Union County residents reported the highest sense of well-being anywhere in the Charlotte region, while Gaston County residents reported the lowest, according to a new survey of roughly 4,000 people spanning the 14-county Charlotte metro area. Across the region, a familiar concern emerged: housing affordability was the single most pressing concern among respondents across the bi-state footprint.
The findings come from the Carolinas Regional Explorer, a new data tool and survey released by the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute, as reported by WFAE 90.7. Residents across the region rated their overall life satisfaction at 7.4 out of 10, and the survey dug into housing costs, health, income and other factors shaping daily life. The tool itself includes survey results, maps and interactive graphics, giving residents and planners a county-by-county look at quality of life.
Why Union County Comes Out on Top
The well-being gap lines up closely with economic reality on the ground. Union County posted a median household income of $102,900, and its 81.6% homeownership rate is labeled as a 2024 figure on Data USA, a profile that helps explain why its residents reported the region's highest well-being. Gaston County, by contrast, recorded a far lower median individual income of $37,312, reflecting its roots as a legacy industrial community rather than the affluent suburban growth pattern seen in Union County.
Charlotte Urban Institute executive director Lori Thomas said the results show both reasons for optimism and areas where communities need to improve, adding that Charlotte-area residents performed better on average than the national benchmark. That national comparison carries some nuance: separate analysis from the State of the Nation Project, using U.S. General Social Survey data through 2024, found that overall self-reported life satisfaction among North Carolina adults has been trending downward in recent years.
Renters Report Starkly Different Outlooks Than Homeowners
Housing status, not just geography, shaped how people viewed their own well-being. Charlotte Urban Institute researcher Eric Moore said renters were generally more pessimistic about their well-being than homeowners, and that housing status played a major role in overall outlook. Adults aged 25 to 54 were disproportionately more pessimistic than both younger adults aged 18 to 24 and residents over 65, according to the survey.
The numbers behind that pessimism are stark. A 2026 housing study found that 77% of low-cost housing available across the region in 2015 had disappeared by 2024 as redevelopment and gentrification spread, according to a report cited by BuySellLoveLKN, leaving half of all county renters spending more than 30% of their income on rent. For a generation of renters squeezed between stagnant wages and vanishing affordable units, the survey's gloomier numbers track with lived experience rather than abstraction.
New Construction Hasn't Solved the Affordability Problem
It isn't for lack of new housing. UNC Charlotte's Childress Klein Center for Real Estate reported that the Charlotte metro area added 28,951 housing units in 2024, outpacing household formation by more than 4,000 units, yet median home prices still climbed to $443,850 by late 2025. The Canopy Realtor Association's own market data put the median single-family home sale price in the Charlotte metro at $419,650 as of June 2026, with attached homes like townhomes averaging $350,000 — numbers that help explain why affordability topped the survey's list of concerns.
Part of the pressure comes from outside the region entirely. Regional economic data published in September 2026 showed the Charlotte metro gained more than 57,000 net new residents from migration alone between mid-2023 and mid-2024, an inflow of roughly 157 new residents per day, per SunBeltPulse. That steady influx continues to absorb new housing inventory almost as fast as it's built, keeping prices elevated even amid record construction.
A Tool Built for the Long Haul
The Carolinas Regional Explorer was launched through Your Voice Carolinas, a regional survey center at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute that shut down during the COVID-19 pandemic and was officially relaunched in 2026. The 2026 survey is the first annual regional survey.
The new tool builds on an older one. It expands on the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Quality of Life Explorer, an interactive mapping framework that local governments have used for more than 20 years to track over 80 variables across 462 neighborhood profile areas, information city officials have long used to target services and affordable housing projects. The Urban Institute itself, founded in 1969, manages the Charlotte Regional Data Trust, established in 2004.
Hoodline has previously reported on related pressures shaping the same region, including how the metro area lost 760 farms to sprawl as suburban development swallowed agricultural land in counties like Union and Iredell, part of the same growth pattern now showing up in resident well-being data.
