Skyline drive: it's building towers for people wanting to live it up downtown.

• Author: Willis, Dail
• Position: BUILDING NORTH CAROLINA - Influence of Charlotte skyline

Kevin Archer and his wife, Leslie, had looked at five or six condominium sites in downtown Charlotte when they rode the elevator to the top floor of a 13-story building one Sunday in January. The Archers were planning to move to the Queen City from Hickory after their two younger children, ages 13 and 15, finished high school, but they hadn't seen anything they wanted to buy.

The 30-year-old former office building didn't seem likely to suit them, either. 230 South Tryon was still in the early stages of conversion to condominiums, and Spectrum Properties had gutted the building, including the 13th floor. "It was just a concrete floor and windows," says Archer, who owns 14 Bojangles' restaurants in five counties around Charlotte.

But the developer didn't have to renovate one thing--the view. The Charlotte skyline beckoned, and diagrams and renderings arranged around the empty space filled in the interior blanks of the penthouse. Twenty minutes after seeing the plans, Archer submitted a bid for the penthouse. He won't specify the amount, only that it topped the asking price of more than $1.5 million.

"We were a little anxious," he says. The private preview had drawn hundreds of bidders. The Archers sweated it out more than a week before the real-estate agent called to say the penthouse was theirs. About a year from now, the couple and their two teenagers will move into a glass-walled aerie, swapping their five-bedroom, 4,000-square-foot house in Hickory for the same square footage--but only three bedrooms--overlooking downtown Charlotte.

Developers are betting that what drew the Archers will lure others--the skyline, access to sports and the arts, the convenience and cachet of urban living. The city is awash in plans for residential high-rises. Seven--ranging from 13 to 53 stories and totaling more than 1,700 units--were announced from April 2004 through April 2005. Three, including 230 South Tryon, were nearly sold out before construction started. There's talk of more in the works. If all seven are built, Charlotte will have transformed itself along with its skyline.

"The market's hot as a pistol down here," says Peter J. Verna, a structural engineer and construction consultant who has worked in real estate since he came to the city in 1948. His development group, 222 S. Caldwell Street Partnership, is building The Park, a 21-story high-rise atop an existing four-story parking deck at Third and Caldwell streets. Buyers snapped up 75 of the 107 units in two months last summer, even with prices starting at $250,000 and topping out near $1 million. Verna says The Park would have sold out then had he not halted preselling. He figured prices would rise, and they have--about $50,000 more per unit.

"This gentrification of the American city is occurring nationwide, from places like Charlotte and Durham to Dallas, Atlanta, Oakland," says Chris Patriarca, a senior editor in the Charlotte office of Emporis, a German research company that tracks high-rises. "In Greensboro, there are rumors of the 16-floor 201 North Elm Street--vacant since the 1980s--being converted to residential. In downtown Winston-Salem, the 20-floor Nissan Building is currently under reconstruction into residential units. In Raleigh, the 10-floor Paramount is currently under construction in the Glenwood South area."

The list goes on, he says--two seven-floor residential buildings in downtown Asheville, the seven-floor Plaza converted to...