How a Booming City Can Be More Equitable

[M II A II R II K]

How a Booming City Can Be More Equitable


OCT 15, 2018

By BARRY YEOMAN

Read More: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/...munity/572986/

In Durham, North Carolina, abandoned factories are becoming tech hubs and microbreweries. But building a shared commitment to its most vulnerable citizens could be a trickier feat of redevelopment.

- Durham, a city of 260,000 where I’ve lived for more than 30 years, seems like a place that has figured out this formula. Civic life is an obsession here. We elect social justice activists to City Council; our local institutions push back against the national animus toward immigrants, Muslims, and those under the LGBTQ umbrella. We support small businesses, particularly ones that pay a living wage. On the streets, people say hello to each other. But building community, I’ve found, is not like building a house. Or, more accurately, it’s like building a house with a bunch of partners using different blueprints, while others are disassembling the foundation and yet others have confiscated some of the tools.

- When I arrived in the city as a reporter in 1985, I couldn’t find a welcoming pub, and I had to drive five miles into the suburbs for a decent pizza. Hearing live music meant leaving town. Without a vibrant streetscape, people didn’t walk. Economically, the city was hurting, too. The tobacco and textile factories that defined Durham’s economy were shutting down. In the 1960s, an expressway cleaved the city center in two, wiping out a neighborhood called Hayti, once known as the “Mecca of Black Capitalism.” Even after 20 years, downtown had not yet recovered: Many of its buildings were vacant, and its streets emptied at 5.

- Today, Durham is enjoying a headline-grabbing renaissance. Downtown pulses with microbreweries and international dining. A once-empty tobacco factory now boasts apartments, a public-radio studio, and an artificial river. (“The mark of a successful city,” The Atlantic’s James Fallows writes in his new book, Our Towns, “is having a river walk, whether or not there’s a river.”) Another old cigarette factory has become a biotech incubator. Jazz and R&B pour from clubs. Cocktail bars sling $16 coladas. By one survey, Durham is now the South’s fifth-most diverse mid-sized city. But its economic resurgence is not being distributed equitably.

- In a city with no majority race, the patrons of these businesses are disproportionately white. Likewise, white professionals are buying up houses in central-city neighborhoods, driving up prices and making it harder for people of color to remain. If this sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the story of urban America in the 21st century. “People have fallen back in love with cities,” says Gustavo Velasquez, an assistant secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Obama administration and now a program director at the Urban Institute. “You have a complete reversal of what we saw back in the ’70s and early ’80s. Now the place to be is as close to the major job centers as possible.”

- That in-migration has costs, though. In Washington, D.C., where Velasquez focuses his energies, “we are losing more minorities and more low-income people than gaining.” --- Pierce Freelon, the Durham-born founder of Blackspace, told me that 20th-century highway-building and 21st-century gentrification are, to him, flip sides of the same phenomenon: the pushing of a city’s most vulnerable to the periphery by free-market forces that open an increasingly wide chasm of racial and economic inequality. “Community,” he said, “is about thwarting that trajectory.”

- “In nearly every other industrialized nation besides the United States, there is near-consensus that purely private land markets will not meet the needs of the poor,” wrote Peter Moskowitz in the 2017 book How to Kill a City, “and so measures have been taken to ensure that at least some land remains off the market or subject to regulations that make it affordable.” But local governments in the U.S. tend to encourage high-end residential and commercial growth. That might augment the tax base, Moskowitz writes, “but it also reshapes what cities are, turning them into explicit supporters of inequality.”

- Durham isn’t as expensive as San Francisco and New York. But three-figure rents here are disappearing, and the median home is now listed for sale at $283,000. And Durham’s local officials have limited options to offset the trend, thanks to North Carolina state law. “We have a legislature that is using its power to clamp down on cities,” says Durham Mayor Steve Schewel. “There are many things we’d like to do in Durham that we can’t.” For example, municipalities here are barred from practicing inclusionary zoning, which would require developers to set aside a percentage of their units for lower-income families.

- I’ve watched the housing crisis play out in my own neighborhood, which is sandwiched between downtown and Duke University and mirrors the city’s demographics. For much of my 30 years here, I was calling in gunshots nightly. Now century-old bungalows and Craftsman-style houses are being renovated and flipped for ten times what I paid in 1987. Crime has gone down, for which I’m grateful. But in today’s free market, older residents, artists, activists, and working-class families, all of whom gave this neighborhood its texture, are often priced out.

- There is one thing, however, that has helped our neighborhood remain economically diverse: Around the time I moved here, my neighbors welcomed a nonprofit with an innovative homeownership model. The Durham Community Land Trust fixes up houses and resells them to families earning below a certain income. --- Families buy the houses at below market prices; when they sell, it must be to another qualified buyer, at a modest mark-up limited by a formula. This keeps the houses permanently affordable. The trust has also provided credit counseling to help prevent foreclosures and worked with residents to advocate for better policing and infrastructure.

- Like many cities, Durham boasts a technology incubator that has attracted young entrepreneurial energy downtown. It’s called American Underground (AU) because it began in the basement of American Tobacco, the renovated factory with the faux river. Then, like a plant with a rhizome system, AU spread across the railroad tracks and popped up in two Main Street buildings. It markets itself as a “counter-story to Silicon Valley” for both its urban location and its efforts to nurture women- and minority-owned businesses. “We had goals of being the most diverse tech hub in the world,” says Jes Averhart, AU’s former director of corporate and community partnerships.

- If Durham’s history is proof of anything, it stands for the idea that building community is an all-hands effort that requires buy-in from everybody—elected officials, civic organizations, religious leaders, artists, and businesses. And it can only be built by lowering barriers—to owning a home, to exhibiting your paintings, to launching a startup, to gaining a voice in public policy, to feeling like you belong in the town square.

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[Yuri]

I don't buy this panic about people being priced out. If one region becomes desirable, people will be willing to pay more for living there. That's good for the current residents that can sell their property for a high price or just stay there in a more desirable neighbourhood.

If the State tries to intervene, the result is always higher prices and inefficiency that ultimately cause decay.