ACollaboration is key in the first public art project for the Raleigh greenway system.
This summer, artist Taylor White will transform the 3,500 square foot underpass at Pullen Road, which connects the restored creek pathway to Pullen Park and Raleigh’s larger greenway system, into a space that’s light, inviting, safe and beautiful to look at. The public art project—a pilot developed by the City of Raleigh Arts Commission and Public Art and Design Board—will be funded partly by the City and partly by the local real estate investment firm Merge Capital, which owns adjoining property. The project should be completed by the end of the summer.
The Rocky Branch Creek pedestrian tunnel is pretty dark, and a
little dingy, but it won’t be that way for much longer.
Taylor White
White is a Raleigh native who, after graduating from the Savannah College of Art and Design, lived and worked abroad in Norway and Australia for six years before returning to her home city in 2013. Her striking, distinctive murals—often focused on the kinetic human form and the relationship between different levels of consciousness—cover walls at Whiskey Kitchen and Raleigh Raw, among others. White has exhibited her work all over the world and was chosen from a pool of 32 artists for the Rocky Branch tunnel project.
“Therehas always been a very bold emotional context to my work and I am taking the abstraction element to the extreme on this project,” White says of her vision for the tunnel. “I’m going to break everything down to its bare bones, shape and color and texture, so this will probably be my first piece that is not going to incorporate any representational imagery. That will be a challenge in and of itself.”
Taylor White’s mural at Wake Forest Renaissance Center
White’s mural will also integrate a brand new lighting array,
incorporating hand-built plexiglass and aluminum fixtures embedded with
programmable LEDs. The LEDs will respond to sensor data creating different
visual effects inside the tunnel. White will be working with local LED
specialist and programmer Sam Steele to fabricate, program and install the
array. Raleigh-based flow arts performer and postdoctoral physicist Adam Dipert
will assist with electrical engineering and programming. White will add depth
and texture to the walls of the tunnel using layers of abstract shapes and
patterns that will play off of LED lights, adding a new dimensionality to the
way her work is experienced.
“As people enter the tunnel, the lights will get brighter,” White explains. “That serves two functions. One, it’s a cool interactive component and also, it’s a pedestrian safety enhancement. So if you’re in the tunnel, it’s appropriately lit and you know whether other people are in there with you.”
“Abstracted Motion,” White’s augmented reality mural for Google Fiber
White was drawn to the project for the opportunity it will give her to experiment with LEDs in her work, an opportunity made possible via a public-private partnership. Merge Capital owns the property next to the tunnel’s egress; the greenway runs through that property and continues on into Dix Park.
“It seemed like a brilliant way of transforming that overlooked
space into something really neat that would be great for the city and would
help start the transformation of that area,” says Chris Woody, the president of
Merge Capital. “We’re invested in the property, obviously, but we live here and
work here—I am from here—and it’s an easy way to be able to give back to the
city that has given so much to us.”
Kelly McChesney, the public art director at the City’s Office of
Arts, says her office is exploring ways to integrate artwork into the greenway
infrastructure as a way to enhance the safety and vibrancy of the system.
We’re hoping that means more public art collaborations are afoot.
This September, dine out and raise money to support school
meals.
A five dollar lunch is a pretty good deal but chipping in five
dollars to support students eating lunch at Wake County schools is a great one.
Through the month of September, around 100 restaurants across
Raleigh and Wake County will offer the option for customers to add five dollars
to their bills in order to raise money for the North Carolina Partnership for
Child Nutrition (NCPCN), a nonprofit with the goal of ensuring every child in
the county chooses to eat a nutritious meal at school. Look for “Support School
Meals” cards in participating restaurants explaining NCPCN’s mission or special
menu items that add five dollars to the cause.
“Every restaurant might do it a little differently,” explains
NCPCN president and founder Steve Mangano, a Raleigh resident, foodie and
entrepreneur whose two children attend Wake County public schools.
Mangano started NCPCN with a group of local partners around a
shared vision of students (and teachers, administrators and other staff) opting
to buy lunches from their school’s cafeterias during the school day.
Accomplishing that goal, Mangano says, would create other positive outcomes for
students including, potentially, universal free breakfast, innovative meal
programs and opportunities to engage with each other through food.
“If eating lunch at school becomes the default, you start to
break down cultural barriers around that,” Mangano says. “So now, it’s not only
some kids who are eating lunch at school, but everyone is. You have more
opportunities for interactions, you have opportunities for kids not to feel
stigmatized. A lot of times kids who are on free or reduced lunch choose not to
eat because they’re embarrassed. It also puts more money back into the school
system.”
