Our endorsement issue drummed up strong responses from readers. But no pick was as controversial as our support of Raleigh’s $80 million housing bond, which we figured was a no-brainer considering the city hasn’t invested in a housing bond in nearly a decade, and Durham passed a $95 million bond last year.  

CARMEN CAUTHEN, a shortlisted candidate to replace Saige Martin on the Raleigh City Council, shared her reasons for opposing the bond: 

“Doing a little bit of something is ‘better than doing nothing at all’ might be a good policy for putting a bandaid on a scratch,” Cauthen wrote on Facebook. “Raleigh’s affordable housing policies for low-income [people] are hemorrhaging nothing that helps conclusively. I believe the statement is racist and is spoken from the standpoint of someone who doesn’t care to hear all of the truth. It is as though breadcrumbs from a table full of food are better than starving while the people who sit at the table eat the steak, potato, and salad. 

Ms. Trauss’ knowledge of what actually occurred over the last year with the Wake County Housing Justice Coalition and what has prompted this fight are not based on the full truth, because she didn’t research the full truth. Here is part of what I wrote as a complete rebuttal to this endorsement. As we know that systemic racism must be changed by those who have the power, we also know that this requires white people to do the work. White people created the racist systems and have the votes and the funds to make the changes. 

During my research on housing in the city of Raleigh since slavery, I learned the truth about some things that I had thought were true. One of them was about the way the city’s [unfairly] segregated neighborhoods were developed as the city was created, from the late Dr. Wilmoth A. Carter’s book, [The Urban Negro in the South]. The city was crisscrossed with creeks and watersheds. “As a result, high hills, long ridges, and dank bottoms characterized Raleigh’s terrain. Antebellum residents, for reasons of health and aesthetics, chose the higher sites for their homes. The low-lying areas were for industrial development or lay vacant.” 

After the Civil War, the Freedmen who came into Raleigh settled in the areas east of East Street and south of South Street. Because of their poverty, [they] were only able to purchase the less expensive land, usually in the creek bottoms or other less desirable locations, and if they couldn’t purchase, they rented in those same areas. These are the same areas that predominantly black and brown people live in today. Feel free to read the entire article on my page. And don’t vote for the bond if you haven’t already done so. It is time to work on the systemic racist policies and not to keep putting bandaids on hemorrhaging wounds.”

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