Alston Ave. widening comes before Council next week

I realize most BCR readers also read Endangered Durham each day -- but just in case you don't, you do not want to miss Gary's outstanding analysis (and some untold back-story) on the Alston Ave. widening, which is set for the City Council work session next Thursday.

As Gary puts it:

There is a depressing desperation to this move - the sense that the $28 million that NCDOT proposes to spend on converting ~12 blocks of a 3-lane urban street into a 4- to 6-lane thoroughfare-to-nowhere is money too good to pass up, no matter what it is buying....

Although people seized on the "shift the money" thing publicized a few weeks ago as a way to manipulate the process, the suggestion was: shift the state money to Fayetteville St., and let NCDOT do their unitary suburban highway design down by Martin Luther King. Then shift the city money that would have been spent on Fayetteville to Alston - so that the city can design a better road. Combined with streetscape funds from the Office of Economic Development, we could build a functional and beautiful street that would be the envy of other parts of Durham.

But suddenly we have a rush to move forward, and because people would rather take money from the state to hang themselves than figure out the right thing to do, it's coming to a vote. Why have we adopted an ad-hoc committee of citizenry to examine, in detail, the future of the East End Connector, but have had nothing of the sort here? This widening would take more than twice as many buildings as the East End Connector. Does it deserve the same sort of care?

...I don't know what else to say about this $28 million mistake that I haven't already said again and again in many different forums. We have already made this mistake. People cry about the highways destroying their neighborhoods in the 1960s - and believe me, I am empathetic. But I'm not empathetic to repeating the same stupid plan that you know caused terrible repercussions the first time around, and didn't create all of the promised benefits.

What's really unfortunate about the whole situation is that it highlights one dark underbelly of Durham racial politics. As Gary notes, the entire discussion became about the black community supposedly being 'slighted' by the transfer of state dollars to South Durham -- a charge that is quite at odds with the reality of the situation.

Naturally, though, such arguments can resonate off the pages of the Herald-Sun and get local residents behind a project that may not, in fact, be good for their neighborhood or their homes. Which I don't think this design for an Alston widening is, in its proposed form.

Widen Alston Ave.?  Absolutely. But not this way.

A part of me wonders, is that necessarily a problem for the folks advocating for this? There's an eerie connection between the rush to widen Alston Ave. at any cost and the stubborn refusal of the City to look at solutions to dilapidated properties that don't involve demolition, or the support of black elites for urban renewal a quarter-century ago.

What do all these have in common? A conclusion that impoverished areas are best improved by the process of subtraction, of wiping clean the slate of what has been before and getting a fresh start. Hey, the houses and businesses lost to the project may not be all that attractive in the first place, so what's the harm of losing them?

Unfortunately, such an outcome can be appealing to those outside a community who may be frustrated with the pace of renewal and transformation in a neighborhood. And it's just as appealing to those within it who are desperate for any investment whatsoever.

Believe me, as someone who's been active in discussions about reducing traffic in my own urban neighborhood, there's a temptation to see the Alston Ave. widening as a step towards that solution. Heck, if Durham's leaderships wants a high-volume NC 55 through East Durham, why not just continue the widening all the way to I-85 and Roxboro Rd.? Heck, that's the best possible cut-through, short of the East End Connector, between North Durham and RTP/Raleigh.

But such a "modest proposal" is, to my mind, scarcely moral because it does what communities shouldn't: to shove an externality like cut-through traffic square in the middle of an impoverished area, just because it's cheap and easy to do so. (In contrast with the EEC, that is, which passes largely through an area kept undeveloped by the NCDOT's own road plans.)

Yet we don't have this debate in public in Durham. It's not seemly, and it doesn't further the long partnership between white liberals and black elites that have maintained the status quo of power for decades.

A status quo that's accomplished much that's good in the Bull City -- but which sometimes has a blind spot towards making the same mistakes now that we did in the days of Hayti's demolition.

Comments

[Dave N.]

Required reading.

[Patrick Baker]

Kevin, Alston Avenue widening is not on the work session agenda for next Thursday. We are still working through this issue internally but hope to have a decision very soon.

Patrick

[KeepDurhamDifferent!]

Thank you for making the point that the black elites supported urban renewal. Too often the destruction of Hayti is portrayed as a whites vs. blacks thing, when in fact there was widespread support for the Durham Freeway (however misguided it may have been).