Like gambling addicts who keep doubling down thinking they’ll come up winners eventually, the City of Durham keeps putting our money on Rolling Hills, the ill-conceived development south of downtown Durham.
Since the 1980s taxpayer money has been dumped into Rolling Hills to no effect. Every time one “developer” fails to revive the project and make it go, the city has to pump in more money.
City Councilman Eugene Brown gave the addicted gambler’s classic response to the latest all-in bet. “We’ve already come this far, we can’t stop now,” he told The Independent. The latest developer to come to the rescue couldn’t even come up with its half of the planning costs, so the City Council has agreed to pay it for them. This is starting out like all the other failed attempts.
The problem with Rolling Hills is not the economy, it’s that it always has been divorced from anything resembling market forces. Whether anyone would want to live there is something a conventional developer would have asked at the start, and his answer would have been absolutely not. A conventional developer never would have put money into this project in that location. Only someone relying on a government sugar teat would ever try it. After all, it’s easy to be an entrepreneur when you’re using taxpayer money.
Check out the photos of Rolling Hills in The Independent‘s report, here and here. It looks that way after two decades of expensive enabling by our elected officials. Some argue, incredibly, that the decrepit homes and decaying amenities are a reason to keep dumping money into Rolling Hills. In reality, the conditions are stark testimony to the ill-advised nature of the entire undertaking.
Sorry, Councilman Brown and other city fathers, but it’s not time to double down. It’s time to cut our losses. There may be some use for that property that will enhance Durham, but this is clearly not it.
