Criticizing a Chick-fil-A rezoning in Charlotte cost him his job. He doesn’t regret it.

John Holmes spent most of Thursday riding his bike through uptown Charlotte in the rain, looking for new jobs.

Holmes, 26, had just been unexpectedly fired from his position as an operations manager at a Chick-fil-A in east Charlotte for speaking up against the city’s recent decision to allow a drive-thru-only Chick-fil-A in an area zoned for transit-oriented development.

Charlotte City Council voted last week to approve two rezoning requests brought by Chick-fil-A and Fifth Third Bank, both of which sought to build drive-thru locations in parts of the city where drive-thrus are currently not allowed.

Holmes, an urban planning enthusiast who is currently pursuing a masters in public administration at UNC Charlotte, took to Facebook to express his frustration with the decision.

“This is a step in the wrong direction in so many ways and I’m genuinely disappointed that our city would decide to cede its vision of a pedestrian-friendly city to, of all things, a deep-fried chicken restaurant,” Holmes wrote in the post, which has since been deleted.

When Holmes got to work the next day, his boss pulled him aside and fired him. The post was unprofessional, his manager said, and it didn’t look good to have an employee speaking poorly about the corporation, even though he works at a different franchise.

“To be quite honest, I used a little profanity in that post. I was like, ‘OK, well, f–k the city council for deciding to do this, and f–k this Chick-fil-A for deciding to ask the council to have the rules of the city changed for them,’” Holmes told me.

It’s not the best time for Holmes to lose a job; he and his girlfriend are expecting a baby girl in the next few months. But he doesn’t regret it. Given his passion for transit-friendly development, speaking up against the decision was an easy choice.

Holmes’s job loss is a casualty of a wider struggle. Across North Carolina, city officials talk about expanding pedestrian-friendly development, but the commitment has gaps big enough to fit a car through.

Holmes and other transit advocates have a point: granting exceptions is pretty contradictory to the goals that Charlotte has set for itself in recent years. In 2019, large swaths of land along the Blue Line light rail corridor were rezoned for transit-oriented development, part of a larger, ongoing vision to reimagine Charlotte as a less auto-centric city. That kind of zoning typically doesn’t allow for drive-thrus, because the intent is to promote transit ridership as much as possible. So Chick-fil-A and Fifth Third had to ask for special permission to build them.

It’s yet another reminder that even Charlotte’s best ideas seem to be crippled by its inability to follow through on them. The city’s aspirational $13.5 billion transit plan, for instance, faces a mountain of obstacles, most notably the approval of a 1-cent sales tax which may or may not even end up on the ballot this year. And when it comes to major issues, there’s not a whole lot of consensus among city officials.

“It feels like every time it gets challenged, that big idea that they had, it either barely passes or it gets shut down,” Holmes said. “It’s really disheartening to see that, and depending on the decisions this city makes in the next five years, a lot of people are going to make the decision to stay in it or leave.”

Sure, building another drive-thru or two may seem relatively inconsequential. And there are certainly plenty of Charlotteans who may even consider it as a good thing; after all, demand for drive-thrus has grown significantly during the pandemic, and fast-food restaurants have been transitioning before that toward shrinking dining rooms and increasing drive-thru operations. But we shouldn’t put our long-term goals aside to accommodate businesses chasing relatively short-term economic gains.

The city has said it wants to make Charlotte a place where there are more people like Holmes: people who prefer to walk, bike or take the bus to get where they need to go. But most people aren’t going to ditch their cars unless they’re given a reason to. City council did the right thing by choosing to focus on transit-oriented development back in 2019. No chicken sandwich is worth undoing that.