Skip to content
The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen
Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Community
  • Schools
  • Business
  • Opinion
  • Obituaries
  • Sports
  • Mill
  • Flora
  • Print Archive
  • About
Menu

Greenbridge, activists look beyond ugly incident

Posted on April 16, 2009 by Staff

By Kirk Ross
Staff Writer

As Chapel Hill Police continue to investigate a hoax email and pointedly worded fliers circulated this week, officials with the Greenbridge project say that, moving forward, they want to see more positive dialogue.
Likewise, members of UNC-NOW, a partnership of community and campus groups that says the project is emblematic of the gentrification of the historically black Northside neighborhood.

Frank Phoenix, a partner with Greenbridge Developments LLC, said he continues to suspect that the UNC group was behind the fliers and email – which said, among other things, that the project’s developers were ceasing sales – but has not heard anything conclusive from the police. Wording in the email and fliers is very similar, he said, to language used by members of UNC-NOW, including an open letter from the group’s steering committee sent last week to the Chapel Hill Town Council and Greenbridge Developments.

In it, the group demands that Greenbridge stop using a promotional video featuring prominent members of the Northside community, offer job training and employment for Northside community residents and join with the town to revisit the idea of a payment-in-lieu for affordable housing rather than affordable housing into the development. The letter asks the town to spearhead an effort to provide property-tax relief in low-wealth neighborhoods and impose a development moratorium on projects in or near the Northside, Pine Knolls, Rogers-Eubanks and Ridgefield neighborhoods.

Haley Koch, a student organizer with UNC-NOW, said Tuesday that the group was not responsible for the phony email and flier and had no information on who did.

“It’s obviously not a tactic or a strategy we would use,” Koch said. She said she hopes the incident could lead to a more positive dialogue between the Northside community, activists and Greenbridge. “We hope we can collectively seize the moment and do something positive about it.”

Phoenix said he too would like to see some more positive engagement come from the incident, although he said past attempts have him wary of it.

He stressed that the representatives of the project have been in long-running discussions with its neighbors.

“We have always been in dialogue with the neighbors and will continue to be,” he said. Northside itself, he said, is not monolithic. UNC-NOW, he added, represents “a faction of Northside, but certainly not all of Northside.”

Web Archive

© 2025 The Archive of The Carrboro Citizen | Powered by Minimalist Blog WordPress Theme