As North Carolina doesn’t allocate money for school meals in its
state budget, advocacy nonprofits such as No Kid Hungry and others have worked
for decades to ensure students aren’t going hungry in schools. And while No Kid
Hungry and other private sector and nonprofit organizations, including Blue
Cross Blue Shield and the North Carolina Alliance for Health, are important
partners in what NCPCN hopes to accomplish, Mangano says he saw a need for
on-the-ground ways to educate parents and other stakeholders about the
importance of strong school nutrition programs
Currently, school lunch participation rates in Wake County are
below 50 percent; NCPCN wants to bring those rates to above 70 percent. To
reach this goal, the nonprofit hopes to raise enough money in September to hire
an executive director, complete a study from a food insight group outlining
national best practices for school lunch participation and, finally, launch a
pilot program in one school in Wake that would implement changes to increase
school lunch participation that, potentially, could be replicated on the county
and state levels in the future.
The nonprofit also plans to work with WCPSS Child Nutrition
Services director Paula De Lucca to help her achieve the goal of making Wake
County’s child nutrition program one of the top in the country.
“A pilot project in one of our schools would be a way of
proving the practicality of this great idea,” says Christine Kushner, a Wake
County school board member and advisor to the NCPCN board of directors. “If
more students participated in school meals, that’s a benefit to
active parents, giving them one less thing to worry about, as their
student gets breakfast and/or lunch with their classmates at school.”
So, how can you chip in?
Simply check out NCPCN’s website for a list of participating
local restaurants, cafés,
breweries, confectionaries and other businesses. In September, whenever you
dine or make a purchase in one, you’ll have the option of adding five dollars
to your bill—and that’s it—that’s all you have to do!
“We’re focused on Wake County first, and whatever we accomplish
in Wake, we can replicate in other areas,” Mangano says. “It’s hopefully this
incremental thing where, if we have enough people contributing five dollars,
we’ll get to an amount that will allow us to make a change.”
The City Council has proposed putting an affordable housing bond on the ballot next year. Do you support the bond and do you think that’s enough to address Raleigh’s affordable housing problem?
I do support the bond proposal, it;s a solution to a problem that we are years and decades behind on so we need to take action now. But having bonds every single time we need money for affordable housing is not the answer. By keeping bonds just focused on affordable housing, we take away the aspect of looking at it holistically. Like how are we doing affordable housing with transit, how we are making it sustainable, how are we making the quality of life better for our residents? The bonds make us evaluate our success based off how many houses are built versus how many homes are created, how many people we’ve made better quality of life for. So there are other ways the Council can be looking at addressing housing. We’ve seen things like getting rid of single-family zoning work around different places in the country. We know that comes from the Jim Crowe era and causes inequities that we, as a city, know we can do better on. I got my Masters in Public Administration and I learned about zoning, specifically around [eliminating] single family zoning; that has shown the biggest impact you can have and a very small risk pool. We also need to make sure we are involving the most impacted people in the conversation first, that we are going out and listening to the community and figuring out what can we do to not only build affordable housing but to convert renters to owners, how to go into the community and fix up the houses already there, how do we let people who have been part of these communities forever stay in there and embrace development that reinvests in their own community? i don’t think development and growth is wrong but it is wrong when you’re only developing in areas now because that land is valuable, land that was never valuable before, but now is and you’re pushing people out from there.
Raleigh’s Human Relations Commission recently recommended the city set up a police oversight board with investigative and subpoena powers. Raleigh’s Police Chief has stated she is not in favor of such a board. Does Raleigh need a board for police oversight?
Raleigh needs accountability. Because this is portrayed so highly in national media, we stay away from it here, but us wanting feedback or to improve our police force does not mean we’re against the police force. Everyone respects and honors what our officers do every single day but we also recognize there is no way to do our job better unless we get better. There is no other job in the country that you’re going to be able to move to the next level, you’re going to be able to improve in your career, unless you go through more training, unless you get more resources to help you get to that level. The fact that people want that and want it because we also know it will impact the residents that our officers are serving, is the basic right of a community. The reason people want a police accountability board is not because everyone wants to oversee and micro-manage the police. They don’t trust in the government right now to do that job. So once you build that trust with the residents and you get residents to trust the government, there won’t be a need to push and fight for police accountability anymore because our leaders will be holding people accountable. So people don’t have to be there pushing for that. Unfortunately, trust is not there for all residents and we’ve got to recognize that. It might be there for some residents but at the end of the day, statistics show that these issues exist, especially in low-income and black and brown communities.
John Kane has proposed building a 40 story tower in the Peace Street area downtown. If elected Mayor, would you support the rezoning for that proposal as is, or try to negotiate for inclusion of affordable hosing units?
