Update 2/14: The Inside Scoop has more... much more
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On the front page of today's N&R, Margaret Moffet-Banks' looks behind the curtain that recently fell on St. James Homes II. Her expose' is chock full of facts, figures and hints of conspiracy theories. Lot's of conspiracy theories.
Andy Scott, the City's director of Housing and Community Development (HCD), is as forthcoming as we could possibly ask of a city employee who must continually balance the community's needs against the political forces that might have other ideas about what is best for Greensboro. This quote from Scott is especially telling on that count:
"Even a crackhead wouldn't want to live there if they could live somewhere else... It should have never been allowed to get that way."
Keep in mind, these words came from the guy who is in charge of Greensboro's publicly subsidized low income housing, and by all accounts does a heck of job at it. But I can assure you that St. James II wouldn't have "been allowed to get that way" if it had been up to him and HCD. Some other force was at work that ultimately "allowed" the complex to fail.
Sarah and Donald Graham, who head the management group charged with the project's oversight, identified why they thought the project was being allowed to fail. From the article...
"In a 2004 memo to city auditor Len Lucas, the Grahams referred to the 'Greensboro mafia' -- city leaders who wanted the apartments destroyed for their own personal agenda... "This project has not moved forward because we have been red-lined. Special interest groups desire to tear down the apartments for self-serving reasons."
County Commissioner Skip Alston agrees and identifies what he believes why 'city leaders' were allowing the project to fail, he opines that, "city leaders portrayed the apartments as run-down so they could use the land for a baseball stadium." Banks quotes Alston, "The reason why the city might say the property was in bad shape in 2001 was because they wanted to tear them down."
Although Alston's assertion that, "The City staff is racist." is an over-the-top and untrue accusation that brings the rest of his take on the whole affair into doubt, his and the Graham's identification of the culprit in all of this could very well be proven to be correct: Baseball.
I can attest to the no-holds-barred level of back room politics from our 'city leaders' that was occurring in the months leading up to the announcement of the South Elm Street site for a new baseball stadium and little of it involved our elected leadership. The same can be said for the Eugene Street site.
So who was pulling the strings? Names aren't named in the article, and I'll be damned if I'll do it either, but as Sarah Graham says cryptically in the article, "God knows. The City knows. We know. The community knows."
There was no way that millions of dollars in private funds earmarked for the stadium's construction was going to be committed to the original site without some serious 'urban removal'. If the stadium was going to be built at the South Elm site, the decks would have to be cleared of any "undesirable" structures or people that might detract from those 'city leaders' vision of what should occur there. Another consideration of where professional baseball should be located had to be what fans might view from their seats and on their way to and from their cars. From that point of view, St. James Homes II simply had to go. The N&R article hints at how that might have been accomplished.
So, I empathize with the Grahams. From what I read in Banks' article, and from knowing what I know from being intimately involved with 'city leaders' in both the Elm Street site and the site where the stadium ultimately was built, they never had a chance. No amount of good intentions and/or alternative community vision was going to get in the way of a new baseball stadium here in Greensboro. Make no mistake about it, money and influence on the part of our un-elected 'city leadership' was used to pave the way to what we now see at the corner of Eugene and Bellmeade.
Someday the entire story of the back-room messiness behind Greensboro's new baseball stadium will come out and it will be a real education to how politics is really done in this town. I have often thought that Jerry Bledsoe's particular brand of writing might be up to such an explosive task. But until then, today's article by Margaret Moffet-Banks will just have to suffice as a hint to how Greensboro's government-in-fact, which can best be defined as a benevolent oligarchy, operates.
10:40:26 AM 
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