Baldwin’s Council Cronies Erect Housing Hurdles

Baldwin’s Council Cronies Erect Housing Hurdles

This gentrification–cruelly forced to be funded by the council’s constituents through taxes and fees–is not done with respect to or value for the history, culture, and communities of Downtown. It’s for the investors; for the migratory wealthy who seek new investments for their capital in an expanding city.

Public Forum: Will New Bern’s Mass Upzoning Revitalize Neighborhoods or Eliminate Them?

Public Forum: Will New Bern’s Mass Upzoning Revitalize Neighborhoods or Eliminate Them?

Join us on Sunday, January 21st at 2pm at the Tarboro Road Community Center (121 N. Tarboro Street, Raleigh) to learn how you can help stop the city’s urban renewal of New Bern Avenue. Stand up for Raleigh’s Black history and for revitalizing existing neighborhoods and businesses along the New Bern Avenue Bus Rapid Transit line rather than forcing them out.

December 12, 2023 City Council Meeting

December 12, 2023 City Council Meeting

Highlights Despite previously guaranteeing 3 minutes per speaker at Public Comments and establishing a special meeting to accommodate that, Mayor Baldwin instituted a one-minute limit per speaker because 108 people had signed up to speak. Four councilors voted for...

New Bern BRT: Bait & Switch or Just Action?

New Bern BRT: Bait & Switch or Just Action?

In 2017, ‘The Color of Law’ landed like a bombshell in progressive housing policy circles. In Raleigh, powerful development interests saw the opportunity to adopt — some would say co-opt — Richard Rothstein’s anti-segregation message by promoting pro-density zoning rules that not only lifted exclusionary zoning rules, but went much further. By 2020, a new alliance of developer money, self-righteous Council aspirants and their white privileged adherents provided the lubrication to fast track pro-density zoning proposals. Novice Councilors were assured that pesky public input needn’t impede this sweet deal to meld profits and equity.

Don’t Break Raleigh’s Transit Promises

Don’t Break Raleigh’s Transit Promises

If their egregious zoning case, Z-92-22, gets a positive vote from City Council, it will usher in the worst kind of Urban Renewal. Affordable homes will be scraped off, to be replaced by luxury apartment buildings that only the affluent can afford to live in. Picture a stretched-out North Hills, replete with restaurants and bars – and parking decks – but with no room for the working-class.

BRT Transit that Benefits All and Displaces None

BRT Transit that Benefits All and Displaces None

New Bern Avenue is living proof of the bigoted depredations our country and city have imposed on Black Americans. It is also living proof of Black Americans’ determination to fashion lives and communities of faith and hope in the face of overpowering forces of greed and racism. Of all projects which have the potential of restorative justice and to make good on Raleigh’s pledge to dismantle the city’s policies and systems of racial inequity and oppression with equitable transit, this is it.