If you’re going to build a 40 story tower, there better be some affordable housing in there. It just seems simple. It’s pretty clear that developers are also interested in the idea and in providing affordable housing, but would still be allowed to build more dense buildings. What a great tradeoff. Why are we not thinking about that when we are letting developers propose these buildings? We should actively be thinking about that. It takes a leader and a vision and wanting to work in partnerships and some creativity, understanding that the public and private worlds can work together, provide social good and do it with more urgency because we can build a lot more housing than we are building now. What we do now is we go and look at a city—say Seattle—and we continue to look at that city. What we need to do is to look at a lot of cities and, second, recognize whatever model we use here in Raleigh is not going to look like what every other city looks like. We need to create a model that is specific to the city, the needs, the history of the city. I don’t have a silver bullet of what’s going to work whats not and I don’t think any city in the world has figured it out. But what’s cool about it is we have the timing and the people and the resources that can study everybody and figure out a very comprehensive solution that specifically fits the community we have right now.
Does Raleigh have enough density and do we currently have the infrastructure to support more?
I don’t think we are dense enough. There is not a way for us to build out anymore, we need to build up. We do have the infrastructure to support it but at end of the day, it’s about the fact that we need more units, we need more places for people to live and no way you can do that without density, no way you’re going to do that without getting rid of single-family zoning. And we cant be for affordable housing and make the city more transit oriented without increasing density. It is just not possible, it is not possible for any city we’ve seen anywhere in the country. So we’ve really got to embrace that and understand that that doesn’t mean we’re going to start building 40 story complexes in the middle of a neighborhood in Brier Creek. That’s not what that means. It means we can build some taller buildings in downtown and also build a few stories in other places so it doesn’t all just look the same. That also means hey, you may get a grocery store walking distance to where you live now, maybe then you’ll get a transit line on there because there are mixed use areas and businesses. So it opens people up to opportunities.
CACs (neighborhood meetings) have traditionally been ways for citizens to engage with decisions that will go before the City Council. Do you support CACs or do you think, with a lot of these conversations happening online these days, that CACs have outlasted their usefulness?
There is space for them. How we get citizen engagement and how citizens are engaged in the city does need to be re-looked at. If CACs provide an avenue for people, specifically people who have always been involved in politics, maybe from a different generation than I am, that is completely fine. You keep what you know and you make it better. But there definitely need to be more ways for people to get involved than just attending a meeting at 7 p.m. or trying to go to Council at 1 p.m. while everyone is working. I don’t know if this is the most efficient way to engage citizens but I do know people hold true to the CACs and it is part of a rich history of how work has gotten done in the city. If people are engaged that way, it is one tool we have. It is not our all-go-to tool for citizen engagement. We should have multiple tools in our toolbox making sure we’re getting citizens engaged because you have to engage people in various ways because not everyone is able to engage in the same way to go to those meetings.
Are the current members of the City Council putting forward a strong enough vision for Raleigh’s growth?
Right now, we are building a city for 2020, not 2050. We have a lot of varying issues under our belt the current City Council has tried to solve, tried different methods, tried to put effort into fixing, but at the end of the day, these are problems every city across the country is facing, if not the world. That means you need new leaders, new visions, new people in there that have not traditionally been in those spaces because you need new ideas to fix these problems. So Council needs leadership and vision, specifically vision in a city that’s the second biggest tech hub after Silicon Valley. We are in a prime place to where if we got more visionaries into office, we’d have all the resources and the people to make such an impact in a very fast-paced way that most cities won’t have the opportunity to.
Are the city managers and staff doing a good job implementing the Council’s vision as stated and running the day to day operations of the city?
I can’t completely speak to that, you really have to be working in City Council to know. But honestly, from what I have sensed from events and when I have interacted with staff, we have amazing staff. We have recruited people from all around the country, we have people onboard who have been in Raleigh forever, making amazing programs. I really do think leadership comes from the top. The people are amazing, they have the resources, they have the creativity, they want to do more. The thing that holds them up is Council
Recently, the Council passed a suite of rules regulating Airbnb and electric scooters. Do you support the rules or feel they are too strict?
The Airbnb rule goes into effect in 2020 so I’m hoping when I’m elected, we can switch that real fast. I don’t agree wth either of them. There are ways to build partnerships with people, work with them and compromise. For us, it is just “no, there is no other answer.” There’s no trying to figure out “Alright, there are a good amount of people valuing, making income off of Airbnb, or off charging the Bird scooters.” That conversation has been completely left out, the fact that this is a second paycheck for people, especially for the Bird scooters. People—kids and teens—were making a living off of it and it was a good idea in a place that doesn’t have high chance of upward mobility. On top of that, you make things more expensive. When people visit from out of town, our hotels are very expensive and limited. Airbnb was an option for people to stay in at an affordable price. It was a place for families to stay in and not be forced to get three hotel rooms because they have a big family. When we did Airbnb, we based it off Asheville. We are different from Asheville, we’re not a tourist attraction. We are a place people come for work, to visit, to just enjoy and they should be able to enjoy it in a neighborhood, to really see the history of Raleigh. Where better to do that than in an Airbnb? With the scooters, what’s interesting is now Council has a contract and they’re going to have it with a new scooter company. The difference with that company is you can’t make income off of it. So the company would have to charge the scooters. Basically what they did was got rid of the Bird scooters and then said “We will bring this other company back but you can’t make any money off of it.” Now who is really getting harmed in that picture? Who are we benefitting and who are we harming? We also failed to talk about the environment in this conversation, the fact we are a car city—every day we add 63 people to Wake County, so that means we add just as many cars. Bird scooters take away that carbon. We didn’t think about, not only does it access mobility but we’re in a time where climate change is a very pressing need and Raleigh needs to be thinking about that in every single decision we make.
