The City of Durham’s Neighborhood Improvement Services (NIS) is holding a “Code Enforcement Summit” tomorrow night to discuss its policy of demolishing vacant and dilapidated buildings. To those who favor preservation, and I would count myself one of those, this meeting seems more like a justification of the policy rather than a discussion of its wisdom. Pro-preservation Gary Kueber said on his fascinating blog site, Endangered Durham that the meeting has all the earmarks of a sham and a mockery, maybe even a mockery of a sham:
I feel strongly that this may be our one chance to try to make headway against a department that refuses to acknowledge the costs of demoliton to our community. Have no doubt – the department is stacking the deck; they sought no input on a date, choosing one that is the same night as a major Preservation Durham event.
He notes that he, one of Durham’s most visible preservation voices, was not invited and will be out of town. He notes that the language of the city’s press release does not imply a conversation. Here’s what the city info folks said about the meeting:
The City of Durham is hosting a code enforcement public forum to help educate residents and property owners on code enforcement and legal processes, the removal of unsafe structures as well as preservation and revitalization efforts.
Kueber’s response?:
No, NIS, we don’t need to be ‘educated’. Perhaps you should, for once, listen before presuming that the public is ill-informed.
I love old homes and old buildings. I spent hours in The Herald-Sun’s photo files when I worked there, looking at old downtown photos just for the pleasure of learning what the city was like 30, 40, 50 or 60 years ago. I still stop and look at the old aerial photos at Brightleaf Square. I find them fascinating, which is why Kueber’s blog is so interesting to me. But this is one of those issues that doesn’t just involve a piece of property. It involves public safety as well. The city obviously thinks these empty houses attract drug dealers and other n’er do wells, which is undoubtedly true. But preservationists dream of what these houses could be somewhere down the road.
The question is, what happens to the people in these neighborhoods in the meantime? If the landlords refuse to fix the property, and preservationists don’t come up with the funds to buy the properties themselves, what is the city to do? It’s a tough question, one of those Solomonic ones that people on the public payroll get paid the big bucks to answer.
By the way, the meeting is Tuesday night, May 1, at 6 p.m. in the City Council meeting room downtown in City Hall.
