The property tax rate will increase by two cents most of which is going toward an affordable housing bond that voters passed in 2019.įeatured Image: Durham North Carolina (Philip Vignola, Bull City Pictures). Leaders say that the budget approved for Durham for the next fiscal year will fund community safety, affordable housing, green and equitable infrastructure projects and COVID-19 recovery. “And this it has led to an enormous racial wealth gap that is unjust.” “The historic injustices from slavery from Jim Crow, and now the injustices that continue today, have had an incredibly disproportionate burden on our African American brothers and sisters here in Durham and around the country,” Schewel said. Last year, the city council voted to invest in things like home ownership or health care in areas where Black residents face disparities. Durham, with its 500 million-plus budget, is on solid ground like so many municipalities in the Triangle because of its strong property tax pipeline. In 2018, the Durham City Council passed a resolution calling for reparations to descendants of enslaved people. cities attempting to provide reparations. And I think that’s an important distinction.”Īsheville is setting another example, separately, committing $2.1 million toward funding reparations about two weeks ago. But that’s different from really having a program of reparations. “And we do that every day in our work in the city. “I think, locally, what we can do is we can do things that are reparative,” Schewel said. Mayor Steve Schewel says he wants to see the reparations efforts at the city level replicated on a national scale. Durham intends to allocate money every year going forward. The city’s budget for the next fiscal year includes $6 million that will go toward green and equitable infrastructure in historically Black neighborhoods. Durham is showing what providing reparations for slavery could look like by actually trying to do it.
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