Over the last 14 months, much has been made about Ignite High Point and architect Andres Duany. Even though the street diet plan has been problematic and is IMO, a nonstarter, young entrepreneurs like Ryan Saunders are doing their best to revive parts of the city like the Pit downtown. On July 14, Saunders and company held an event at the Pit to demonstrate just how a center city revival could work.
This picture that I snapped on the 7th says a lot about the city's true attitude towards entrepreneurs.
That's right, folks, Dinner with a Side of Culture could have been shut down at any time. The Pit has been around since the 1970s, and nobody with the "right" connections has been able to make the collapsed parking lot productive? And the people who are supposed to lead this city wonder why downtown's moribund.
Then, there's this gem from Jordan Green's article last week:
Some council members were angry that the event was held without obtaining permission from the city.
Monica Peters, a member of the grassroots group We Heart High Point, volunteered during the committee meeting that although she did not organize the event, she signed a city-issued event permit to prevent the event from getting shut down. Interim City Manager Randy McCaslin said that he had the authority to order the police to arrest people for trespassing, “but we decided to handle it the right way.”
These sentences tell me that those councilmembers were likely upset that they were deprived of the chance to (gleefully) tell Saunders and/or Peters no.
The city can largely blame itself for downtown's decline and nonrecovery because it made the decision back in 1995 to zone most of the CBD in favor of the furniture industry once Chick-Fil-A and Sears fled to Oak Hollow Mall. It shouldn't have been surprised that some of those same furniture companies threatened to pull out of the High Point Market had the City Council adopted the Planning Commission's idea of rezoning parts of downtown that would have allowed development via a Market District in 2009. If there were any foresight 19 years ago, there would have been no need for Uptowne after the Market districting plan fell flat. Instead, the center city was all but lost in '95.
It seems as though some city leaders are more than willing to bet High Point's future on the furniture industry likely due to the Vegas threat being neutralized a few years ago when the High Point and Las Vegas markets fell under one roof in the wake of the Great Recession.
I have reached the conclusion that there are some elected officials and unelected power brokers who have the mindset that it isn't in their best interest to revive the decaying parts of town because they figure they'll be long gone by the time High Point resembles a Rust Belt city and that it'll be up to their children and grandchildren to handle the fallout.
The final reason why this city's morale absolutely sucks is due to the heavily publicized legal and financial troubles of embattled mayor Bernita Sims and Ward 2 councilman Foster Douglas. At one point last year, those events took a nasty turn and could have been turned into nasty racial issues. Fortunately for them, the noise died down as citizens' ire shifted to revitalization. It's also a good thing that neither one is running for reelection.
Unless this city can elect people who aren't entrenched with the elites who are largely responsible for High Point's split personality or a bunch of austerity hawks who will say no to anything creative, the Furniture Capital of the World will either resemble Baton Rouge (split into two cities where the new city thrives at the older one's expense) or Detroit (decayed urban core with better off suburban areas) in the next 25-50 years.
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