Category Archives: Greensboro

Cities, Durham, Family and Place, Greensboro, Politics of Place

Coming Back to the Streets, Coming Back to Action

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Many times, it is very difficult for me to feel like I make a real difference in lives by writing. Are words are what people need the most? Don’t they need action?

Well, action is what they got out of me these past two weekends. On the weekend of April 20-21, 2013, a project that had been sitting under some dust, the Pop-Up Promenade came together in Greensboro. A partnership between Action Greensboro, Downtown Greensboro, Inc.,the City of Greensboro, and several community partners, February One Place will become a place in the truest sense of the word every Friday and Saturday from 6-10 p.m. throughout the months of May and June. Food trucks, musicians and who knows what else will show up and ignite this alleyway right in the heart of downtown Greensboro.

One of the centerpieces of this project is a street mural pattern created by graphic designer Nadia Hassan. Half-homage to the lunch counter seats of the Greensboro Four and half-octagonal M.C. Escher memorial, the street itself gets to put on a nice costume and be more than the place where we put our feet and drive our cars. Due to the complicated nature of the design, the city asked that volunteers come out and paint the street. I picked up a paintbrush on April 21 and helped with the first leg of the project. Yesterday (4/26/2013), other volunteers came out and finished the project. While the paint is semi-permanent, we all hope that this paint will last a very long time. I am also excited that this project has been on major local news stations and our city manager has filmed a video to encourage people to the painted street. I can only imagine what our weekends will be like this summer, with lots of people engaging the street and not just from the sidewalk.

Personally, it took me back to drawing Escher-esque patterns in grade school, doing volunteer work as a student leader in undergrad, and back to the basic core of why I’m a community advocate and placemaker. It’s fun to make something beautiful of out of a place. Plus,there’s a pride in doing something with your hands that changes the physical space. I’m not a formal planner or even a full-time community developer and getting a chance to do just that, even for just a few hours on the weekend, was priceless.

 

Painting February One Place in Greensboro. Photo by Cecilia Thompson
Painting February One Place in Greensboro. I’m in the pink hoodie. Photo by Cecelia Thompson

The city of Durham is one step ahead of us in Greensboro though. I spent this past Saturday (4/27) afternoon helping put on Durham’s Longest Dinner Table and Block Party, a Build a Better Block initiative put on by the City of Durham Neighborhood Improvement Services and Marry Durham. The goal was to block off the street and create the longest communal dinner table ever in Durham. The table was a good 1/8 to 1/4 a mile long and there was wonderful food and music all up and down the street. According to the event organizers, 669 people showed up, including a man dressed as Jesus. How’s that for divine intervention. The diversity of people was brilliant. And to think, the City of Durham took the lead, then the community organizations followed. Oh, and the neighborhood is in transition, but holding on to it’s mixture of people and income levels ever so slightly.

There were several personal tugs here.Durham was the first city I completely legally resided in, outside of Greensboro (my years in Raleigh were campus years, in which I only registered to vote and did not establish a permanent household of my own). I learned how to drive on my own in Durham. I rented my first apartment there. I worked my first full-time job there as well. However, I never really got a chance to learn and love Durham. The name of it being the cesspool of the Triangle region lingered so heavy, I was not surprised when I was mugged in my own apartment parking lot in August of 2008. My job fell through and so did several subsequent efforts to find employment in the region. I came home to Greensboro, climbed under a proverbial rock and didn’t go out at dark for months. The streets stopped being my friend.

 

Check me out towards the middle with the red shirt and fro. Great conversations with folks of all ages. Photo by Mary Beth.
Check me out towards the middle with the red shirt and fro. Great conversations with folks of all ages. Photo by Mary Beth.

Yet, here I was, back on a Durham street, eating a nice lunch and chatting with a variety of positive folks. What really touched me was talking to an 11-year-old. Outside of my younger cousins, talking to children doesn’t come easy to me. Yet, as I was telling another table mate about where I lived in Durham and how much of the city I missed while I was there, the young man and I were able to chat about living in and around the same place. I also told him about this page, so hopefully he’s reading this. I also hope that he gets the chance to know that I really enjoyed talking with him and was honored that this page might have some interest to someone his age, who clearly has an aptitude for learning why the world is the way it is. I have no doubt he will do great things in his life if he keeps up his love for learning.

As I bring this to a close, I look forward to great times at the Pop-Up Promenade and look forward to next year’s Longest Food Table. I also feel better about the action of the pen/keyboard. I wouldn’t have known about either event had I not started writing this blog and had I not had a will to be a public servant in some form.

Sometimes actions and words speak at the same volume.

