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While millions of low income workers are flooding the United States from south of the border, the city of Greenville, South Carolina is making it difficult if not impossible for low income workers to reside in the city. In fact, Greenville is gradually and systematically pushing the unemployed and the low income restaurant, hotel and maintenance workers into the surrounding county and towns.
The slogan “keep Greenville Green” has a double meaning downtown. Local “tree huggers” think of the slogan as referring to a green canopy of trees. The city decision makers have something very different in mind. They are thinking of the color of money. They know that people who do not work and earn a lot of money do not pay city taxes. They know that the owners of run-down housing do not contribute very much of that green-folding cash to the city tax rolls. They know that if you get rid of the low income housing, you get rid of the low income people. It is that simple, and that is what they are doing.
When Carol Coletta, author of the Memphis Manifesto, publicly unveiled the Greenville Manifesto called “Vision 2025” in the fall of 2004, her presentation centered on advocacy of what she referred to as the “Creative Class” of elite college-educated 25 – 34 year-olds called “The Young and The Restless.”
Coletta advocated bringing “The Young and The Restless” into Greenville from elsewhere and keeping them here so that their presence and leadership would influence our values, tastes and personal relationships. Her teachings and her basis for the future of Greenville are based on a book by her partner, Richard Florida, titled: The Rise of the Creative Class.
At the time Coletta announced the Greenville Manifesto publicly for the first time to a group at the Palmetto Expo, it was said that the Creative Class comprised more than thirty percent of the workforce.
“In the future, they will determine how the workplace is organized, what companies will prosper or go bankrupt, and even which cities will thrive or wither,” Florida claims in his book.
Mayor Knox White and the Greenville City Council bought Carol Coletta’s Manifesto for Greenville and, through contributions to candidates in County Council elections, proponents of the Manifesto have influenced the election of individuals to Greenville County Council they hope will require county residents to pay the cost of the Greenville Manifesto in taxes and loss of individual freedom.
During her presentation in Greenville, Coletta said studies have shown that the Young and the Restless class are much more aggressive than the home-grown variety when it comes to forging change, such as consolidating 65 independent taxing districts and dedicating 15 percent of Greenville County to open space and parks for public use.
Since the Manifesto was introduced as Vision 2025 in the fall of 2004, city officials have been replacing low income housing with expensive condo’s and efficiency apartments to attract high-income young singles to Greenville.
Longtime occupants of established neighborhoods, including many working class African-Americans, have been uprooted and banished from the city. The transition from low-cost to high-cost housing inside the city has forced many citizens who work in the city to move to the county or surrounding small towns, creating a transportation crisis that city officials want county taxpayers to fund.
When you read the propaganda about the need for mass transit, a tree ordinance or other radical changes that add to your taxes or infringe on your property rights, remember that it has its origin locally in the Greenville Manifesto of 2004, called Vision 2025.
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