I just drove down here, and I’ve seen more cool urban “stuff” in one hour here than I saw in two days in Charlotte. It is a remarkable city, a place of about 70,000 with a reclaimed riverfront park, a Calatrava-style cantilevered bridge over it, a downtown filled with independent stores and restaurants, 20-year-old street trees that now create a lovely shaded main street, and mid-town neighborhoods developing with walkable medium-density housing.
Why should the meeting have been held here? Scale. Its the kind of place that people want to move post-Covid: big enough to have a selection of jobs and things to do, and small enough to have a sense of community. Charlotte is a pre-Covid place: big and corporate, with midtown and suburban retrofit. Greenville is that rarity in cities, the kind of place we got to Europe to see: walkable, pretty, and interesting.