Already Mayor Vaughan has forced 400 or more residents, some of them home owners, from Heritage House and now she again plans to "help" District 1 by using TIF financing for part of the South Elm Redevelopment thereby forcing an entire neighborhood of poor and mostly minority residents to get out just as was done in Warnersville and on East Market Street years ago. From the City of Greensboro website:
"From the turn of the century to the late 1950s, the East Market Street Corridor flourished. It was the shopping and social center for many of Greensboro's African Americans, who owned businesses on the street and provided services to those shut out by segregation practices in other Greensboro neighborhoods.
This lively community began to wind down in the late 1950s and 1960s when, under the guise of "urban renewal," thousands of people and more than 80 businesses (many minority-owned) were displaced. Most of those businesses never reestablished.
Decline and disinvestment took a toll on the neighborhood -- and its residents."
For well over 60 years the Nancy Vaughans of Irving Park have "helped" Greensboro's poor and working class in exactly the same way-- by pushing us out. It's time we said enough is enough, stop talking about jobs at the airport and start putting jobs where poor people live. Stop talking about real estate development and economic development as if they were the same thing-- they're not. Stop talking about megasites in other communities across the county line that will encourage the few Greensboro residents who get those jobs to move out of Greensboro and take their money with them. Stop giving away money to rich people just because they're your friends and neighbors. Stop doing what has never worked before.
And stop your campaign of lies.
