Proponents of a downtown Greensboro performing arts center like to use the excuse that the area in the green circle is a high crime area where no one would attend shows. If that's true then the crime rate is high because the City of Greensboro hasn't made enough of an effort to control crime in the area.
Yes, the Claremont Courts and Patio Place Apartments, low income housing projects are next door but those projects were built and still belong to the City of Greensboro. If the people living in those projects are the reason Greensboro's elite are scared to come here then one only needs to remember that it was Greensboro's elite who chose to put them here instead of their own neighborhoods. Like distributed parking, Greensboro's low income housing projects should have been distributed all over the city-- even in their precious downtown.
"...if Greensboro's better-off population is so snobbish, classist and racist as to refuse to patronize an East Greensboro Performing Arts Center then none of Greensboro deserves to have a performing arts center no matter where they ultimately decide to locate it."
And on that, you know I'm right.
Greensboro's elite and the Greensboro City Council made East Greensboro what it is today through a deliberate series of events that began with the bulldozing of East Greensboro's thriving commercial district in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and the trend has continued to date. Patio Place Apartments were built after the City recognized the need to distribute low income housing throughout the city instead of concentrating it all in a few areas.
Over all, East Greensboro has more low income housing than any other section of Greensboro. This was deliberate and planned. And it was wrong.
If my East Greensboro neighborhood-- the neighborhood inside the green circle is unsafe then it is unsafe because the City of Greensboro, the Greensboro City Council and Greensboro's elite who make up Greensboro's downtown proponents, made it so.
And there would be no faster way to make them pay for their sins that to build an East Greensboro Performing Arts Center named after a man of color who inspired children and provide the resources to make the neighborhood safe again.
But there are those people who want to continue the status quo.
Continue to article #27 Downtown Greensboro Performing Arts Center: The Lies Never Cease
