DHA Developments

The news today of the DHA development plans at Fayette Place and Forest Hills Heights is pretty exciting: much needed affordable housing proximate to downtown and, in both cases, the development proposals exceed the preliminary minimum goals DHA established for bids in terms of commercial space and units. It's a shame that the selected proposals aren't public, however. My understanding is that DHA hopes to have master plans finalized with the selected developers within three months, but hopefully we won't have to wait that long for more details.

https://www.durhamhousingauthority.org/whats-new-view?id=220

Yes - this is very cool! On the Reddit thread about this, I saw a bunch of "let's see how DHA messes this up!"

I am hopeful that not only does this provide great, quality affordable housing, but also rehabilitates DHA's image a little.

Yeah, I saw that too and was bit irritated. Sure, it could go wrong and it's not a silver bullet for housing prices in Durham, but it's definitely a step in the right direction. And the poster in question lives in.... Cary. :|

The bull city subredit is really annoying. Posters have a surface level understanding of stuff and just protest against any development ugh

It really is super obnoxious. The same people are constantly outraged about the lack of affordable housing. Then when this project is announced with nearly 1k new affordable units they just say oh well DHA will probably screw this up. They’ll never be happy unless they have something to complain about.

I would go a step farther and say that Reddit on the whole is obnoxious and most posters have no clue what they're talking about.

But in good news, I'm glad to see a potentially good project come to Fayette Place particularly. If you've been here for a bit, you likely know most of its ups and downs, so hopefully this plan will come to fruition as close to the intended goal as possible.

So, I have two thoughts:

1. I would go a step farther the other way and say that there are a lot of good meaning people that don't have expertise in the built environment both on Reddit and outside of Reddit. It's one of the tricky parts of being in this field. Unlike medicine, law, and other professional fields, the built environment feels approachable to laypeople. As a result, there is WAY more noise that you need to sift through (people calling for more parking or widening roads, etc, just because on the surface, those may SEEM like good solutions).

2. With social media like Reddit and Twitter, it is easy to distill many people into one person. I hear claims of hypocrisy more than I ever have pre-social media (e.g. "people say they want x, but also say they want y, which are in conflict with each other"). I imagine that the majority of the time, there are people on Reddit that voice their support for X and then there are different people that voice their support for Y, but because it is anonymous, it feels like "Reddit-person" is being hypocritical.