Last Word
In my 28 years in Raleigh, I have met a lot of talented, good people and I really think that the people here in Raleigh are ready to lead Raleigh into the future. But they need people in office who are equitable, they need to be equitably represented, need people who have a vision in mind and are truly part of the community and know Raleigh and can really speak out for others. My platform is focused on mobility, security and happiness and the idea that everyone in the city should have economic opportunities to thrive and do better, to have security and feel safe in their neighborhoods and to feel protected by protectors, to not feel like police might be working with ICE. And then happiness. A lot of countries will gage their communities’ happiness. I read an article recently that stated that America is increasing in happiness inequality. The idea is to have basic shelter, to be able to trust your energy providers, to know the water you’re drinking is clean, to know your government has your well-being at heart and will remove barriers that keep you from pursuing a higher quality of life.
The City Council has proposed putting an affordable housing bond on the ballot next year. Do you support the bond and do you think that’s enough to address Raleigh’s affordable housing problem?
Affordable housing is one of the top issues in the city, if not the top issue. I stressed it in 2017 and I’m going to be talking about it a lot in this campaign and emphasizing it as Mayor. I do support an affordable housing bond. The exact amount of the bond, I’m not sure. The important thing is what we do with the money. It costs $140, $150, $160 thousand to build an apartment so it’s not practical for the city to use the money to build apartments. Usually, the way you’re using that money is as a subsidy for private development. For example, what you want is for the private sector to have affordable units like people have talked about in some of the market rate buildings downtown, so you’re layering in different subsidies. The effective way to use that city bond money is to subsidize the private market to include affordable units. Much more than a bond is going to be required. One of the things I proposed is that, immediately, we will set up a task force of developers interested in building affordable housing, bankers, bond attorneys, tax attorneys, activists on the issue and come up with five to 10 things we can do right away that will have an impact. That includes a housing bond, it includes expanding tax credits on development, includes increasing density in areas where we need to have more density like downtown, like the places where the boulevards meet 440, but it can’t just be density, it needs to be density with diversity and density with ethics so we find a way for different people to live in these dense areas. It shouldn’t just be only density for high income people, it needs to be density that also includes affordable housing. Another thing we need to do is to remove some of the unnecessary impediments in the development process that slow it down and make it more expensive unnecessarily. I will give one example: the site plan review process is too cumbersome. The city staff very often takes too long in giving endless rounds of comments back to people developing properties which adds time and expense to development which is passed along to renters or to buyers. So we need to increase the stock of accessible housing, I won’t say affordable housing, but accessible housing both to rent and to buy. One of the things highlighted by the [recent] New York Times article about gentrification is the main problem is with the lack of ownership. Because without ownership you don’t have control. So a lot of people who own properties in the areas that are being gentrified may feel there is some cultural displacement taking place. But as owners, they can generally make a decision whether or not they’re going to sell and leave. When people don’t own a property, they’re renters and the owners decide to sell, then they’re out. So we need to focus on how we can increase homeownership. My wife and I bought our first home right when we were getting married in 1991. There was an old NCNB (a predecessor to Bank of America) an old NCNB program where we only had to come up with a $3,000 down payment. We were both young attorneys and we didn’t have $3,000 for that. We had to save for several months, each of us putting in a few hundred dollars until we got it and were able to buy our first home. We need to have more programs like that, like the one in East College Park that make homeownership more accessible for people who can afford to have a home but just may not have the money for a down payment or need other assistance. There’s not going to be one strategy that’s going to solve the whole problem. There needs to be a number of strategies. Up under the affordable housing problem is really a stagnation in the growth of wages. If people make enough money then they are able to afford housing but at the same time we’re trying to create more access to housing, we’ve got try and create and attract more jobs that pay a higher wage. If we do that, then more people will be able to afford the market rate for housing.
Raleigh’s Human Relations Commission recently recommended the city set up a police oversight board with investigative and subpoena powers. Raleigh’s Police Chief has stated she is not in favor of such a board. Does Raleigh need a board for police oversight?
