2010: The Year in Review

by Moe White

Any ‘Year in Review’ has to ask “what happened this year that’s worth remembering?”

How is December 2010 different from December 2009? What has changed
enough that its impact will be felt long after the change itself is
forgotten?

The year started with the wintriest winter Western North Carolina has
seen in years, with snow that began in December and kept coming back for
more. Then nationally known columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr. warmed
everybody up when he spoke at the Martin Luther King breakfast in
January. The heat was turned up even more in May when writer and singer
Bernice Johnson Reagon was the keynote speaker at UNC Asheville’s
commencement.

The summer hit, and after some good spring rains through June, it turned hot, dry and, it seemed, endless. But fall’s color season was abruptly terminated by heavy rains, then snow flurries showed up in November, followed by torrential downpours the week after Thanksgiving, and more snow on December 5, 6, 7, and …? None of that changed the world, but it all helped shape our memories of 2010.

Here, though, is what might matter as the years go by:

Urban Redevelopment

The Del Cardo building stands at the corner of Eagle and Market Streets.

Pack Square Park finally opened after five years of construction. From a distance, the performing stage and its wavy structural cover look charmingly abstract, and the modern style and elements work surprisingly well with the classic designs of City Hall and the County Courthouse. It will probably be next summer, under blue skies and warm weather, that the park becomes the dynamic hub of creative relaxation that was promised.

Meanwhile, both drivers and pedestrians are becoming accustomed to the changed traffic patterns around and through the park. Overall, despite some cost overruns, the redesigned, rebuilt Pack Square Park promises to be a pleasant new heart for downtown.
A few yards away, the renaissance on The Block has not yet taken place, and there are few signs that it’s even moving forward yet. But the joint effort between Eagle-Market Development Corporation, Mt. Zion CDC, property owner Eugene Ellison, and developer Mountain Housing Opportunities is the most promising of many plans that have been floated over the years. We’ll keep our fingers crossed that it moves toward fulfillment as time goes by.

In the meanwhile, though, it’s hard to see any change on The Block, unless you’re looking for the staff at the YMI. Just about everyone who worked there a year ago is gone — longtime fixtures Connie Jefferson and Margaret Fuller were laid off and, later, Executive Director Harry Harrison resigned. Now the organization is being reimagined and reinvented under interim management by the board of directors.

Where and in what direction the historic community center will go cannot be predicted; what can be expected, given its central role in Asheville’s history — and the sometimes rocky path it’s taken to preserve and showcase it — is that the YMI Cultural Center will survive and thrive.

North Carolina governor Bev Perdue meets the publisher of The Urban News, Johnnie Grant.  Photo: Renato Rotolo

Urban “Renewal”

When prosperous African Americans began moving into previously all-white neighborhoods half a century ago, it was called “blockbusting,” and property values often collapsed as fear of new black neighbors caused “white flight.” Conversely, when whites moved into black neighborhoods to take advantage of affordable property found there, prices inexorably rose and pushed out less affluent residents — and it was called a neighborhood “renaissance.”

Eric Boyce, head of campus safety at UNC Asheville.	Rev. Aubra Love, Executive Director of Building Bridges.

Nearly fifty years after Urban Renewal helped empty the Southside and Depot Street community of a huge proportion of its residents and hundreds of homes, Mountain Housing Opportunities opened a new apartment building at 372 Depot Street in November. But the African Americans who were forced out of Southside back then are nowhere to be found: the new residents are hip, young(ish), and mostly white. They join the hundreds of artists who started moving in to the area a decade or so ago, when they found empty warehouses to convert into galleries and living spaces in what was quickly renamed “the River Arts District.” Is it Urban Renewal, or an Urban renaissance?

Urban Self-Determination

Neighborhood activist groups grew and began to thrive in Shiloh, West End-Clingman Avenues, Southside, and the East End. How strong a force they will become is yet to be seen.

Urban Transit

Asheville’s public transit system has been under a spotlight for a good part of the year, due to a spate of accidents in which its drivers were to blame. Because state law prohibits North Carolina municipalities from negotiating with unions, the city contracts out its transit operations to a unionized company. As a result, the city — which is legally liable for transit accidents — has no real control over the people it entrusts to drive its buses. In 2010, one woman lost her leg, another man died, and several vehicles were clipped, bumped, or dented after being hit by city buses. Blacks ride buses at a substantially higher rate per capita than whites, so the safety and efficiency of the transit system can disproportionately impact the African American community if service is truncated or costs are increased because of poor management.

