Thomas, the concern is downtown-wide, where commercial rents are increasing, not solely at this property. The rent will definitely be higher at the old Blue Coffee space. Increased supply of office space will be affordable if the property owners want it to be; whether that will happen is what concerns some downtowners.

It kind of feels like we are lacking a basic understanding of economics here.

Joshua, I wrote both the N&O article and this one, having been assigned by both outlets. The N&O prefers a traditional news format; BCR allows for a more highly voiced style. Thus, this story has the same facts, but additional analysis.

Durham's downtown streets are just too narrow to support a project of this size.

Prices rise when increase in demand outstrips increase in supply. If downtown rents are going to stay low given the population increase, there just has to be vastly more inventory. (San Francisco rents have now climbed higher than New York rents precisely because they have such tight zoning restrictions in the former.) If there's demand for inventory at a lower price, then city council should make it easier for property developers to create that inventory: I'll put up the money myself if I'm persuaded that a good developer can work with city council to make it happen.

For two years now, I've woken up every day but Sunday in Durham to loud, buzzing, ceaseless construction of an ugly mixed-use condo building that all of my friends and most of the long-time residents of Durham could not afford to live in. Some houses were torn down for it. Others were abandoned near it. Many of our neighbors who were trying to make something there just left, for rising rents, taxes, and that ceaseless noise.

When I go where I used to go to relax in Durham Central Park, to try to get away from the concrete and traffic, I watch children shouted over by more construction of even more exclusive condos that even fewer people here could hope to afford - marketed by an "Own Downtown" tagline, if I remember it right.

I am naieve as anyone here and know only how things feel to me; but through my eyes, Durham is being consumed by a pattern that connects the luxury hotels and developments that seem to be built for someone none of us are actually allowed to meet. This pattern proclaims what so many cities have before: that all these communities, all these parks, all this history, all these gardens, all this culture, all these memories, all these struggles, all these unique small businesses are ultimately stock photos to feed the 1% who are so starved for meaning, for culture, for reality, for 'character' that they need to continually consume cities and culture to not immediately drop dead from the smart growth tapeworm of their heartbreaking digital emptiness. It gnaws at the smiles that they try to rehabilitate with $20 cocktails named after historical figures. It convinces them to convince us that growth is good, even when the planet is catching on fire; that growth is good, even though it means children play in parks and neighborhoods shoved into the shadows of condos that will inevitably price them out; that growth is good, even though it only will make the smallest fraction of any of us who are affected by it any happier, any more contented.

May this skyscraper sate at least one rich developer's spiritual tapeworm so they can stop pushing their ugly lifeless megaliths on all of us and finally experience the 'enoughness' that some of us used to know, in our peaceful backyards, with our beautiful neighbors, before the shadow started blocking our sun and the noise devoured our songbirds' prayers. And in agreement with the sign that stands before the hole that waits this massively dull mistake: "the sky is not the limit" - but the earth is.

@Kevin - as a very young chick walking home drunk most nights through downtown Durham in the early 00s, my favorite quip was that I'd have to see anyone on my walks home in order to be harmed on my way back to east durham. I literally saw maybe two dozen people in that walk over the course of FIVE YEARS of walking home after dark from the TTA stop (and the bars). Downtown was so dead.

@Kevin - I appreciate what feels to me like your open minded and thoughtful response, and for the ability to express myself here. I assume that everyone here has very real and personal care for Durham, and that we're all doing our best to figure it out together.

I've only known Durham for a decade. I've seen the area around Central Park totally vacant and scorching on an August day and thought: who would want to walk around here or be here? and I acknowledge that in coming here, I brought my own wishes for the city and had my own affect on it. It's been a dilemma that friends of mine have faced in other cities, too: the community garden or neighborhood commons you create you later find on the brochure of the high-cost condo that displaces all the gardeners and neighbors. I don't have an answer to that pattern that we've seen again and again, and though I forget this when I'm lost in emotions over it, I don't have blame, either. Everyone is doing what they think will benefit the city (except maybe the out-of-town developers).