Greensboro, Issues and Ideas, Raleigh

Reconciling Education Reform and New Urbanism

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Schools may not be the urbanist anchors we want, but the community can serve as a school, as well as push for transit that connects other educational needs.

I once read an article in the News and Observer that illustrates the true effect of the modern neighborhood school. In this article, schools in wealthy neighborhoods had established private foundations, some that were able to pay teachers outside of state funding. This is on top of the money raised by their Parent Teacher Associations (PTA). However, schools in poorer neighborhoods were dependent completely on government funding.

Say what you will about who’s to blame for the poor education system, but it often comes down to economics. Equally troubling were the comments on the article. These comments bashed the idea of having a big all-district endowment instead of the per-school endowment. The assumption would be that each school would get equal dollars. I think this makes sense in the public school realm. Yet, this was slammed as socialism by many commentators on the post. One commenter offered to help other schools establish private foundations, but the sad part about him was that he was also anonymous. Still, parents who are buying into public schools, remember that they are public. Your money goes to the public good. If you really are concerned that bad about helping other students that you don’t like or know, consider taking your kids to private school.

A part of good urbanism is having amenities close by. This includes our schools. However, I believe our schools will be the last piece to join a compact, self-sustaining urban neighborhood. There are far too many curriculum choices, learning styles, parenting styles and age groups in fluctuation to allow for a successful neighborhood school network in line with urbanist principles. However, urbanism can embrace equal school access.

For cities like Raleigh that have a large enough urban and suburban base, I propose that we go to zone based schooling.  Zones would have several types of schools in one geographic area. No student would be bused out of this area unless demand far exceeded supply. A plan like this was proposed in Wake County. It was passed, but with far too many holes and disagreements and politics to work well.The main concern was that schools would re-segregate by racial and economic lines. They probably will, but that’s only a problem if the teachers and parents make it a problem. Kids bully, cheat, and fail tests all across the school income spectrum. I witnessed at the suburban high school I attended.  While these privileged kids from the suburbs were in high end classes and some did quite well, not as many did so well in college and so far there aren’t any who are doing above-average things that their high education would speak to. For the record, we do have aspiring lawyers doctors and young engineers. We’ve launched an Olympic athlete and a governor. Yet, just like any school, no matter the level, there’s not a 100% success rate.

Yet, what is success? People have different definitions. My own success came from a parent making me do well. In college I had professors and mentors that cared enough about my future to push me to the top. People are needed to help all students find resources they need and they don’t always cost money. They could be your neighbors. In a dense urban environment that’s economically stable, these neighbors also have careers and occupations that serve as educational outlets.

Ultimately, if we can’t get schools into the neighborhood fold, at least get mentors and teachers there. Find store and business owners who are willing to train students who aren’t too academic to  run tech based businesses or manage stores. Provide an adequate transportation network to and from schools that offer something the neighborhood school doesn’t. The neighborhood school should host other community events either free of charge or at a reasonable rate. Bring mentors in for students who are struggling, as well as for parents who may need help with continuing education and entrepreneurial training. Also, as we hold all parties (parents, teachers, students and the community) accountable for environmental issues, let’s push for educational excellence as well. Lastly, we must remember that success looks different, but we should strive for whatever it is for a particular person.

At this point, we can then start solving the urban schools problem and cross that off our list of urban renewal(the good kind) and suburban retrofit.

creative class, Greensboro, Politics of Place

The Creative Class: Off the Record and On the Money

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Recently, I was chillin’ with some DC artists who were visiting Elsewhere, one of my favorite creative spaces here in Greensboro. Many of the people, who live in a very culturally rich city, had been waiting years for the opportunity to go down and see this art space that is now getting a lot of  attention and press from mainstream and trade publications, along with other cultural institutions and organization. The executive director of Elsewhere is also very engaged in the sense of place , creative placemaking and his role in how that works.

I was not officially part of their visit, but I valued so much the cultural and regional exchange inherent in being able to chat with the visitors, as well as staff at the museum, many who are becoming good friends and partners. Our conversations went back and forth to history, culture, cost of living, and what it means to create.

That to me is what makes being in a city great. No matter what size, there are cultural connections to be had when there are a good number of cultural institutions, bars and restaurants, and homes in a central location. This exchange happened on a First Friday, the gallery walk/festival which has reignited many a downtown, small town or neighborhood.

Sadly, we still have the development community who still just doesn’t get it. I’m praying, crossing my fingers and knocking on wood that when two new buildings are built in my apartment complex, the rent doesn’t go up. While the DCers were happy to hear what I pay a month in rent, I explained that it was our equivalent of the condos-at-any-cost strategy. (However, the beer is really that cheap guys and so are the southern-style hot dogs I didn’t get to feed you because the joint shuts down early even on Fridays). Anyway, this particular evening was a nice grass-is-greener type exchange.

