City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County on the Quality of Life Explorer, the Regional Explorer expands that footprint to the 14-county region surrounding Charlotte.
The platform carries dozens of indicators across themes important to quality of life: economy, education, housing, transportation, health, environment and civic engagement, for every census tract in the region. You can map any indicator, watch it change over time, compare neighborhoods and counties, and look at how two measures relate or where values cluster in space. Every indicator has a “why it matters” page with sources, and the full dataset is free to download.
The application and its data pipeline are open source and use no proprietary Geographic Information System, or GIS. We treat statistical uncertainty as a first-class concern: Survey estimates carry their margins of error, low-reliability values are flagged and model-based estimates (such as the CDC health measures) are shown as levels rather than trends where the source does not support comparison over time.
How every number is produced, and its limits, is documented on the Methods page. We have published comprehensive documentation of the application and its data infrastructure as a working paper that you can cite if you plan to replicate the platform in your region. Repositories of the application and the data infrastructure are publicly available on GitHub.
This Explorer is a project of the Charlotte Urban Institute and partners, designed to grow as more counties, data and community input come in. To contribute data or partner with us, visit the Charlotte Urban Institute.
The well-being survey
Well-being Survey
The Your Voice Carolinas Regional Well-being Survey is part of the Charlotte Urban Institute's State of Our Region report 2026. The project was conceived and designed in collaboration with the Happiness Research Institute and supported by the Gambrell Foundation and UNC Charlotte. It reports how residents across the 14-county Charlotte region rate their quality of life, based on 3,398 weighted respondents. Please read the technical report or browse the dashboard to view the results.
Acknowledgements
UNC Charlotte Urban Institute
Eric Moore, Ph.D. · Kailas Venkitasubramanian, Ph.D. · Lori Thomas, Ph.D.
Supported by
The Gambrell Foundation · UNC Charlotte
Who is this for?
Planners, officials and researchers
Data about the region isn't always hard to find, but it's hard to find in a form that's useful. The Regional Explorer brings indicators, research, and context together in one place, so that a planner in Gaston County and a researcher at UNC Charlotte are working from the same picture.
Residents and neighbors
The data that describe a neighborhood, like housing costs, health outcomes and income levels, are public, but rarely accessible in a practical sense. The Regional Explorer makes it possible to look up your own area, compare it to the next town over, and actually understand what you're looking at.
Who is behind this?
A project by the Charlotte Urban Institute
The Regional Explorer is a project of the Charlotte Urban Institute, which has spent 50+ years researching the Charlotte region and the people who live here. The platform builds on the Institute's earlier work on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer, and extends that approach across 14 counties in North and South Carolina.
Open data
Working with the data
Data included in the Regional Explorer is available to download here. For specific questions about the methodology, please refer to the documentation.