The police have an incredibly difficult job. They are called in to some of the most violent, difficult, fraught, tense situations in human life and police need to be strongly supported by the city and its citizens. We need to pay officers well, perhaps more than what they are paid now. There is also an issue with force strength. A lot of people have told me as Raleigh has grown, the number of officers has not kept up with that and so they may be being spread too thin. So we need to look at whether we have enough officers for the job they’re being asked to do. But once we respect them as professionals and respect them in their compensation and the way we staff, then the citizens are entitled to a certain level of transparency back. We should have a body camera policy where those cameras are on all the time that they’re interacting with citizens. And some form of police oversight is necessary. I’m not sure about the exact form of it and whether it will go all the way to subpoena powers and things like that but something to increase transparency. We also should look at the training that officers are receiving to deal with people who have mental health issues, with LGBTQ people, and maybe what is needed is to have non-law enforcement people who are available to deal with some of these mental health situations so they can work to de-escalate a situation rather than have it escalating into violence. If there is a citizen review task force, I would require that the people who are on it undergo extensive training. If you’re a lawyer and you sign up to be an arbitrator, you have to take a 40 hour course, you have to really want to do it. There should be something like that for this, so that only people who are really serious about the problem will be a part of it and they’ll understand that most of the time, what the officers experience is mundane and it’s only the rare experience where you have something go sideways and there’s an allegation of excessive force. That’s not the norm and anyone who serves on this task force needs to understand something about what the daily realities of an officer are. And then they will be better able to assess that rare instance where something jumps off or goes sideways and there’s a claim of excessive force.
John Kane has proposed building a 40 story tower in the Peace Street area downtown. If elected Mayor, would you support the rezoning for that proposal as is, or try to negotiate for inclusion of affordable hosing units?
I haven’t studied that particular proposal in detail and I wouldn’t take a position on a proposal like that. In general, the downtown area where that property is should have more density. I don’t know what the exact level of stories needs to be without studying it further but, like I said before, we don’t want just density downtown for density’s sake but we want to have density with diversity, density with ethics and inclusion. You can’t expect the developer to pay the cost of affordable housing. There is a difference between the rent that is generated by market housing and affordable housing. It’s a social problem, so society has to contribute to the cost of funding it. That’s the reason why I proposed that task force, to try to figure out ways that we can fund that. I have some ideas on that. Project based vouchers may be helpful, using the bond money we’re talking about from past or future bonds to offset the difference could be helpful. I’m sure there are other strategies that could be used that I haven’t thought about, that smart people could come up with, but it just takes leadership to coordinate people and focus on solving that. In general, when you have a large, dense building built like that, you ought to do everything you can to include some affordable housing in the project. Developers are open to that, it’s just a question of how we’re going to pay for it.
Does Raleigh have enough density and do we currently have the infrastructure to support more?
There should be greater density in downtown. Ideally what you might have is sort of a wedding cake approach, where the tallest buildings are on Fayetteville Street and stepping down from 40 stories on Fayetteville Street to 20 to 15 as you go onto streets off of that. We should have more density downtown, but no, we don’t have the infrastructure to support it. So in building tall buildings and building greater density, we are going to have to improve the infrastructure.
CACs (neighborhood meetings) have traditionally been ways for citizens to engage with decisions that will go before the City Council. Do you support CACs or do you think, with a lot of these conversations happening online these days, that CACs have outlasted their usefulness?
There is still a role for CACs. They have been effective and I support them. The CAC system has been in place for a long time and I don’t think it has deterred growth in Raleigh at all. We need to look at ways to improve and increase citizen engagement and not try to limit citizen engagement. One of the reasons people all over Raleigh are frustrated is because they don’t think their voices are respected and heard. The CACs are one vehicle for that. We should look at people being able to participate online or by conference call. That’s a way that a lot of people participate and do business now. I suppose that there could be a, just like some people listen to a streaming church service, instead of actually being in the sanctuary we probably should look at technology where people could participate, or at least listen to, the CAC meeting online as well as being there. They wouldn’t take the place of an in-person meeting. There have been efforts by some staff and the city to limit the CACs and I would strongly oppose that. I support the CAC process.
Are the current members of the City Council putting forward a strong enough vision for Raleigh’s growth?
The current Council needs and requires and wants leadership. Why people are frustrated now, when they look at the Council, is they feel like there is a lack of leadership and lack of a leader. That’s what’s needed right now, leadership in the sense of someone who can get us to define what there is a consensus about. Not the lowest common denominator, but to set the consensus, being bold and something that’s conclusive that’s going to move us forward and then to bring a majority of the Council and a majority of the city together behind that vision to get it done. Mayor Meeker was very good at that when he was in office and that is what we need again, now. I have relationships with some of the members of Council now. The basis of any working relationship is personal relationships. I have good relationships with some of the members of the Council now and i am confident I can form good relationships with whoever is elected to the Council. There are a lot of talented people running, a lot of energy is behind those candidates and I look forward to working with whoever may be elected.
