No vacancy

Tan gravel sidewalks, stone walls, anti-housing organizing

I’VE BEEN going through my binders of research related to James Cates. I’m working on cataloguing it all for eventual placement in the Critical Oral History archive the James Cates Remembrance Coalition is working toward.

Recently, I came upon a newspaper clip I’d filed from a 1968 edition of the Chapel Hill Weekly. I had copied the page a few years back for the photograph of and headline about former Chapel Hill police chief William D. Blake. By coincidence, surrounding the photo of the chief happened to be a story about neighborhoods organizing to block an affordable housing development proposed by the Inter Church Council.

Chapel Hill Weekly, June 12, 1968

In researching a number of local history topics and eras, I’ve found that you can open local newspapers or books from just about any year going back a century and come across complaints of town growth or development projects. People have been bellyaching that Chapel Hill was no longer the charming village it once was dating back to when Franklin Street was dirt.

There have almost always been residents desiring to hang a No Vacancy sign on the “Southern Part of Heaven.” Chapel Hill was heaven when they first fell in love with it and should remain frozen in time. And when one considers that the historical meaning of the “Southern Part of Heaven” nickname is the Confederate Part of Heaven, that inclination collects some additional context.

Many people dislike change. But, of course, things do change. Villages and towns are no exception, try as hard as some might to prevent it. As is often the case with oppositions to development, arguments tend to include tortured, sometimes coded, rationales, especially when it comes to adding multi-family housing.

The gripes from that 1968 newspaper clip — not long after future mayor Howard Lee’s family battled tremendous friction and dodged deceptive real estate tactics to buy a home in white Colony Lake only to have a cross burned in their yard and a neighbor walk backward down her driveway daily to get the newspaper so that her back would stay turned to the Lee home¹ — don’t sound too different from complaints of modern times. Hundreds of people residing on acre lots in 1968 said what they feared from the proposed new apartments near Elliott Road were “lowered property values, high density and increased traffic congestion”.

When I tweeted this 54-year-old clip as an example of how familiar these fights are here, it got some interesting responses. One person, Melody Kramer, a founder of Triangle Blog Blog (nope, that’s not a typo), replied with other historical examples of local anti-development organizing, as did others.

Mike Ogle @mikeogling

I have this 1968 Chapel Hill Weekly clip in my research files for the police chief. But you can just about open up town newspapers from any time going back a century and see complaints about town growth. Here, a familiar fight against an affordable housing project.

This 1968 apartment project was proposed by the Inter Church Council to address a need for affordable housing. Another person replied to my tweet that her “grandmother and a close friend were part of the Inter-faith council. i can tell you that the complaints were not about ‘town growth’”.

Susan Worley, a social worker and lifelong resident of Chapel Hill, saw the tweet and it sparked a memory. She recalled that for her 10th grade English class at Chapel Hill High School in 1968, she had written a paper about this very housing controversy. So she went to her attic and found the paper. Then she emailed it to me, writing, “Getting past my impassioned 15-year-old fervor, you can see that many things haven’t really changed.”

Ms. Worley graciously agreed to permit Stone Walls to publish her old high school paper. She only hoped that people would keep in mind she was 15 when she wrote it.

Susan Worley (Source: Volunteers For Youth)

Here is the text of that 10th-grade English paper from the fall of 1968, just the third school year in which the high school was fully integrated:

Susan Prothro
Sept. 16, 1968
3rd Period

On Chapel Hill

When I was old enough to read pretty well, I started reading the Chapel Hill Weekly and I really thought it was great, finding out what a praiseworthy town I lived in. The Weekly never stopped extolling the virtues of Chapel Hill, seeing it as a community of liberal minds with just a touch of sweet magnolia blossom in the air. I was so proud of my hometown and couldn’t imagine anyone wanting to live anywhere else.

And then one day last spring, a church down the road from my house decided to build some low cost housing units in my neighborhood. Immediately the smell of sweet magnolia blossom turned sickeningly syrupy and I found that the “liberal” community of Chapel Hill was all a big farce.

It would have been hard enough to stand my neighbors if they had simply said they hated black people and didn’t want them living nearby. But, instead, they made up whining excuses, like the traffic problem these few units would cause or that their property values might go down.

The other night, the Board of Aldermen went along with my neighbors and didn’t allow the low-income housing units to be built. Somebody who could’ve had a nicer home will be unable to, I will continue living in a white ghetto, and, I have started thinking that maybe I would rather live with the hate of a typical Southern town than with the hypocrisy of this one.

Her teacher wrote on the paper that it was written with “great clarity & gentle persuasion” and suggested her student submit it under an alias to the Chapel Hill Weekly as a Letter to the Editor. Worley explained to me that her teacher suggested using an alias because her mother, Mary Prothro, was on the Board of Aldermen at the time. (Prothro voted in favor of the housing, Worley confirmed in the archived Town meeting minutes.) Worley also said she doesn’t recall the details of how the saga eventually played out, but that Elliott Woods Apartments of Inter Church Council Housing was completed in 1973.

Worley expressed that she felt a touch embarrassed to publish the emotional responses of her 15-year-old self. But her explanation to me of how her feelings have matured was just as instructive as her observations back in 1968. “I feel a little sheepish about it because I was caught up back then in that sort of, ‘I thought this place was perfect and it’s not, therefore it sucks’ attitude that I think many of us go through as teens. I’ve since come around to ‘this place isn’t perfect and there is so much work to be done to make it so AND I’m so glad to call it home.’”

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1. The Courage to Lead: One Man’s Journey in Public Service by Howard N. Lee