Quick Update 2: Heed the sins of Raleigh

An interesting article in today's N&O profiles the upcoming demolition of Kings, which, for those who aren't familiar with it, is a music club in downtown Raleigh, set amongst a row of one-story early 20th century commercial structures on McDowell St. It's the kind of homegrown, grassroots place that has the right setting and substance to attract a wide array of people - kind of like Joe and Jo's did here in Durham. (They call the structure cinderblock, when the picture clearly shows that it is brick; seems like a quibble, but has definite value connotations.)

The article in the Independent back in February emphasized the fact that the structure was going to be torn down only for a temporary staging area for construction of the parking deck for Wake County; the N&O adds the information that the owner plans for it to be a surface parking lot when that staging is done.

"Honestly, you can make as much from leasing parking as leasing buildings."

... is the comment from the owner, who bought the building 10 years ago as an investment, thinking the RBC center was going to be built around that spot. He evidently sees the parking lot as a better blank canvas for whatever bounty he sees coming down the pike.

We have a tendency to get starry-eyed over the glory of grand new development, and as one whose childhood play options seemed revolve around Legos, blocks, or Tonka trucks, I understand the appeal. Despite my frequently malcontented posture on this blog, I still feel the passion evoked by construction.

My concern arises from what I think is a tendency to lump all of our economic hopes into big landscape changes - whether it be wholesale demolition or fancy new buildings or both. In the slash, burn, and build process, we risk nullifying the small seeds of economic change that can accumulate to form a greater whole. The new construction market is going after the kind of leases that can allow them to bring in a 17-20% IRR to their equity investors. And that's fine - I'm not against people making money. But it is necessarily going to exclude small businesses that are struggling to put something together at the outset. Part of saving old builings is to provide those opportunities for businesses like Kings, which the owners say is "viable, but no one has gotten rich from [it]". They create positive externalities though, both by attracting the market to that geographic location, and by the more ephemeral 'cool' or 'interesting' factor.

And really the issue for me is how government plays its role. Do they get starry-eyed, and throw millions of dollars at large-scale projects without a clear sense for the pitfalls? Do they demolish old buildings (opportunities) because their economic development programs are not successful at alleviating poverty? Do they demolish music clubs for staging areas for building parking decks while building convention centers that rely on booking conventions who base their location decisions in part on the entertainment options around the site? (Sorry for the intended run-on sentence.) What preconceived notions are in play? That the high-end convention-goers want 4-star restaurants, not unscrubbed clubs?

While the decisions to demolish the mansions of McMannen St. (now Mangum St., where the ballpark, Diamond View and the Durham Freeway now intersect Mangum) and all of the other businesses and homes taken by urban renewal long preceeded the coming of our own new downtown south of the tracks, it is our public funds chasing our public funds in an effort to alter the economic circumstance of downtown Durham. We don't know what small businesses would have started on S. Mangum and what a cool neighborhood McMannen (Mangum) St. might have become had we left well-enough alone in the 1960s - or how much tax renvenue might have been lost from these neighborhoods. The same mindset predominantes in our current decision-making - witness the upcoming demolition of all of the structures in 300 block of East Main St. for a county surface parking lot.

We continue to try to change the market by changing the venue, a policy that, nationally and historically, as well as locally, has very limited efficacy. To date, in Durham, the successful market has come from people renovating the structures that survived demolition, primarily at the hand of government, in the 1960s. Why our elected and un-elected officials can't digest this notion, I don't know.