Construction is starting this fall on a 371-unit apartment complex that will rise from the site of a former chemical manufacturing plant in Charlotte's Optimist Park neighborhood. Space Craft has named the eight-story project Mira, and it's slated to take about two years to build, with an expected opening in 2028.
The site at 2323 N. Davidson St. previously housed Textile Rubber & Chemical Company, which operated there from the 1950s through 2023, according to a Space Craft press release cited by Axios. Mira will sit directly on the Cross Charlotte Trail and next door to Urban District Market, the international food hall that anchors the Mill District with vendor stalls, a test kitchen incubator, and monthly night markets, as Axios Charlotte has reported. The Cross Charlotte Trail itself is a joint City of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County project designed as a continuous, paved greenway running more than 30 miles from Pineville through Center City to UNC Charlotte, per the City of Charlotte.
The building itself will include 371 apartments alongside seven storefronts totaling 9,765 square feet of retail space and 146 parking spots. Axios reports the project reflects how Optimist Park has become a more walkable area along the Blue Line light rail corridor.
A Growing Mill District Pipeline
Mira is the latest in a string of Space Craft projects clustered across Optimist Park, Belmont, and NoDa. The developer's other current work includes Oxbow, which has begun leasing, and Cordo, which remains under construction, the same Axios report notes. Cordo, a 287-unit development also in Optimist Park, secured $94 million in total project financing in September 2024, including a $69 million construction loan and $25 million in joint venture equity arranged through an institutional Japanese investment firm, according to The Real Deal.
Contractor Swinerton announced in December 2025 that it had topped out Cordo, an $80 million, seven-story multifamily building, marking the firm's fifth project collaboration with Space Craft, according to Swinerton. Property records cited by The Real Deal also show Space Craft purchased an adjacent 1.6-acre parcel at 2321 N. Davidson St. for $9 million in February 2023, expanding its footprint along the same corridor where Mira now sits.
The Car-Optional Playbook
Space Craft first tested its car-reduced housing model with The Joinery, which opened as Charlotte's first parking-free apartment complex in April 2022 at 1824 N. Brevard St. That 83-unit community, located near the Parkwood light rail station, replaced a traditional parking garage with shared mobility options like electric vehicle rentals and e-bikes, according to WSOC-TV. The station has reported that cutting structured parking decks can reduce housing construction costs by an estimated $30,000 to $60,000 per parking space, since surface and deck parking typically consume 10 to 25 percent of a residential development's budget.
Space Craft has also leaned on mass timber fabricator Timberlab to build multi-phase projects using cross-laminated timber horizontal decks, a method meant to reduce embodied carbon and streamline construction, per Timberlab. Timberlab provided design-build timber services for The Joinery's second phase, as well as Oxbow and Cordo.
Transit Infrastructure Behind the Boom
None of this development would look the same without the LYNX Blue Line Extension, whose 25th Street station opened in Optimist Park in March 2018, offering direct light rail service between Center City Charlotte and the UNC Charlotte campus, according to a history documented on Wikipedia. A 2021 study from the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute found that apartment developments accounted for two-thirds of all construction spending along the Blue Line Extension corridor between 2013 and 2020, a period when Mecklenburg County set a construction spending record of $3.6 billion in 2020.
Hoodline has previously covered Optimist Park's evolution, from neighborhood business guides to early rental listings in the area. Mira marks a new chapter for a neighborhood once defined by industrial use and modest apartment stock, now positioned as one of Charlotte's more ambitious transit-oriented redevelopment zones.
