This is a letter to the editor I published at the Daily Advance. Posted here for posterity, since they have no online archive:
The city Planning Commission’s approval to rezone River Road, allowing a gated-community, while denying a rezone request for a Homeless Shelter on Herrington Road does not bode well for this area’s future. Are the Planners intending to deal with Elizabeth City’s poverty and drug-abuse by relocating our communities away from the bad neighborhoods?
If Elizabeth City continues to develop along this paradigm, where wealthy neighborhoods are built around a city overrun with drug-dealers and poverty, we will have an apple beautiful on the outside, but rotten to its core.
“Unfortunately, these (shelters) are needed. But where do you put them?” David McGuire asks. The answer is simple: When a church offers to take homeless people and rehabilitate them on a street where drug-dealers fearlessly accost any citizen passing through, you enable those wonderful, charitable souls with anything you can to help them do their job. A Homeless Shelter on Herrington Street would serve as a moral foothold in the war on EC’s plague of poverty and drug-abuse.
You do not improve neighborhoods by abandoning them. Rezone the property to allow its use as a shelter, put a security system in it with panic buttons, and enable the police to coordinate with shelter volunteers to identify the dealers in the neighborhood and force them to move on. If not that, then would Mr. McGuire and the other members of the Planning Commission please donate their own homes to the cause of relocating the homeless to their neighborhoods instead?