A bad reaction to a worse situation
March 28, 2007
Everyone in Durham is saddened over the death of a 14-year-old girl, Tavisa Cartnail, in East Durham on Sunday night. Looks like she was literally in a very wrong place at a very wrong time: in an SUV with friends, on N. Driver Street at 11pm.
We haven't talked much about this incident on BCR, and I feel like in time, we need to. We need as a whole community to think about how we can react and how we can support more intensively a part of our city that is not seeing the revitalization and investments -- in neighborhoods, in jobs, in civic life -- that the rest of Durham is benefitting from.
For this reason, I was more than a bit puzzled and disappointed by City Councilman Thomas Stith's quote in today's Herald-Sun:
On Tuesday, City Councilman Thomas Stith said he wants to know why the city is about to invest $13.5 million to open a vocational school yards from where Cartnail was killed.
The city has approved just such a multimillion-dollar plan to convert the old Holton school into a vocational school, office space for the Durham Parks and Recreation Department and space for a Duke University Health System clinic by the start of the 2008-09 school year.
"Why would you put additional investment into a situation that's not secure?" Stith asked.
Stith said others disagree with him and say that the city should invest in the area as a means of rehabbing the blighted community, but those attempts will not and can not be successful, Stith said, until local leaders admit the city is in crisis.
So let me get this straight. We have an area that is marked by crime, despair and violence -- in which there is massive underinvestment. There's a proposal on the table that will bring jobs and, just as importantly, people with honest, important business to the area. While providing health services to the neighborhood to boot.
What Stith fails to seem to grasp here is that the thug-and-drug scenes just loves the blighted places... the areas that are deserted, that most people have no interest in coming to, day or night. And that certainly describes the Driver Street area. Bringing in local services and an educational facility is one way of turning on the flashlight that forces so many vermin to flee.
Alternatively, we could ask Stith if he knows anyone with Magic Anti-Blight Pixie Dust that we could sprinkle over the area first before we open this school and services facility.
Well said, Kevin.
More to the point, what solutions is Councilman Stith proposing, especially to remove handguns from people who think that standing on a street corner firing at random vehicles is an acceptable thing to do?
Posted by: barry | March 28, 2007 at 12:08 PM
Great post. I think a lot of us recent Durhamites (I've been here 10 years, but I'd still consider myself "recent") tend to draw an imaginary curtain at Roxboro Road and don't frequent East Durham all that often, so it tends to fade from our consciousness, except when tragedies like this happen.
Shootings and homicides happen everywhere, unfortunately--even downtown. That hasn't stopped the city from putting a lot of resources there in the past couple of years. I think the mayor said something recently about how it's time to move the city's attention to areas like eastern Durham, and the proposed vocational school sounds like a great start. Let's hope Mr. Stith doesn't derail an important venture like this.
It's nice to see our local blogosphere (Gary's recent post about east Durham at Endangered Durham comes to mind too) expanding beyond the new urban renewal going on downtown. Please keep reminding the rest of us what's going on in other parts of the city.
Posted by: Jim | March 28, 2007 at 08:38 PM
Thanks, Barry and Jim. Jim: especially after reading Gary's post (which was a terrific call for attention to East Durham) I've felt I haven't talked nearly enough about the needs of that community.
I wouldn't worry too much about Stith. Though I sometimes find his posturing absurd, when the Council divides, he seems to usually fall on the losing side -- alone. I don't disagree that safety is something DPS would need to look at at the school, but how is that different from any other public school in America?
Posted by: Kevin Davis | March 28, 2007 at 11:17 PM
Jim - the curtain at Roxboro St. is far from imaginary. Despite bisecting a residential neighborhood (Duke Park, which extends to the east as far as the intersection of Camden and Colonial), Roxboro is a boundary for school attendance zones, state legislative districts, and voting precincts. it used to be the boundary between PACs 1 and 2.
Posted by: barry | March 29, 2007 at 09:51 AM
actually, i need to amend that previous comment. Roxboro St. runs through the middle of numerous neighborhoods, including Old North Durham and Little Five Points, not just Duke Park
Posted by: barry | March 29, 2007 at 10:16 AM