Molly De Marco's blog

{Cross posted from the Chapel Hill News}

A picture of a stop sign graffitied to read “STOP PROGRESS” appeared on Twitter last week. The person who Tweeted it captioned it simply: “Chapel Hill politics in a nutshell.”

A few days later, a community leader expressed to one of us their disappointment in how our community is perceived. “People used to look to us as a leader in innovative policies, a place where cool things were happening. That doesn’t happen anymore.”

How we got to this point is no mystery. Past local elected officials enacted policies that made it difficult to open new businesses and build new kinds of housing. As a result, most development of the past few decades has been low-density, single-family homes on dead-end streets.

On March 4, 2016, the Center for Social Inclusion and its Government Alliance on Race & Equity held a workshop called Advancing Racial Equity: The Role of Government.

This workshop was held at the Chapel Hill Public Library and brought together elected officials from Hillsborough, Carrboro, Durham, and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools Board of Education, as well as town staff from Hillsborough and Carrboro, the Chapel Hill Police Department and the Charlotte Police Department as well as community members who work with the Racial Equity Institute, the Organizing Against Racism Alliance, and Chapel Hill's Justice In Action board.

The purpose of this workshop was to start to build a common language and set of organization ideas around how elected officials and municipal staff can work toward addressing racial inequities in our community.

[Cross-posted from the Chapel Hill News]

We’re fortunate to live in a community with many resources and services. That’s a large part of what makes southern Orange County so appealing to newcomers, and so hard for natives and Carolina graduates to leave.

But our community isn’t perfect. We don’t have it all. The way we live is changing, and so our community and the things we want to see in it have to change, too. How we currently live and how people will live in 50 years are sure to be different. It’s important that we keep this evolution in mind in making decisions now that shape our community later.

We should start today to identify what’s missing in our community. For example, community conversations have already identified a desire for things like an arts district, more robust public transit options, more green space, housing options that are affordable for everyone, retail choices that don’t require driving to Durham, and commercial space to support microenterprises and makers.