Are the city managers and staff doing a good job implementing the Council’s vision as stated and running the day to day operations of the city?
On the first question I need to learn more about that but I will defer until I learn more and answer the second. There have been instances where the Council defers too much to the staff and the Council cedes too much policy making authority to the staff. The job of the staff should be to execute and implement the policy adopted by the council and to advise the City Council on alternative courses of action, not to make policy themselves. Part of it is this council-manager form of governor that we have and this part-time City Council, it’s just easier to go along with the staff recommendation. I intend to go against the grain on that or push back on that because there have been too many instances where the staff has been allowed to make policy. A couple examples:
The site plan review process for certain types of site plans, bigger site plans, used to go to the Planning Commission and then the City Council. Now, a lot of it is just administered by the staff. When that change was made, people thought it would be a more streamlining change but it has not been because it results in just these endless rounds of reviews and comments by staff and a feeling by the citizens that they’re not getting a chance to be heard in a public forum. The site plan review process, certain big site plans, ought to go back to the Planning Commission and then to the Council and not just be a staff function.
A second example: there was recently a kerfuffle about Councilman Cox and his interceding on behalf of neighbors in Brentwood on a utility pipe going through their backyard. The essence of it was a utility pipe would be run, the city had chosen a course that was going to be vey disruptive to these Brentwood residents by going through their backyard, it was going to impact property values, affect their quality of life and that had been a staff decision. Councilman Cox spoke up against that decision and said “we should consider a parallel course that will have much less impact on these property owners.” Some people criticized him for doing that but I think it was entirely right and proper that he did that because something like that really was a policy decision that should not have been delegated to staff without any oversight or question. There needs to be a clear delineation in the way that things are run between policy and implementation and that the policy should fall to the Council even if that requires a little bit more work on the Council’s part.
Recently, the Council passed a suite of rules regulating Airbnb and electric scooters. Do you support the rules or feel they are too strict?
My position on scooters is that I am pro-scooter and pro micro-mobility. We ought to have a set of rules that makes it easier and not harder for young people and all people to be able to rent a scooter. On Airbnb, we need to revisit what we are doing with that. Airbnb and those types of home sharing arrangements are ways many people like to travel and ways people are able to achieve some additional income. So I think that needs to be revisited. Scooters need to be revisited too, in order to make sure we are not over-regulating the use of scooters and regulating them out of existence. The policy ought to lean toward making it easier instead of harder for people to rent scooters. Micro-mobility is good.
Last Word
I am a pro-development candidate and I will be a pro-development mayor. But—this is the big but—the growth that we have in the city shouldn’t be just for buildings or for the city limits. The growth should be for the benefit of the people who live here. The frustration many people have in Raleigh is that the growth has been exclusive and not inclusive. It has excluded people from neighborhoods and they have been here for a long time. It’s excluded them from gleaming towers downtown. We need to figure out a way that the city policy can help more people to be included in the growth and in the good life in Raleigh. So, I am pro growth, but a form of growth that more people who are already here now can benefit from. That’s what I’m looking forward to working with the City Council, the staff, the citizens on, coming up with that type of a model for growth, that type of model that would be more sustainable. One that includes more people, one that is environmentally friendly, one that considers more transit options. That is the type of growth we will be able to continue for decades and that people would truly benefit from.
The City Council has proposed putting an affordable housing bond on the ballot next year. Do you support the bond and do you think that’s enough to address Raleigh’s affordable housing problem?