It also highlights what I think is the worst problem with the name “Creative Class.” These people were creative, but not necessarily rich. Most were White Americans, who appeared to have some middle-class upbringing. Yet, I too consider myself an artist. I’m middle-class and so are my parents. But I’m still black. The original theory failed to take into account cultural and even gender diversity. Jamal Green does a great job laying out those shortcomings of the theory. The orginial theory seems to only reward development, increase of salaries,increase of property values, and gay diversity, things that are heavily evident among educated or high-income people.

The development and salary piece is why I think Florida should have named his people and his theory, the Knowledge-Class. While there are artists and creative types in that class, attorneys, doctors and others that have a lot of knowledge and command high salaries aren’t necessarily creative. More information has come out on how  the artist is not the real gentrifier. Also, the arts community is openly and enthusiastically embracing its women and non-white members. These folks are driving traffic and dollars to arts institutions, along with allowing people of all income levels to engage in their creations.

I’ll end with the next logical question. How can we reconcile artists, hard laborers, cubicle dwellers and people who lucked out on millions, retirees, disabled and even children without demonization over who causes ills such as homelessness, gentrification or globalization? Can we talk about knowledge workers and creative workers separately, so that we get a better view of where our economy truly stands?

Image: Young man and woman taking pictures of each other, by Flickr user ralphbijker, under a Creative Commons license.

Greensboro, humor, snow

Why Do Southerners Go Crazy Over Snow?

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Editors note, January 4, 2018: I wrote this when I still lived in Greensboro and was still allowed to marvel at the snow. Since I wrote this I feel like it snows in Greensboro and points south and slightly west at least once a year when it didn’t use to. It also gets cold. However, I think it’s worth reminding people everyone’s not prepared for inclement weather of any type.  Especially my friends and colleagues that I’ve picked up out West and in the MidAtlantic states. Go here though to prepare for walking and biking in extreme cold and extreme heat.

Last night (January  18, 2013) in Greensboro, Richmond, Charlotte, Raleigh, and yesterday afternoon in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, it snowed. That’s kind of a big deal for us.

Chicagoians, New Yorkers, Canadians, and any and all others who see snow once a week from September to March can go ahead and laugh.

Why does the sight (and to be honest, the thought) of snow make us go crazy and strip grocery shelves of bread and milk? Here are my thoughts as to why:

–First, 90% of our snow forecasts never happen. There should be a YouTube file of all the times our local weather folks go out in their weather gardens and start getting us hyped up over one snowflake or the temperature that might drop below freezing at just the right time. I also give points to this being our first snow forecast of the year and it actually happening. Especially since I did my Target run at 4:30 p.m. in a torrential rain downpour. By 7:30 this was a snow pour, with thunder and lightning. Yeah, how about that weather.

–Because 90% of our snowcasts never happen, We can count the times we’ve seen snow on our hands. While this is more true for Gen X and Millennial southerners, my boomer parents and war generation grandparents still get just as excited. Maybe it’s because my parents remember helping me make a snowman in 1988 that was twice my height (I was 3). Maybe it’s because they remember how in 1993 we had a mixture of snow and ice just like we did last night. The power went out.  Meanwhile, 2000 shut down the whole city for 8 days. We went to school for extra hours for the rest of the year after that. 2001 gave us the thought of a white Christmas. 2010 actually brought us one.

–And here we are now at 2013. I’ll be putting on my snow boots to get to work soon, but for now, I’m going to enjoy the thought that it’s just enough to be pretty and not enough to be a major hassle.  Even the train (and the buses) are running. Well, the Piedmont is. Check it out at the station below. Queue the thoughts of Thomas the Tank Engine in the snow. The power will come on soon. The sun is shining.

I will step away from the humor again for a moment and wish for safe travels for those of you who are traveling. Call the power company until they get the power back on. If they can stop cutting down our trees because we protest, they can do their basic job of restoring power too. Oh and I think the sun will melt the snow off my car. I’m thankful I’m walking distance.

Amtrak's Piedmont arrives for it's morning run on January 19, 2013. (Photo Credit Kristen Jeffers)
Amtrak’s Piedmont arrives for its morning run on January 19, 2013. (Photo Credit Kristen Jeffers)

Anyway, happy snow day fellow Southerners! Be careful no matter what you have to do, take lots of pictures, and add this one to the finger count. Also, here’s the link to the latest reports from the News & Record, with a nice picture right outside my office.

Cities, Family and Place, Greensboro

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year! New Things to Come for the Black Urbanist

Christmas Tree at Center City Park

Good morning all from Greensboro, where it’s been Christmas for several hours now. Tomorrow we start the Kwanzaa and the extended Christmas season.
We welcome 2013 in a few days.

