Local Elections and the Creatives

I have decided to take a look at the local elections from the viewpoint of how the issues affect the creative community.

Greensboro

The effort by state senator Trudy Wade to redraw the city's district lines has been permanently shelved by the courts and the end result is a very high number of people filing to take out all nine seat holders. Since I hang out here, I know a lot of members of the artist community. Ultimately, my picks and opinions will stray away from conventional belief because I have seen and heard things that would make most people's heads spin.

Following the results of a 2015 referendum, this year's elections will be the last ones until 2021 since four year terms were approved by the voters. Choose very wisely, Greensboro.

There are a lot of issues that need to be tackled: 

• a salary raise the City Council gave itself in mid 2016
• the Tanger Performing Arts Center and its potential to destroy the city's arts scene
• this area has ranked #1 in food hardship since 2015
• the ability to stand up to the Gate City's various political clans
• this is the third straight election cycle where a seat holder appointed to finish an unexpired term has decided to run for a full term, which plays into the hands of said clans
• the continued neglect of East Greensboro

High Point

This is the first time since 2005 that elections are being held in odd numbered years and with primaries. Only 11 percent bothered to turn out for that year's election. The hope in moving elections to even numbered years was to boost turnout. Instead, voters often skipped city elections after voting in higher profile state and national elections and on top of that, every race was winner take all, which led to some candidates being elected with less than 50 percent.

Here in the Furniture City, it's been about the Three H's (which is a sadder riff of what my high school classmate once said about the city being famous for furniture and Fantasia, hence the Two F's): hunger, heroin, and homicides.

At the same time, baseball and revitalization have also become big topics. North Main Street may not be street dieted but other parts of town have seen their streets have reduced lanes in order to make neighborhoods more pedestrian friendly. Andres Duany was brought here in 2013, which was also the same time tactical urbanism was being bandied about. The end result was that some of ideas have been adopted while others have been ignored. North Main through parts of Uptowne was closed between the fall and spring furniture markets. The construction project led to rerouted traffic and one business closing but that has not made much of an impact to this point.

When it wasn't busy chasing young creatives out of the Pit, past City Councils were doing something stupid as getting a Chinese entity to do a sculpture and passing it off as "local" simply because the prototype was done by a resident of the High Point area. The good news is that the current city government eventually allowed murals to be done in the Pit again--the result was a project that was conducted in conjunction with a nearby beer festival back in May.

Exit National Folk Festival, Enter NC Folk Festival

The three year run of the National Folk Festival in Greensboro has come to an end and as it turns out, contrary to what I said last year, the big players in Greensboro do have a plan for next year and beyond, and it's called the North Carolina Folk Festival.

That was a big surprise to me given that I thought for sure that the city's leaders were going all in with the still unbuilt and structureless performing arts center and also I thought that Guilford County's long reputation of naysaying out of the ordinary stuff would have precluded such an event.

While I don't have any issues with the pending spinoff, I do have to question the logistics and public support. First, the bus issues have to be fixed because they were terrible this year. Instead of continuing the increased frequencies (they were every 30 minutes during the festival in '15 and three routes ran every 7-8 minutes while the other routes ran every 30 minutes last year), the regular hourly schedule was used. 

Second, a friend of mine pointed out last year some of the inner workings of the Greensboro arts scene and said that the midsized organizations had been getting less funding due to ArtsGreensboro giving all of its money to the National Folk Festival. I don't believe that 100 percent of ArtsGreensboro funding will go the NCFF, but if it does, then there could be trouble with other arts organizations in town--a prime example is that the Greensboro Fringe Festival almost went out of business due to it falling short of fundraising goals earlier this year.

The elephants aren't going anywhere

The Jim Hunt wing of the Democratic Party has made its choice and it’s to change parties. Politically speaking, North Carolina is the most backward state because of how long its political realignment played out. Moderate and conservative Democrats ran the state for much of the second half of the last century. As a result, immense GOP gains were difficult to impossible. What has happened since 2010 only means that NC is not a leader at all--it really means that it has finally caught up to the other southern states as the Nixon-Reagan realignment has made the state's GOP more in line with the national party.

Anti-urbanism’s power has shifted west. For decades, it was eastern Democrats. Now, it’s suburban Republicans joining forces with their rural counterparts to put the screws to the urban areas. Trudy Wade’s failed attempt to overhaul the Greensboro City Council was just a local example of this.

The right wing takeover could have been avoided (or at least dented) if only Dems had agreed to an independent redistricting plan in 2002!

Democratic corruption has given way to Republican stupidity and embarrassment

• Exhibit A: The lawmakers who said that the First Amendment didn't apply to NC.
• Exhibit B: The nipple ban bill that went nowhere
• Exhibit C: Making various elections partisan when nobody wanted it and attempting likewise with all municipal elections
• Exhibit D: Mike Stone of Lee County going out of his way to force a radio show off a college station after the hosts criticized him for interfering in local affairs
• Exhibit E: Attempting to reinstate a ban on same sex marriage, ignoring the high court
• Exhibit F: Drafting a laughable bill that would force NC State and UNC to leave the ACC if the conference calls the state on its bluff in the future
• Exhibit G: The law that allows people to run over protesters with impunity

Since the GOP will be in power until 2023 at the earliest, get used to this state being in the news for all the wrong reasons like the 2014 Jefferson Muzzles and all of the blowback over HB2.