The affordable housing issue is incredibly complex. We’re going to need to employ many strategies to address the issue. It’s going to be with us from now on. The housing bond is needed. It is one piece to a much larger puzzle. We need to employ all of the strategies that we have available to to start increasing the stock of housing that’s safe and affordable for all of our citizens. Affordable housing is also a big term that means a lot of things, and so when I think and talk about affordable housing, I think and talk about people that we’re trying to house because the strategies and the funding and the way you go about the housing is different for different groups of people. So, you’ve got what you would think of what traditional affordable housing is, which might be some of the voucher programs, Section 8, some of the city housing. You’ve got supportive housing, which I have experience with when I worked in the County. That’s housing for individuals with mental health and substance abuse disorders. Different kinds of funding, different type of voucher, it also involves not just the real estate but the human services side.Veterans housing—again, a different funding stream and two sides of that one, too. Workforce housing, housing for people just starting out, young people. Also, senior housing. Our senior numbers are rapidly increasing and they need different options. You’ve got different groups of people that need housing that is safe and affordable. You’ve got different funding and capital streams for them. We’ve got to figure out the best way to coordinate and deploy all of those strategies. The housing bond that the city is going to put on the ballot is going to address important things like partnering to build new stock with non-profits, partnering to build new stock with private developers who are leveraging the North Carolina housing financing tax credit money, continuing programs to keep folks in their homes, continuing programs to keep mortgage assistance and first time buyers. The other piece is protecting the stock that we already have. One of the nonprofit boards I was on is Passage Home and this is one of the areas that they focus on. How do you partner with nonprofits? The city is actually partnering with Passage Home on some of these programs to protect units that are affordable now. So, it’s the building, the protecting, the assistance to keep people stable in the housing they have. We also need to look at the support for folks that are in danger of being evicted, to keep people housed stably. None of this can go in a vacuum either. When I was on the County board, we did transit and before we put that question on the ballot, we had a long-term transit exercise where you had everybody in the room—developers and people from the counties and municipalities and community advocates and all the partners—and we had to do those value exercises about whether we valued coverage or frequency and what’s most important to the community and where do we want to go. It was incredibly instructive before that initiative passed that we had facilitated community engagement full of good information and education and working with diverse groups to be able to get to that plan. We need to have the same sort of exercise with affordable housing because everybody’s talking about it, which is great, but sometimes, I fear we’re talking across each other and not coming up with a good, comprehensive solution. Everybody is a partner in this. Developers, nonprofits, all of the governments, banks,financing. In Charlotte, they ran a $50 million dollar bond and then they raised the other $50 million, so there’s also room for working with foundations and corporate partners and banks to be able to augment what we’re trying to do with the bond.
Raleigh’s Human Relations Commission recently recommended the city set up a police oversight board with investigative and subpoena powers. Raleigh’s Police Chief has stated she is not in favor of such a board. Does Raleigh need a board for police oversight?
There needs to be increased engagement and people need to feel heard. The city is looking at different types of boards right now and that process needs to go forward because it’s critically important to have robust citizen engagement. That is one piece of this. We also have to look at safety in a bigger way. What can law enforcement do to engage more in communities, have police establishing those relationships before there arecrises. Also, continuing to train the officers in crisis intervention training. The last few tragic incidents have involved individuals with mental health brain disease and 386 officers have been trained in crisis intervention out of the 800. So, continuing to get all the officers trained in these de-escalation tactics is extremely important. The community does need to feel heard and listened to and a part of the solution as well.
John Kane has proposed building a 40 story tower in the Peace Street area downtown. If elected Mayor, would you support the rezoning for that proposal as is, or try to negotiate for inclusion of affordable hosing units?
There is a place for developers to participate in addressing the affordable housing crisis. We need a plan that’s predictable and consistent and long range. That’s a piece of that greater housing conversation. Density where it makes sense is needed. That’s a very dense part of town already. It’s zoned to be a dense part of town. The improvements that they’re doing on Peace Street and Capital Boulevard will help that. It’s becoming what we want in a dense neighborhood: grocery stores, you’re able to get your housing, your office and your free time in a dense, walkable area. Because we’re having these discussions about housing and growth, the areas that are designated and should be dense, I think that makes a lot of sense
Does Raleigh have enough density and do we currently have the infrastructure to support more?
There’s not enough stock in general. It’s the supply and demand piece of this equation. Infrastructure is going to continue to be an issue. When you talk about infrastructure, it’s everything from traffic congestion with people coming in from downtown or going out to RTP. The city is trying to keep up with city roads. Many of the roads in Raleigh and the state are state-owned roads. There are some improvements on the horizon in that area as well. And then you have the whole transit side, which is different. People are feeling the expanded buses now, and that will continue to expand, which is great to move people around the city who don’t want to use their cars or don’t have cars to use. The Bus Rapid Transit is predicted to be completed on the New Bern corridor in 2023. The planning of the corridors going to the north and then the south and the west are also getting planned. The commuter rail is also in the works. So we’re going to have more robust transit options, which will help as we grow. We need to be mindful and intentional about how we develop around these transit corridors, not just transit-oriented development but really transit-oriented communities, and focus on where these fixed lines are going to go. How do you focus on the first and the last mile to get people from the transit stations to where they live. And having really robust community engagement. Making sure people aren’t displaced—that some affordable housing is not displaced to make new affordable housing. That the community has really strong buy-in to how these transit-oriented communities will be developed is incredibly important as well.
CACs (neighborhood meetings) have traditionally been ways for citizens to engage with decisions that will go before the City Council. Do you support CACs or do you think, with a lot of these conversations happening online these days, that CACs have outlasted their usefulness?
I’m going to every CAC; I’m going to go visit all of them. That’s been a great experience. They’re very different. I’ve met a lot of wonderful people. That is a good way for some people to have engagement and learn about the city. Different people are interested in different kinds of engagement so that’s a piece of this puzzle as well. Some of these CAC’s are streaming, which is good for the people who can’t come out, because 7 o’clock in the evenings, especially if you have children, is very, very difficult. So using technology to increase the ability for people to join virtually. How else can we increase engagement? I’m not sure. I don’t think it’s replacing CAC’s, it’s coming up with other ways for people to engage. People don’t understand how powerful they are, especially in local government. Working with folks to be able to increase engagement, meet people where they are, deploy technology is incredibly important. It’s just like where people get their news; right now, people are getting their news from different places.