It’s that notion of 2013  that I want to meditate on right now. In 2012, I celebrated two years of putting together this blog, which has now grown into a full-fledged website. As you will see if you are reading this on the website, I’ve done another redesign. With this redesign, I will be expanding my editorial content, adding more audio, video, book reviews, and even more of the placemaking commentary you’ve come here to enjoy, learn, and share.

I’m also looking to hear from you! If you have something that you think would be a good fit for the page, such as an urbanist commentary on a place in North Carolina, where people of color stand in the new urbanism, or the story of how you created a better block with barely any capital besides sweat equity, I want to hear it! Email me at theblackurbanist@gmail.com.

I am once again grateful to The Atlantic Cities, The Congress for New Urbanism, Piedmont Together, Sustainable Cities Collective, my undergraduate alma mater, my current employer ,and many others who have shared my work this year. I am also thankful to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, for conferring on me the status of being a Master of Public Affairs with a concentration in community and economic development. Were it not for my course in urban political systems, this blog website would not exist.

I’ll be on Facebook and Twitter throughout the holiday as well as working out the kinks on this page. I’m still working on getting the podcast so it can be downloaded, but in the meantime, please share the stream with others.

Merry Christmas! Happy Kwanzaa! Happy New Year! Happy anything else I forgot! Let’s celebrate in the community today and everyday!

Alexandria, Cities, Family and Place, Greensboro, Issues and Ideas, Politics of Place, What is urban planning?

What If The City Doesn’t Want You Anymore?

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A study of urban political systems is a study in the history of cities spitting out or sectioning off their least desirables, namely lower class and people of color of any class. First, it was the gentry of the streetcar era that found they could move further away from their servant class. Then it was housing covenants that kept out non-whites from post-war suburbs. The 1960s brought urban rewewal and slum clearance. Today, we have people who are underwater in shoddy built suburban houses because the city was such a bad place, we needed to get everyone out. Meanwhile, shiny new condos and apartments are filling cities. Sadly, or should I say ironically, some of these places are failing to sell units. A great primer on this history is the textbook City Politics: The Political Economy of Urban America by Dennis R. Judd and Todd Swanstrom.

One major example of failed “urban renewal,” which I was not familiar with until recently, is the World Trade Center complex. The area was a vibrant neighborhood until the Port Authority decided to start being a real estate developer instead of a promoter and operator of decent ports and commuter subways. City Journal has more details on how the taxpayers of New York are dealing with a potential white elephant, which now has not just one, but two tragic events attached to it.

Another example of modern urban renewal is the “entertainment district” that many downtowns have become, including my own. As a woman, I can do all of my shopping downtown, and there are a couple of affordable boutiques. Yet, men are out of luck. Outside of thrift stores, there are no suit shops for men. The restaurants have a new allure, yet, we don’t have shiny new stores downtown at all. I love the local consignment shops and the old theater that plays classic movies. Yet, what about the chain stores that fill our shopping malls and power centers that attract the mass majority of the population?

Once upon a time, downtown was the shopping mall. Department stores were locally owned and did not pay workers inhumane wages. Another concept that’s now foreign downtown is the supermarket. The farmers market we had was great, but it only operates in the summer. What am I supposed to do about fresh food during the winter months if I want to be true to my walkable, urbanist principles? What if I had no car because I was broke, but I was trying to live in a place where everything was close by? Downtown looks cute architecturally, but it far underperforms for the style of real estate it contains.

Those are the surface problems with cities pushing folks out. The real problems come when the suburbs they come into are suburbs in the truest since of the word. They were only subdivisions to begin with and there are no centralized services, shops, or even schools. People complain about parents not coming to schools in low-income areas. The suburbs make it worse by forcing these people to go even further to their schools, possibly via a non-existent bus. What does one make of the dead Kmarts and dead Borders that were so hot when the demographics of the neighborhood were different? Granted, Borders was part of an overstreched business model, but the one in the “inner-ring” suburb I grew up in, up the street from the dying mall, died first.

So hence why I fault those that want to willingly be part of a failing system that traps people. Many suburbs are truly towns and offer people services in walking distance, as well as concern for all it’s citizenry. Yet, too many suburbs are housing subdivisions with nothing to offer. With cities that practice covert forms of urban renewal and suburbs that don’t want to recognize their role as small cities or big towns, we are left with not only suburbs of self-hate, but hateful, hostile cites as well.

One last note before I close out this post. Posts like this and my previous post expose how different governments consider one place a town, a city, or a suburb. I see Greensboro as one big suburb with two to four walkable urban areas, some with all the necessary services such as Lindley Park and others without such as Downtown proper. In other states, a suburb may be an actual city such Alexandria, VA, but thanks to the media, overshadowed by it’s neighbor across the Potomac River.

