My Usual Charming Self | Bernie Reeves | Raleigh’s Decline Is Durham’s Big Chance

Raleigh’s Decline Is Durham’s Big Chance

By Bernie Reeves

Like Athens and Sparta, Raleigh and Durham have been in a war despite their proximity to each other across a geographical vale: Raleigh east, and Durham west with a DMZ that follows the “fall line” between the coastal plain and the rising topography of the Piedmont. While Durham is a city right out of the sociology textbooks — tobacco and textile manufacturing, extreme wealth, a true blue collar working class, a large and proud black community, Raleigh is a political creation, plopped down in the middle of the state to assuage the regional warfare dominant after Independence. Durham was more brawn and Raleigh more brains, a working city versus the redoubt of politicians, lawyers and merchants.

The latest drawn out clash between the two city-states began in the 1950s over the creation of Research Triangle Park. Durham, always on their toes for business opportunities, ran water and sewer lines to the half of the Park in their county. The white collar denizens of Raleigh played their lutes and hoped no one new would move to their idyllic town and upset the status quo. But the first big wave of new arrivals to work in the Park chose Raleigh over Durham in greater numbers. Durham, like Sparta and its jealousy of Athens, felt snubbed and prepared for war. In the latest battle, Durham sent a clear message by lobbying to be removed from the Raleigh-Durham Metropolitan Statistical Area designation — the modern version of the ancient Greek city leagues, leaving Raleigh joined with Cary and the Bull City the brightest planet in a constellation featuring Chapel Hill and Roxboro.

Durham is indeed transformed, even while Raleigh continues to walk away with top national rankings for best place to live, work and raise a family. Downtown Durham is on the rise, and the aesthetics of the city offer a funkier frisson than Raleigh’s rather middle-class deportment. But will newcomers today choose the newly revitalized Durham over the blander but more uniformly attractive Raleigh? I think so, due to the same weakness that lifted Sparta over Athens for a long stretch of the Peloponnesian Wars — unenlightened leadership - in two key areas today: roads and schools.

Raleigh On The Decline
The first thing people notice when they travel to another city is the condition of the roads. Well-maintained streets denote a well-run, prosperous civic entity. But when main thoroughfares are in perpetual decay, visitors and citizens begin to question the leadership of the community — and the image the city is promoting.

Glenwood Avenue, the old Highway 70 that runs right through downtown — Raleigh’s main thoroughfare — has become nearly impassable, especially through Five Points and westward past the Woman’s Club to Crabtree Valley. The condition of this vital artery would be unacceptable in a Third World country. In the world-class capital of North Carolina, the deteriorated Glenwood Avenue — along with Wade, Hillsborough, Person and several other main roads — is embarrassing and inexcusable.

The last time I mentioned this to city officials — over six months ago — I was instructed to speak to the person in charge of Raleigh’s roads for DOT since most of Raleigh’s streets are owned by the state. He said the city would have to finance repairs on Glenwood. He said the state, which is responsible, is not going to do it. I e-mailed this information to the same city officials, hoping the humiliation of the road situation would stimulate action. Nothing has happened, and the main roads continue to decline. The only information worth noting is that, to its credit, the city in the past would repair state-owned roads and bill the state later. Now this practice is abandoned, perhaps because the state can’t pay back the money. And while Raleigh sinks into disrepair, Durham is on the rise and well aware it has a chance to replace Raleigh as the darling of the quality of life pollsters.

Is it because the Council advocates rail transit that no leader has stood up and taken a stand on the road issue? The new Comprehensive Plan for the city is riddled with make-believe rail corridors no mature adult could possibly believe will work. But clinging to these fairy tale rail lines prevents our leadership from raising hell with the state to fix the bloody roads.

Busing Gulags
The school situation is another serious matter affecting the viability of Raleigh’s future. The stubborn refusal of the Wake County School Board to cease and desist from disrupting the lives of thousands of families with school-age children via callous artificial busing, a practice ruled unconstitutional five years ago by the United States Supreme Court, is detested by families and noticed by realtors. Newcomers fear their kids will be summarily scooped up and frog-marched across town without warning under the current Wake Schools policy of arbitrary pupil assignment.

A ruling by the Supremes doesn’t appear to faze the die-hard social planners who have a full nelson grip on the Wake Schools’ busing policy. Even in the face of the reality that the theoretical construct of busing does not work — as the Supreme Court noted — the pupil assignment zealots will carry on, unless the outrage felt in the community translates to a new School Board. Dana Cope, chief of the State Employees Association, has learned what it feels like to be a victim of the busing Nazis. His kids were suddenly uprooted and goose-stepped across town, and he didn’t like it. He is offering the juice from his contacts and political skills to unseat the current Board.

In preparation, Wake School officials glided down to the NC Supreme Court and gained a ruling saying the practice of busing students was supposedly legal, despite the US Supreme Court ruling. This is disingenuous and petulant at best. As there is no precedent for state rulings in the matter of busing, this is political window dressing.

The most shocking aspect of this preposterous policy is the involvement of the business community. The Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and the Wake Education Partnership are community forces behind pupil reassignment, maintaining that newcomers and new businesses actually prefer to live where school kids can be uprooted and the tranquility of their family thrown into chaos — all in the name of a theoretical social policy even the highest court in the land finds repugnant.

Durham’s day is here.