The main questions I wish we could ask as a community that I don't ever hear (though maybe others are asking) are: why is big high-density and luxury class growth inevitable, and who is it really for?

Building up or building out are still both building, growth, increase. The rents and appraisals of all the neighborhoods bordering these developments have not gone down or stabilized because of an increased high-rise housing stock; they have risen dramatically - doubled, tripled in decades. If we imagine that this is to benefit the lower and middle classes of Durham, I just don't see the numbers agreeing with that. What I see in numbers alone is a massive increase in rents across the board. A pricing out. It is anchoring economic development, and it doesn't seem like letting a downtown stagnate in vacancy is the answer; but I think we are trapped in a story where we choose between vacancy and the other extreme: this nebulous, often dogmatized package deal of usually corporate-driven, high-price growth and economic development that can create a handful of modestly paying local jobs for existing residents, but mostly prices them out of their neighborhoods in the process, as part of a continual terraforming towards the creative class. The influx of this kind of growth may give some benefits to all at first, but the effect on the system almost always seems to be to skew towards the privileged over time; and of course, the environmental effects are non-reversible and rarely talked about.

Arguments about how a high-density high rise replacing a green field is somehow environmental may even have a good logical basis, but the wise 5 year old somewhere in me looks at all that construction and waste and concrete and size and parking decks that certainly don't look like something friendly to our planet, and wonders if there's not a very deeply storied confusion somewhere underneath that argument that we're afraid to explore. I see the math, I've read the arguments when the same thing was being created in Carrboro, and now that that thing (or many of those things) is there, I have to ask: really? Was this really smart development, to which the only alternative would have been something monstrously worse?

So I will share my naieve dream: I dream of community-directed growth that meets the real needs of our existing communities, while creating some space to welcome others. The medium-term and systemic effects are modeled and considered by the community. The impact on the quality of life of the people already there is considered by the community. We consider brave collective action, like community land trusts, municipal banks, and regeneration of the commons. We realize that two kinds of beauty you can't buy or get from outside investors are the beauty of a deeply rooted community that has learned to cooperative over generations and the beauty of natural areas allowed to grow tall mature trees that clean the water and invite rich biodiversity; and the kind of things you do to nurture those forms of beauty may be diametrically opposed to the kind of things you do to attract big investors. In this dream, we stay all the way out of the socially and ecologically devastating race-to-the-bottom that so many impoverished American towns are desperately participating in when an "Open for Business" sign replaces their municipal welcome signs (or in Florida's case, the entire state's... and look at the effect there). We nurture this dream in part by examining what we're creating and who it is for and how much of it we're creating and what it leaves us with when the boom ends, as every boom ends. In this dream, I think a green space begins to be a fantastic alternative to both high rise and sprawl development. I and everyone I know will never be invited into the top floors of any of those high rises; but we would love to meet all of you for a picnic on a beautiful green space, where we talk bravely about what a city for everyone would truly look like and support the genius in each of us for helping that come to be.

End of rant :) and care for all of you

Thanks for playing along Damian! ;-)

@hope - Say that there are 200 units in a downtown tower on around an acre of land. How much land would those 200 units take up in a typical suburban development? How many trees would be cut down? How many vehicle miles would be driven for EVERY basic need (yes...I realize that downtowners still own cars and make trips but they are typically shorter).

As people reference all of the time, Chapel Hill has historically done a great job of thwarting development in their community. The result is that home prices appreciated at a rapid clip due to increasing demand for housing but no new supply.

@hope: if all the world's 7 billion people lived together in the same population density as Manhattan, we would all fit in an area the size of the state of Texas. The remaining 99.9999% of God's green earth would be completely untrammeled. Those of us who care about the earth need to encourage density (or else encourage population control).

@Virgina: There is actually a downtown business owner (whom I like very much) who has been publicly fretting about rent increases when leases turn at their building, where they've been for a decade. Interestingly, if you go back in the Indy to a decade ago and read the story about that building, it's noted that there were other renters displaced when this owner started their business.

Pretty much any activity downtown that isn't a government agency, bank, attorney's office, or tobacco factory (hah!) is a gentrifier. And that's not a concept folks seem comfortable with or aware of.