Either way, there is no excuse for governments of any type to contribute to the demise or the migration of their citizenry. Putting a subdivision next to a landfill, selling out downtowns to one developer, and continuing to pursue loop roads that are known contributors to sprawl are not good. Governments, as well as residents, need to come to terms with being good citizens. Stop stealing, whether it’s your neighbor’s car or “prime land” that’s already a small-scale, but thriving community.

Photo of Downtown Greensboro by Flickr user dmattphotography.

Family and Place, Food, Greensboro, Rural, Traveling as An Urbanist

Gratitude for a Country Road (And All of You!)

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Today is Thanksgiving Day in the United States and this afternoon I will I embark on my annual journey to see both sides of my family within a span of 5 hours. While many folks have the tradition of watching the Macy’s parade, watching football and eating copious amounts of food, my most unique Thanksgiving tradition involves one long country road.

On a regular basis, the concept of one road=one family rules my life. Within ten minutes I can be at my mom’s house. Five for my dad’s. Of course you’ve picked up on the houses being separate, but it’s been so long, I’ve worked at making sure it doesn’t feel like there was separation.

Meanwhile, on Thanksgiving, it’s worked out on many years that both family celebrations are within 30 minutes of each other, connected by one (technically four, but it’s close enough) country road.

I’m very thankful for that country road. It’s the same road I learned to drive on and it’s taught me the value of the rural environment. As I drive over the rolling hills of the North Carolina Piedmont, I see small farms. I see all types of home architecture, including one house that keeps adding turrets, stained glass windows and doors. My mom and I have bets on it being a bed-and-breakfast, but who knows? There’s even a small waterfall cresting from a dam at another point of the journey.

This road and the country surrounding it is why I love the urban transect so much. For those of you who aren’t urban planners, the urban transect is a system developed in the 1990’s to portray the optimal progression of land use. It goes from New York level urban density, to un-claimed natural land. In between there are levels for used farmland, small town main-streets and even lesser dense suburbs. It accounts for all the desired land uses in a way that honors compact living, efficient development and the need for some communities to have space from their neighbors. It allows for the rural areas much like the ones I’m visiting today to exist in a modern, urban-centric, placemaking scheme.

We talk about density and connectivity and the ability to bring communities together in the placemaking blogosphere on a regular basis. Thanks to this road, and the years both families gather on this road, I get to feel what it’s like to be a part of my first community, my own family.

And on that note, let me take the time to express my thanks and gratitude to everyone who has followed me on Twitter and Facebook, given me a byline in another publication, read and shared this blog, heard me speak , invited me to speak and all of the above and more. Let us all be grateful for the great places in our lives and work hard to preserve them all.

apartment living, Brooklyn, Food, Greensboro, Issues and Ideas, Things At a Place

Identifying Real Place Inferiority

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Ambulance Chaser

Upon opening my inbox and my social media streams on a recent morning, I was met with this article. In the article, published by the News & Record and written by a fellow blogger Michael Turner, laments the lack of an identity that we have here in Greensboro.

He has some good things to say, but the real problem is not that we don’t have an identity, the problem is that we feel like we are lesser than someone else when it comes to our city. I’ve said this before and I will say it again-ALL CITIES HAVE PROBLEMS. Not just cities, but towns, suburbs, farms and anything else that’s either incorporated and providing municipal services or working hard to make sure the cows come home from graze.

The problem of having no identity is nowhere near as bad as the problem of no heat, no water and no way of getting medical supplies and food. Thanks to Sandy,at least 7,000 people in New York are having that very problem. To cap it off, they still have rent due. Their landlord- the public housing authority. There are middle class people, including first responders, who are facing devastation they never thought they’d see. One minute, they are living the American Dream in the NYC area despite 9/11. The next minute, their home is gone. Do you think they care as much about the ideal and image of NYC or do they care about rebuilding their home or getting basic needs?

I’ve written articles here before about making the best of what you have and creating your own identity wherever you are. Yet, I say this not to force people to stay in unsafe(as in, you hear gunshots nightly and you have stuff stolen on a regular basis and someone’s been assaulted) conditions. I say this once again as I’ve said it before, that the message of place inferiority rings hollow when one has money and connections to make things better.

Please remember our fellow brothers and sisters who are still struggling to make that happen. Many are not lazy, most are just out of luck.

Image above courtesy of Flickr user Andreanna Moya Photography.

Cities, Greensboro, Issues and Ideas, Politics of Place, Raleigh, Things At a Place, Transportation, What is urban planning?

