[Durham INC] Fwd: Letter from professors re development in chapel Hill

[Mimi Kessler]

>From the people who teach urban planning at UNC and Duke. Please take this
to heart.

---------- Forwarded message ---------
From:
Date: Tue, May 2, 2023 at 11:06 PM
Subject: Letter from professors re development in chapel Hill

Posted on nextdoor.

The slogan “missing middle” is deceptive. We hope not deliberately so. It
suggests that your goal is to provide affordable housing for the middle
class when it most emphatically is not. Instead, you are pursuing a policy
of deregulation that gives carte blanche to developers whose goal is profit
maximization. With no zoning regulations in place, they can tear down
houses, destroy tree canopies, burden already inadequate infrastructure,
and fill small lots with large luxury townhouses or crowded but lucrative
student rental properties. If you wanted to prevent that outcome, you would
provide guardrails and guarantees. You would look carefully at and consult
with the residents of particular, diverse neighborhoods in order to
ascertain how available housing might be augmented without destroying a
sense of place, history, and community. You would not just throw up your
hands and say, let the market decide. As historians of race and class in
the American South, we could not be more aware of how redlining, racial
covenants, and, yes, zoning policies have perpetuated class and racial
discrimination. We are also very much aware of how current banking and tax
policies disadvantage poor people as well as of how mortgage tax exemptions
and other policies privilege homeowners at the expense of renters. But that
very awareness intensifies our dismay at how you are expending your time
and, most important, your political capital on a policy that will alienate
the very supporters you need for addressing the real problem of affordable
housing. We want to stress the term “affordable.” For the problem of
housing in Chapel Hill and elsewhere is a problem of affordability, which
will not be solved by “more houses,” let alone by allowing developers to
build duplexes, triplexes, etc. anywhere they see fit. It will be solved by
rent control, housing subsidies, requirements that developers provide
affordable units, and so on. In that regard, you seem to have simply
acceded to state legislation that ties the hands of local governments. We
understand the predicament that you—and we, as local citizens—are in. But
why not use your position as local leaders to band together with other
localities and mobilize your citizens to fight to untie those hands? At the
risk of straying from our main subject—the protection of neighborhoods from
unregulated development, the importance of the democratic process, the
prioritization of policies that will produce both affordable housing and a
sense of place and community—we want to add a few comments on your broader
development strategies. Among your stated goals are a “vibrant and
inclusive community.” Who would not support that? And yet this is what we
see. A proliferation of cookie-cutter one plus fives (or variations of the
same). Out of control traffic. Anemic support for parks and other public
spaces. Rising real estate costs that push out local businesses. How can it
be that Kidzu Children’s Museum has been priced out of its current
accessible location? Not to mention that another one and fives seems
destined to be built on top of Mama Dip’s? The Purple Bowl? Really? We
could go on and could go back in time. You want people to frequent and
choose to live downtown. But how are you going to achieve that goal with
chain stores and soulless, ugly buildings? To come back to and add another
dimension to our main point: We are not opposed to mindful consideration of
denser housing in certain areas, especially if density translates into
affordability. We are, for example, supportive of accessary dwelling units.
We know that certain neighborhoods will prefer and benefit from carefully
regulated duplexes and such. We are very much in favor of “walkable
neighborhoods,” although we fail to understand how you are promoting this
goal given the striking absence of sidewalks and streetlights even in
neighborhoods near the university and downtown. In sum, we implore you to
slow down, look beyond current slogans and nostrums, honor democracy, and
have the courage to take on the issue of housing justice in ways that do
not play into the hands of developers and thus further the cause of free
market fundamentalism, which has done so much to undermine community and
solidarity and escalate inequality in our town and throughout the country.
Sincerely, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall, Julia Cherry Spruill Professor Emeritus,
Dept. of History, UNC-Chapel Hill Robert Korstad, Professor Emeritus,
Public Policy and History, Duke University

Sent from my iPhone
-- 
Mimi Kessler
919-599-2892
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