June 16, 2025

Dear Governor Stein:

The People’s Alliance urges you to veto SB 153 and HB 318 quickly and decisively. Immigrants are an
essential part of our community. They are our neighbors, coworkers, and friends. We all want to live in safe
communities, but scapegoating immigrants, who research shows are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.
citizens, is not the answer.

The Durham People’s Alliance (PA) is a grassroots membership organization that has been advancing a
progressive vision for Durham and NC for over 40 years. We advance progressive issues and policies through
research, organizing, advocacy, and democratic engagement.

The requirements in SB 153 are overly burdensome for state agencies tasked with providing social services
and ensuring North Carolina residents are able to access public benefits for which they are eligible.
Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for the vast majority of public benefits, and agencies already have
procedures in place to verify eligibility, making the requirements of the bill not only discriminatory, but also
redundant and overly bureaucratic.

HB 318 would sweep up even more people who are accused, not convicted, of a crime -- including non-violent
crimes -- in cruel immigration enforcement activities that tear families apart. Delaying the start clock would lead
to longer periods of incarceration, raising 4th amendment concerns. These laws will also likely lead to increased
surveillance and racial profiling of Black and Brown communities, harming North Carolinians who look or speak
a certain way regardless of their citizenship status, and erode the trust between communities and the
protective services they should be able to rely on.

Requiring local law enforcement, the state highway patrol, or other state agencies to enter into agreements
with ICE or otherwise participate in immigration enforcement distracts from their primary obligations and forces
our state to play a role in the inhumane immigration enforcement actions we have seen on the national stage.
Elected officials and law enforcement are sworn to protect and uphold the U.S. constitution. The People’s
Alliance is concerned that ICE officers across the nation are ignoring due process and violating the
constitutional rights of U.S. citizens, legal permanent residents, and undocumented immigrants alike.
We urge you to uphold North Carolinians’ constitutional rights by vetoing SB 153 and and 318.

Respectfully,
The Board of Directors
People’s Alliance
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Town-Gown Unity Against Trump Attacks

The People’s Alliance joins our allies in the Durham community in urging the Duke administration to pursue a budget adjustment process that is fair, transparent, and minimizes harm to Durham’s most vulnerable residents, who should not be asked to shoulder the heaviest weight of Donald Trump’s unconstitutional and authoritarian attacks on higher education.

We recognize that Trump’s ongoing assault on our nation’s universities has jeopardized at least $500 million in federal grants, contracts, and other funding sources at Duke. Hundreds of millions of dollars in existing Duke research grants have already been cut, frozen, or eliminated. Taken together, Duke is facing a loss of almost 15% of its roughly $3.5 billion budget—a massive hole that must somehow be filled.

Given the magnitude of this threat, some level of painful budget cuts and staff layoffs are likely inevitable. However, People’s Alliance is deeply concerned about reports that the Duke administration has designed and rolled out these cuts without any meaningful input from key university stakeholders, including Duke unions, faculty, and rank-and-file staff. Even worse, Duke’s leadership is asking many of its lower paid and most vulnerable workers to bear the brunt of these cuts, while apparently shielding the highest-paid staff and administrators. This is deeply unfair.

Duke is Durham’s largest employer and our residents are a critical customer base and source of revenue for the Duke hospital system, so what happens to Duke’s workers deeply impacts the Durham community. Given the consequences for Durham, the People’s Alliance calls on Duke to open up their budget adjustment process to key stakeholders, minimize the pain inflicted on its lowest-paid workers, and require the highest paid administrators to share the burden of any cost-saving measures the university adopts.

Finally, we urge Duke administrators, Durham community leaders, and elected officials to explore avenues for cooperation in the face of Trump’s assault on American life. We can no longer afford to bury our heads in the sand and hope that he will somehow forget about progressive cities like Durham or that Duke will be the one university that he miraculously decides not to target like he’s already targeted Harvard, Penn, Columbia, and the rest.

This President is coming for all of us. It’s only a matter of time. Fighting each other—instead of fighting back—will allow him to pick us off one by one. The only hope for American democracy is that we hang together, or we shall assuredly hang alone.

505 Coalition*
Position Statement on the 505 W. Chapel Hill St. Development
June 5, 2025

Re: Response to City Staff Memo dated June 16, 2025

The 505 Coalition stands by our previous position that the development of the property at 505
West Chapel Hill Street must include a significant number of residential units affordable at 60%
AMI, in perpetuity. And there must be no more delays in this element of a development plan.
Addressing the lack of affordable places to live is our community’s most critical and pressing
need, and the 505 site offers the City a chance to do something significant now, not wait for
years in the future. We reject the City Staff’s recommendation to simply stop moving forward.
This is a pivotal moment, and now is NOT the time for Council to take its foot off the gas.
As we stated in our position statement in October 2023: “We believe this significant public asset
can give us a unique chance to take a big step forward in meeting Durham’s affordable housing
needs... Downtown’s long-term residents – educators, first responders, bus drivers,
maintenance workers, and especially those on fixed and low-to-moderate incomes – are being
displaced and priced out of the City they helped build and now serve in so many essential
ways.[1]”

Discussions about how to use this important plot of land have gone on for almost a decade.
During that time, hundreds if not thousands of Durham residents have been priced out of
Durham’s urban core, or forced to spend an unsustainable amount of their income on rent or
mortgages. We believe that it is simply unacceptable for the City of Durham to pass up an
opportunity today to use an asset that the City, and by extension, the people of Durham, own, to
do what our residents most need: build safe, attractive, affordable housing.
At this critical moment, we collectively and respectfully ask the Council to pursue the following:

(1) Honor the first priority of the RFP and ask the City staff to negotiate and execute a cost-
effective contract with a developer – Peebles or another qualified affordable housing developer

– to build 160-200 units of housing affordable at 60% AMI in perpetuity at 505. We agree with
City staff that no market rate housing or commercial space should be built at this time. Not only
are market conditions unfavorable, but subsidizing these uses makes no sense in a City where
lab and market-rate housing infrastructure is already adequate.

This affordable housing effort does not need to start from scratch. Peebles has already
submitted to the City a preliminary “low density” proposal – for several stick-built five story
buildings that would require much less subsidy than a 10 -12 story tower using steel
construction. So, the City subsidy for 160 units, for example, might be roughly $15M
(approximately $100K per unit) rather than over $200K per unit required for steel tower
construction. We think this project IS achievable with a reasonable subsidy from the City. And, it
could leave room for the other components envisioned by Council to be built when market
conditions improve.

(2) Time is of the essence. Council should stipulate that this contract be finalized in time for the
developer and the City to apply to the NC Housing Finance Authority for a 4% LIHTC allocation
in fall of 2025, or in January 2026 at the latest.

(3) If Council determines that it has lost confidence in the City’s ability to work constructively with Peebles, then Council should agree to the Staff’s recommendation to end the negotiation process with Peebles. At that point, the City can pivot to identifying another developer – one
with deep AH expertise – to execute the plan to build low density AH at 505 W. Chapel Hill St. Akridge has previously submitted a good response to the RFP.

(4) Most importantly, the members of the 505 Coalition agree that the City of Durham should
NOT STOP the development process, but continue to move it forward with the AH component
with all possible speed. The AH crisis continues to worsen, and our City employees, teachers,
first responders, and other essential service workers deserve action, not further delay.

*505 Coalition members:
Durham CAN
Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People
Duke Memorial United Methodist Church
Durham chapter of the NAACP
People’s Alliance
Durham Coalition for Affordable Housing and Transit