My Own Letter to the Nation, In Terms of the State and the City

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Do you know where you’re going to?
Do you like the things that life is showing you?
Where are you going to?
Do you know?- “Theme From Mahogany (Do You Know Where You’re Going To)”

On Election Night, President Barrack Obama earned a second term. Pot and gay marriage are legal in more states. The governor’s mansion and the General Assembly in North Carolina are all Republican, save one good friend of mine and a few others sprinkled here and there. We elected other local folks to our school board, our executive cabinet and our county commission.

We are also still dealing with the aftermath of another storm that shifts the political climate, along with does major, possibly irreparable damage to communities. This tests local governments and shows how much a community really needs a backbone.

My friend Kaid Benfield has laid out a good set of mandates for the federal and state governments as far as planning goes.

I want to take it further, as we are now back into the city council cycle in Greensboro and we are dealing with a new regime in the state government. Don’t believe me? I had a front row seat to the last campaign and I am already hearing chatter about who is going to run next and how. Also, with the election of Trudy Wade in our fifth district to the state house, we have a wide open seat that represents one of our wealthiest areas. This area is also an attractive area for our newcomers and this person, whomever it is, needs to be focused on the future.

So what are my mandates for the next four years? Here’s a start

–Real talk around commuter rail and light rail in all of our major cities and connecting our major cities. Governor-Elect McCrory opened the Blue Lynx line in Charlotte, working with city leaders of all stripes to get that done. I want him to keep the efforts going by Governor Perdue and others to maintain federal high-speed rail funding. I also want funding to go to adding a third train from Charlotte to Raleigh that leaves at midnight and arrives in Greensboro at approximately 1:30 AM. The Piedmont train is almost always on time. The Carolinian has issues due to it’s leaving the state and going all the way to New York. Get this train to an on-time schedule, and use this to build on an already established commuter rail system that’s gaining ridership at a rate higher than any line in the country.

–Keep our university system affordable. Do not let the passing of Bill Friday give you permission to completely dismantle what is already a great system and a revenue generating system even with the lack of income from students. Don’t build up physical campuses at the expense of having good research faculty, good and caring teaching faculty and students, and students who finish in a timely manner without debt. We will fail in North Carolina without proper higher education, that doesn’t choke students with debt.

–Continue to increase pedestrian, bike and other inner-city infrastructure– We have a lot of good bones here in Greensboro and in other towns and cities across the state and the nation. The General Assembly needs to revoke the privilege to allow cities NOT to demand that landlords be accountable for their houses. Far too many renters, many who have already suffered from foreclosures, are struggling with being able to stay in homes that have toxic issues. Also, we need a decent water and sewer system on the east side. Part of the excuse for not investing in this area is this issue of water/sewer and we need that covered, so that we can deal with the very reall inequity that still exists in East Greensboro. Similar areas in Raleigh and Charlotte, with lower-incomes and browner people, still have lots of mainstream business and retail opportunities. We need to do what we can (save adding the road into NC A&T’s farm), to get the East side at parity. Also, we can support another performing arts center, concentrated in the downtown area, if we work to make sure our transportation and also the groups who need to use it for their own personal economies and wellbeing (dancers, actors, singers, other local artists),know it’s theirs.

-Finally, lets keep grassroots efforts moving. I’m looking forward to this film and discussion on next Wednesday on the film Fixing the Future. A lot of people organizing this event I consider friends, colleagues and fellow foot soliders into what makes Greensboro great. I know of two active Better Block projects run by friends in Memphis and Durham. The folks here in Greensboro represent co-op businesses, environmental groups and others concerned with giving back to their own community. Oh, and we’ve done very well with having food trucks here in Greensboro, thanks to grassroots and mainstream support. As my friend Rosetta Thurman has stated, we cannot afford four more years of leadership by proxy.

Let’s do this people! What are some other things on your wishlist for this next election cycle and the next four years.

Cities, Family and Place, Greensboro, Guest Post, Politics of Place

Guest Post-An Open Letter on the State of Greensboro

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In honor of Election Day in the United States, I wanted to post this reflection of the political climate of Greensboro, where I live and work and inspired to be a placeist most of all. It’s written by my friend Graham Sheridan, a 23 year old Greensboro native and a graduate of Grimsley High School and Washington and Lee University. He is currently a Master’s student at Brown University in Providence, RI, in public administration. We met last year on the campaign trail for city council. My candidate lost, his won. We both love Greensboro with all of our hearts, so campaigning and making sure good people got on city council, was personal. Also, as Millennials, we have a very different view of some of the old struggles of our hometown. Without further ado, I’m giving you Graham’s letter, which outlines this different view:

An Open Letter on the State of Greensboro

This is the sort of piece editors usually write on the eve of an election – a sort of “the choice before us is clear” piece. But the choice is not clear, or, more aptly; I am not sure what the choices are. Instead, I intend to look at how Greensboro is doing today, examine what trends push our town, and see not who, but what ideas, can put our city on the best course for the next ten years.

