Why Chapel Hill has new leadership

Chapel Hill voters this week kicked out their mayor along with two town council members. Since as far back as anyone can remember, no incumbent mayor has lost an election in Chapel Hill, and the council’s composition has never changed so radically.

The incumbents lost despite endorsements by nearly every interest group: NC Equality, the AFL-CIO, the Sierra Club, the Indy, Orange Politics, the Breakfast Club and the Chapel Hill-Carrboro Chamber of Commerce. How did the Chapel Hill Alliance for a Livable Town or CHALT – a group of local residents dismissed by real estate developer Roger Perry as “that small group of people who make noise about everything” – beat these incumbents and secure wins for three of its four endorsed candidates?

On social media and in the press, the losers are portraying the election as a setback for progressivism. They say “the C in CHALT is silent” and accuse the group of trying to halt development, cut services and torpedo light rail. They imply the new mayor will take a less friendly attitude toward minorities, among them a newly discovered and allegedly endangered minority: real estate developers.

In truth, candidates for “progress” and “development” did not lose this election. Candidates for high real-estate taxes and high rent did. Many people in Chapel Hill work for UNC or the state and local governments, including the school system, or live in families with UNC or government employees. UNC or government workers are often the breadwinners. These workers have not received a substantial pay raise in seven years. They cannot afford to pay high taxes and rents. They do not want to shoulder the public infrastructure costs of new real-estate developments, and they do not condone the mayor’s willingness to let speculators gobble up the town’s dwindling stock of smaller, cheaper houses and stuff them full of students while violating regulations against overcrowding.

Promised revenue increases from business taxes have yet to materialize. Luxury high-rises materialize instead, along with new town bonds.

The Southern Part of Heaven being what it is – and America being what it is – this assault on the voters’ standard of living fell hardest on the working class. Few teachers, police officers or janitors can afford to live in Chapel Hill. Working-class blacks lost not just homes and money, but a whole neighborhood, Northside. Chapel Hill is becoming a Southern segregated part of heaven.

CHALT members objected to this sort of progressive segregation. In their minds, a livable town is one where the woman who drives your bus to campus can afford the rent, or where her husband, who is working down a manhole as you cross the street, can co-sign a mortgage. CHALT agreed with the longtime resident of Northside who stood up in the council chamber and told the mayor that if he wanted luxury high rises on Rosemary Street he should put them down on the other end, on East Rosemary, where the rich live.

The outgoing mayor and council made no plans to build high-rises on the east end of Rosemary. Now they will not be putting them on the west end, either. They are out. Chapel Hill’s workers, and what remains of its middle class, have a chance to catch their collective breath. The new mayor and council have a chance to do better.

That would be progress.

This story was originally published November 6, 2015 at 6:02 PM with the headline "Why Chapel Hill has new leadership."