Urban Leadership

Several African American men and women have taken high-profile new roles in the community:
•    Eric Boyce took over as head of campus safety at UNC Asheville.
•    Gerald Spate became director of diversity at Warren Wilson College.
•    Dr. Joseph Fox is the founder of the Minority Male Leadership Program at AB Tech.
•    Rev. Aubra Love became the first non-volunteer Executive Director of Building Bridges.

Mike Easley was indicted.

The State

After two years of investigation, paying one fine and claiming to have no money left to pay another, and seeing a former aide convicted of several felony charges, the former governor, Mike Easley, was himself indicted and finally pleaded guilty to a single minor felony charge of misusing campaign funds. He followed in the footsteps of former state House speaker Jim Black and former official Meg Scott Phipps, though his missteps won’t lead him to prison, as theirs did. His fate leaves one wondering, which path will John Edwards find himself on as his own bad choices are brought home to his door?

One result of the 2010 elections is that the North Carolina Huse and Senate will both be controlled by Republicans for the first time in more than a century. Most of the newly elected members pointed at the Democrats’ failures to end the recession and create jobs, and almost all of them ran on a platform of cutting the budget and cutting taxes.

The state faces a budget deficit of up to $3 billion dollars (last year’s total budget was $19 billion), and unlike the federal government, North Carolina’s cannot print more money. So the Democratic governor, Bev Perdue, asked each department to develop plans for 5 percent and 10 percent cuts in their budgets, depending on the size of the deficit.

The Secretary of Agriculture, Steve Troxler, the only “cut-taxes-cut-spending” Republican on the Council of State, refuses to designate potential cuts for his department, saying that it’s already highly efficient and there’s no waste to cut. Perhaps so; maybe we need subsidies for farmers and tax breaks for corporations more than we need teachers in our schools.

Along with the return of Republicans to power in Raleigh, Whooping Cough has returned to infect scores of people around the region. As far as we know, there’s no connection.

Tea Party activists opposed improvements to health insurance laws.

National

Nationally, 2010 was the year of Waterloo for President Barack Obama, just as S. C. Senator Jim DeMint hoped and predicted. The president and his Democratic allies (some of whom were as often opponents as they were supporters) accomplished some major goals. For the most part the Democrats in Congress and the White House did everything they could despite unrelenting opposition from the Republicans; as a result, many of their accomplishments were less than their supporters had hoped for — though the sum is clearly greater than the parts.

A health insurance reform bill was signed in March, after a year of effort, that requires insurance companies to provide the insurance they promise, and requires citizens to buy it from them. The last combat troops were at last moved out of Iraq — and into Afghanistan, where they continue to fight as that war drags into its tenth year. Wall Street “reform” passed, though with no controls over excess profits, bonuses, or hoarding of the billions in bailout funds banks received.

But the end of the year also brought an end to the Democrats’ majority in the House of Representatives and their supposed “supermajority” in the Senate. That change diminishes the likelihood that the rest of President Obama’s promises will come to fruition: Employee Free Choice on behalf of organized labor and other working people; the DREAM Act to offer illegal immigrants a path to citizenship; the repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell to allow all citizens to serve their country; reform of the Bush tax laws to ensure that the richest two percent of the country pay a fair share of taxes; closing Guantanamo to ensure that so-called “enemy combatants” get a fair trial under our Constitution’s guarantees.

Anti-war groups protest against continued wars in the Middle East.  Photo: Renato Rotolo

Republicans oppose all these promises of fairness and equality; unless the Democrats can pass them during the current lame-duck session, they’ll be dead through 2012, at least.

The “shellacking,” as the president called it, was not undeserved; it was the inevitable result of the Democratic party’s missteps during its first two years holding both the legislature and the presidency since 1994. The two greatest factors were Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s underestimation of the vehemence of Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda, and the fact that the president was slow to take up the cudgel to fight back.

The Democrats’ unwillingness to use the reins of power that the electorate had handed them paved the way for the Tea party to take over. It took over the debate about health care reform in the summer of 2009; it took over the nominating process in early 2010; it took over the Republican Party later in the year, and in spirit it took over the entire U.S. government last month.

While watching Tea Party rallies 18 months ago, some of us with long memories recalled the angry mobs in Little Rock and Birmingham, and the angry police backing them up and attacking black activists, students, and bystanders. The 2009 Tea Party events reminded this writer of those 1960s mobs, and made me wonder, as I thought about this “year in review,” if 2010 should be called The Year of Return — to a distant, best-forgotten past.