Greensboro: The Stunted City

It started with the location of the North Carolina Railroad. It was only Governor John Motley Morehead’s political pull that landed the railroad in Greensboro rather than Asheboro. Had the railroad gone through the centrally located city, it’s very likely that this state would have many more people because Asheboro would've been better suited to compete with the Triangle and Charlotte. 

Instead, as these pictures indicate, various cities played hot potato with the top four spots after the Wilmington coup of 1898. 

(Note: The population figures are from the October 15, 2006 edition of the News & Record)

Then, there's this tidbit:

Then, in 1923, High Point surprised Greensboro by an annexation that expanded its population to 21,000 and made it the state's sixth largest city. Greensboro was number eight, and its backers immediately submitted a new charter to the General Assembly, increasing its limits from four to nearly 18 square miles. Its population more than doubled to more than 45,000. "Greater Greensboro," as it was known, became NC’s third largest city overnight, a rank it holds today.

The annexation tit for tat within Guilford Country alone is partly why the Triad has never been a viable threat to its neighbors down I-40 & I-85.

Another thing that surprised me was that it wasn't until the last decade that the Triangle surpassed the Triad in population. One only has to wonder how the region to the east was able to stick to its vision like Research Triangle Park while the much less spread out Piedmont Triad struggled to even recognize itself as a region.

Durham and Winston-Salem traded the #4 and #5 positions between 2007 and 2012 before the Bull City pulled away from the Twin City. Given the stagnant growth around the Gate City, it's plausible that Winston could leapfrog it for #3 or rather Greensboro falls to #5 some time around the 2020 Census or afterwards. Now, if Forsyth County ends up with more people than Guilford County, look out because somebody may want to pull the plug on the whole Triad concept then.

The various regional partnerships have done nothing for this area. While Winston has rebranded itself as the City of Arts and Innovation, Greensboro has developed a tremendous inferiority complex (High Point has become a glorified university town, which is a different set of circumstances altogether). Said complex has also spread over to the arts/entertainment/nightlife scene. The reason why the Tanger Performing Arts Center is even being built is due to Greensboro leaders being so envious of a similar venue in Durham. The city's "leaders"never bothered to evaluate the possible negatives, only the need to keep up with the Joneses. The truth is that the TPAC will actually have a negative impact on the arts as the big money donors will show up to the venue while shunning more organic projects that actually touch more people's lives.

Not asking for a friend, by the way

What happens first, the Triad becomes the Southern equivalent of the Rust Belt or rap music goes the way of jazz?

In other words, the former means that an area that already has trouble getting on the same page suffers an overall loss in population by 2025 or 2030 while the latter means rap music goes from being a popular genre to reverting back to a musical novelty that will eventually be reduced to noncommercial stations two generations from now (try finding a good jazz station and you know what I mean).

For the second time in a six-year span, Debbie Yow had to find a new basketball coach because if she hadn't, Mark Gottfried would have become Herb Sendek 2.0 with half of the fanbase calling for his head and the other half rallying behind him. Two bad seasons followed four consecutive trips to the NCAA Tournament. In reality, Gottfried had three disappointing seasons because in Year 2, the Wolfpack were picked to win the ACC, but the team wound up playing the first day of the ACC Tournament and flamed out against eventual champion Miami in the semis. It's pathetic that football schools and Virginia were able to win four straight conference titles while this program is still looking for our first conference title since 1987.

Kevin Keatts needs to realize that Sweet 16s won't cut it any more. This program wants regular season titles, ACC titles, and to be in the mix for the Final Four from this point out. After all, FSU, Miami,Virginia, and Notre Dame were able to do at least one or two of the aforementioned. If Keatts doesn't get the job done, then, apathy will reign supreme. After all, the University of San Francisco also has two national titles but has been insignificant ever since Bill Russell left.

Gottfried wasn't alone in helping this program underachieve. C.J. Leslie was exposed for what he really was: being selfish. He was so much of a problem his freshman year that Sidney Lowe suspended him at Duke and benched him in what would be the ex-coach's last game at the 2011 ACC tourney. Gott tried to work with the dude but C.J. was too problematic in the end.

Rodney Purvis is someone who I wish nothing but ill for because of how ungrateful he turned out to be. He was the hometown player who was supposed to lead State back to the promised land but cut and ran to UConn after his freshman season.

A Requiem for Oak Hollow Mall: August 9, 1995-March 10, 2017

Oak Hollow Mall is now closed after less than 22 years. On the last day, nothing but the Dillard's was open. So, a city with more than 100,000 people is now without a mall.

The place should have closed much earlier but due to the obstinacy of Dillard's and Sears, it lingered on until the surprise announcement that I didn't even know about until over a week ago. The pharmacy school fiasco of 2014 also exposed High Point University president Nido Qubein for not being as good of a negotiator as he was made out to be.

The mall was what it was. I'm not going to express my opinion in detail--others have evaluated the situation much better than I ever could. I, however, do remember a high school classmate saying how Westchester Mall should have been expanded and how much my vocational teacher agreed with her--mind you, this was two years after Oak Hollow opened. 

Nobody knows what will happen next, but with all of the major retail in the city's north side, given the divide of the city, is bad news for other parts of town.