All posts tagged students

Raising children or the flag?

Whether the Confederate flag symbolizes racial oppression or Southern pride may hinge on the difference between desegregation and integration. A group of parents has asked the Orange County Board of Education to ban images of the Confederate flag, calling it a racially inflammatory symbol that disrupts learning. So far, the board has remained as silent […]

Do-good discount

You get what you incentivize, or so hopes Todd Neal, a Northside landlord. Neal sees the benefit of having more people in the neighborhood who care about the community. To attract those civic-minded tenants, he is offering a rent discount of up to $50 a month to tenants who will volunteer up to 6 hours […]

Tenant cap could tap down rents

UNC student Kylee Wooten has the proper mindset to succeed as a first-year associate in a big-city law firm: a willing slave mentality that all but welcomes abuse. I gleaned this from an essay she wrote pleading for the town to raise the occupancy cap on the number of unrelated people who can live together […]

Random consequences

More than a thousand students waited outside the Dean Dome in a cold, steady rain for hours Saturday afternoon for a chance to watch the UNC-Kentucky men’s basketball game. But their sacrifice was for naught due to a new practice called “randomization” that the Dean Dome ticket office put into play recently. The intent is […]

Lotsa lux

Remember Bicycle Apartments? Trinitas Ventures doesn’t, evidently. The Indiana-based developer of student apartment complexes has opened a rental office in the arcade on East Franklin Street for its project formerly known as Bicycle and now called Lux at Central Park. Gone are the images of healthy, clean-living students bicycling to campus and back, keeping reasonable […]

A roster with ballast

“Fling … ends” read the headline in a local newspaper over a story about candidates running for office. And as I read through the profiles of the final candidates to file for Town Council – Loren Hintz, Jonathan Riehl, Amy Ryan and D.C. Swinton – and the school board – Andrew Davidson and Ignacio Tzoumas […]

And the answer is …

After last Wednesday’s marathon student-bashing that pushed a couple concept reviews off the agenda, tonight’s meeting portends to be something of a sleeper. Nothing nefarious slipped into the Consent Agenda – even the resolution to amend the town manager’s authority to enter into contracts turns out to extend the authority to department heads, not concentrate […]

Timing

Gene Pease put it in a nutshell last night. In response to the concept plan review for Carolina Flats presented by Florida developer Russ Greer of Progressive Capital Group, Pease said, “Your timing is lousy.” After Greer and Scott Radway presented the “back of the envelope” plan, as Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt called it, and a […]

Sharp eye on Flats

I support smart growth in appropriate venues, a minority position among many of my peers. I’d like to be able to lobby for high-density projects, but when a developer seems to portray a project as something it isn’t and smacks down moderately priced housing for a half-mile stretch, that makes the task all the harder. […]

Why not live here?

At last night’s Town Council meeting, town business management director Ken Pennoyer and a band of technology professionals waxed eloquent on the wonders of Gig U, the ultra-high-speed connectivity coming to town. Following the presentation that detailed ways the new service would improve our lives, Mayor Mark Kleinschmidt crowed, “Why doesn’t everyone want to live […]