Are the current members of the City Council putting forward a strong enough vision for Raleigh’s growth?
There’s room for improvement. As we were talking about the transit experience and the housing exercise, there needs to be more discussions on growth in general—where we’re going to be in five, 10, 20 years; how do we manage the growth and how in this process do we feel that everybody’s heard? There’s not a divisiveness in these discussions. People in this city love their city and they want what’s best for their city. It’s a matter of understanding where people are coming from, getting educated on the issues, understanding growth and the implications of growth and trying to come up with a vision of how we’ll be able to handle this in the future, because the growth is coming. And we can prepare for it and build a city that is going to be strong and provide opportunity for all of the city in the future and continue a great quality of life. I fear if we don’t make the decisions on where we want to be in the future, it will be difficult to handle the growth as it comes.
Are the city managers and staff doing a good job implementing the Council’s vision as stated and running the day to day operations of the city?
I think [the city manager] is doing a good job, he’s a strong manager. When I was on the County, we worked on certain initiatives with the city and their staff and the staff is doing a good job. The elected officials are supposed to set vision and policy and look out for, not just today but five, years, 10 years, 20 years and be working on that, but through that process, setting goals and working with staff on policies for the day to day; making sure that the city is working well every single day. You do both. From my experience with the county, the city and the county government is very well run. It’s important for the elected officials to be able to give them a strong vision of where the city should be going in the future and guidance so they can execute what needs to be done every day. There are a lot of talented people and they’ve done a good job serving the community. In the work that I do now, for a business-led education non-profit, we focus on not just supporting teachers and students but we’re in career development, we have a career development focus. Young people are wonderfully interested in serving the community but they don’t’ see how public service is community service, and it is. Working for local government is an important way to serve your community and we need to remember that as well.
Recently, the Council passed a suite of rules regulating Airbnb and electric scooters. Do you support the rules or feel they are too strict?
In certain parts of the city the scooters serve a purpose. They’re either the last mile from transit or getting around without a car and they’re fun. I’m glad the rules are clarified and there is the option for folks who choose to ride on the scooters, and we have bikes at the same time. We’re in a better place for those different modes of getting around. Airbnb are good options. It’s a way you can rent out a room in your house and be able to stay in your house and have a different source of income, which is important especially as housing is becoming much more expensive. For a lot of families especially, they like to rent Airbnb’s, it’s an easier way for them to travel with their children, so that’s important as well. I think there are ways you can maybe increase the opportunities for Airbnbs while having really good, clear rules to prevent abuses. I understand neighbors not liking when sometimes things are rented and there are noise violations or parking violations, but I think we can do that through good, clear rules and regulations and policies. Airbnb rules might prove to be a bit strict. Maybe we need to look at where some of these Airbnbs go, whether we figure out from a geographic standpoint. We’re not New Orleans or Charleston or some of these cities that are tourist destinations where they are having problems with folks not living in any of these homes and they’re just renting them out. There are not that many times where there’s a great demand for whole house rentals, it’s mostly graduations. So maybe we look at how many times you can rent out your whole house. As we continue to grow and live with these rules there are ways we can hopefully expand the opportunities without having the neighbors feel that it’s disruptive for them.
Last Word
I want to talk about opportunity. In all of this, you need to look at the city holistically, and one piece, especially with growth, is are we growing in a way where we’re not leaving people behind? I would like to focus on that as well if I’m elected mayor. How do we provide opportunities for young people to be able to know about, be trained for and have experience for these jobs that we have right now and the jobs in the future? How do we make sure that the city is a place where businesses want to move and bring jobs and how can we also give those opportunities to young people that grow up in Raleigh? How can we grow our own talent pipeline to be able to continue to recruit businesses and jobs in the future. And how can we make sure that no groups are left behind? It shouldn’t matter where your zip code is for what opportunity you have. Also, when I was with the County, we did work on the gender gap; how can we support women in the workforce? How can we as a community look at our gender gap issues? How can we provide salary negotiation training for women to make sure that they start out on their first jobs on the right foot and don’t perpetuate that wage gap through their careers? How do we encourage businesses to be more family-friendly? Because it’s important that women feel supported in the workforce. As you look at the demographic changes, there are less children coming through the educational pipeline, so it’s important that everybody in the city is working to their best ability and they’re supported to do that. I also believe we should focus on individuals with disabilities and job opportunities for folks that are neuro-diverse, who might have developmental disabilities and think differently as well as people that have physical disabilities. How do we support them?