When I was campaigning for Councilwoman Hoffmann, people would balk a little at how much money and effort went into her election. I would always answer that Greensboro, especially Mrs. Hoffmann’s district, has graduated from being a Big Town to being a Small City. We ran a Small City campaign in order to win. In Charleston, SC for example, city council and county commission candidates spend big money on staffs and field offices. In 2009, Mayor Johnson learned the hard way that Greensboro has grown to be a small city. She is a politician of the Big Town era, and a lot of the people who voted against her were newcomers and neighborhoods that were annexed into the city, people who did not grow up in Big Town era Greensboro. Nonetheless, almost everyone on City Council today is a holdover of the Big Town era or still clings to the Big Town power structure for support. The old structure proves hard to shake off.

The Big Town model was based on four quadrants – professional class white people, working class white people, professional class black people, and working class black people. These quadrants dominated economic and social life in Greensboro for many years. The professionals had white-collar jobs at the mill or at Jefferson Pilot, or were lawyers, doctors, shop owners and the like. Working class people worked on the floor in the mill or in the rail yard or some such. These divisions were easily seen and completely understood. On occasion there were a couple of exceptions made, for example, some Jewish people were worked into the system. Now, things are a much more mixed up in Greensboro. We live in a multi-ethnic, multilingual city. Jobs are spread around more companies. Unlike previous eras, we lack a monolithic all-controlling employer who can dictate and bankroll what happens in town. For example, when people in Greensboro wanted to start a golf tournament, the Bryan family just wrote a check. Notice how many places and institutions in Greensboro are named for the same few people, people who dominated their quadrants. These quadrants no longer describe our population, and Greensboro’s economy no longer centers on one or two huge employers.

I wonder if even what we have left of the Big Town power structure would still be in place if so many of Greensboro’s new citizens were not immigrants without voting ability. When I go to the Super G International grocery I wonder how different city council would look if even 15% of those residents voted in municipal elections.
Most of the Super G’s customers, however, are left out of the Big Town power structure, because they do not fit any of the quadrants.

A few factions dictate the opinions and votes of the people within the Big Town power structure. The Country Club and the African-American Church get notoriety as the two most noted and visible. These still dominate the conversation in Greensboro, and tend to get their people elected. However, these organizations are starting to show cracks. Especially in the 2009 election, when the Tea Party, organized locally as Conservatives for Guilford County (C4GC), was able to get several of its people in office. Or in 2011, when some of the African-American groups tried to unseat Councilman Jim Kee, who still won handily.

De Tocqueville worried in the mid-1800s that democracy would fall to the tyranny of the majority, that the rights of smaller groups of citizens would not be protected. In Greensboro we do see this in votes like Amendment One[our ballot initiative to amend the constitution to define marriage in North Carolina]. But what we really live in is a tyranny of the participators. Some people have outsized influence because they participate and pay attention and lobby. Others, who may have real concerns, because they fail to participate, never get heard. Some companies and groups that that employ a lot of people do not participate very much in local politics. This does not fit the definition of tyranny per se, because anyone can enter and start participating at any moment, but the political circles take effort and time to break into.

This self-selection creates some of the conundrums of connecting with voters for Mrs. Hoffmann, especially our experiment with public office hours, when we post a place and time on her Facebook for the public to come speak to her and voice their concerns. Most of the people who have something to tell city council can just pick up the phone and call Ms. Hoffmann whenever they want. She knows what they think, because they show up and tell her. So they have no need to come to the public office hours. Other people, who do not pay attention, would not know to look for Councilwoman Hoffmann’s office hours, and probably do not know their councilperson’s name. Thus, we have a huge self-selection problem. So very few people show up to have coffee with Councilwoman Hoffmann. The people who self-select to care about politics, and by extension to run for office, are not necessarily the best people to do the jobs, or lobby city council. But what should those public officials really be doing? What actions could they take to bring serious positive progress to Greensboro? Or is Greensboro okay?

To me, most of our civic issues come back to the same core: the dissolution of Greensboro’s Big Town Institutions, and debate surrounding what Small City institutions our citizens and businesspeople should create to take their place. The Big Town institutions and Big Town civil society were demolished by a one-two punch: the closure of the Big Town economic drivers, and integration.

In Richard Russo’s Empire Falls everyone in the small town of Empire Falls, Maine waits in vain for the old textile mill to open back up. It was the center of the town, and with its passing went the beating heart of livelihood in the little town. You can see that desperation in the News & Record sometimes. People imagine that some company (Dell, Citi, HondaJet) is going to come to town and employ 4,000 people. This, of course, is not going to happen. But people are upset, because the old institutions – the mills: and Jefferson Pilot – no longer exist at the scale they once did. Lorillard still makes cigarettes in Greensboro, but a few engineers run an automated factory, not thousands of people hand-rolling cigarettes.

The Performing Arts Center debate, too, has Big Town/Small City groups at odds. Some of the more progressive voices in town, and many of the Small City young people, see this as a straightforward choice between progress and stagnation. A lot of the Big Town politicians see it as West Greensboro spending money on their pet projects rather than on East Greensboro. Those Big Town politicians, however, ignore what really happened to East Greensboro.

The second blow of the one-two punch knocking out the Big Town institutions, integration, has changed much of Greensboro’s landscape. You can tell this especially in our debates about grocery stores in East Greensboro. The ones that used to be there packed up and left because some of the old, beautiful, neighborhoods around A&T that used to be Black Gentry neighborhoods have been abandoned. What were once mixed-income areas are no longer. Wealthy black families moved west or to black gentry suburbs along Alamance Church Road. Jonathan Franzen recently wrote in the New Yorker about “the obliteration of all social distinctions by money.” Many members of the Big Town power structure have a hard time accepting this. We celebrate every citizen’s ability to choose where she wants to live and go to school without fear of discrimination. Still, now that these changes have come, we must examine how to protect and reinvigorate neighborhoods left behind by social change. The old quadrants (professional white people, professional black people, working white people, and working black people) no longer apply geographically as they once did. Those raw economics, rather than public projects such as the Aquatic Center, are to blame for many of the problems in East Greensboro.

Integration has also taken a toll on two of the major institutions of East Greensboro – NC A&T State University and Bennett College. Just as wealthy African-Americans have been integrated into white neighborhoods, high-achieving black students have been integrated into white schools. We have our first black president and he went not to Morehouse and Howard Law but to Columbia and Harvard Law. The collapse of the black gentry neighborhoods and the openness of UNCG have made Bennett an ever-less appealing place to go to school. A&T has the advantage of being a state school, but I worry about its place in culture and its status among employers. NC State has the advantage in recruiting and placing the best black engineers now. We may be seeing the last generation of black leaders who were educated at HBCUs. In the face of this distress, A&T is expanding. It does still admirably serve well its function of training African-Americans in the sciences. Maybe the leadership hopes that being North Carolina’s backup engineering school will prove a worthwhile niche. Equality and choice are exactly what Jessie Jackson fought for, but it takes a toll on his alma mater NC A&T SU.

Technology, globalization, and integration have blown open the old Big Town economy and Big Town power structure. Many of the institutions that brought Greensboro through the 20th century are no more. Our town needs new ideas, entrepreneurs, and energy to be a part of the 21st century economy. Additionally, the new citizens of all types contribute to Greensboro’s energy and excitement.

We have great opportunities that come from the cracks in the Big Town power structure. Activists can get more done, because they can cross quadrants and build alliances based on common interests. They do not have to worry about angering the man who employs 15% of the town. The mill town and company town Small business owners have more of a say, and, for example, when M’Coul’s Public House worries about how noise ordinances will affect the St. Patrick’s Day party, powerful people listen.

However, the trade-off of the erosion of the Big Town structure is that civic life is ever more important. In the Performing Arts Center debate, we hear people scream, over and over, “find private funding!” These people hearken back to the Big Town days, imagining that a Joseph M. Bryan will come along and throw in $10 million and a Performing Arts Center will happen. Those days are over. Greensboro’s society grows more meritocratic and more based on activism, mutual respect, and a cosmopolitan mix of people of all sorts. Instead of living under a rich benefactor, we must come together and make public decisions of what to do with communal money. The democratic process takes longer, just ask the members of the council-appointed Performing Arts Center Task Force (full disclosure: the author’s mother is on the task force) but the process is necessary for decisions concerning large amounts of public money.

The Performing Arts Center debate, really, just illustrates the new normal in decision-making for Greensboro. Good old-fashioned community organizing will be the rule from now on to affect change in the town. It worked for the opponents of the White Street Landfill being re-opened. The Big Town people on City Council, who thought they could pit one quadrant against the others failed to see the new Small City mentality. Groups, especially the Concerned Citizens of Northeast Greensboro, were adept at crossing quadrants, and getting people who lived far from White Street interested and activist on their neighborhood’s behalf.

To sum up, we no longer live in the Greensboro of the 60s. We see that everywhere; from how many people line up to live in CityView to political organization of night club owners. The Big Town structure endures, but in a weakened state. The power has spread to more people. The question now comes: what do the people want to do with the power? What kind of town do they want to live in? We must ask them.