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Rodney Graham is a resident of the New Neighborhood in Old Davidson and a local developer and homebuilder.

It’s a good time to be a tree in Davidson. Unfortunately, it’s not such a great time to be a police officer, firefighter, military serviceman, school teacher, or any of the other noble professionals who typically occupy what we call “affordable housing” in Davidson.

In Davidson we love our trees, unconditionally. It doesn’t matter where they are, or whether we have enough of them in another part of town. If you’re a tree, we want you. Preferably in our neighborhood; better yet in our yard.

If you’re what I’ll call an “affordable housing person” (this is shorthand for someone who performs a noble job - often putting their lives at risk - which for some reason is not rewarded financially by our economic system), our love is conditional.

We want you. Sometimes. If our house is burning down, we want you in our neighborhood pronto to save us. We even put stickers on our doors asking you to risk widowing your wife and orphaning your children to “please save our pet.” And we even tell you how many pets are in the house, so you’ll be sure to save cat No. 4 and dog No. 3.

If someone is breaking into our house, we want you next to us immediately. We want you to patrol our streets to keep us safe, even though we know your job entails a lot more personal risk than ours. We want you to take a bullet so we won’t have to.

We trust our children with you in your classroom. In the hostile battles of Iraq today, or Vietnam or Korea or Germany in years past, it is largely you that fights our wars. In the past century alone over a million of you gave your lives for our freedom, and tens of millions of you were wounded in such a way to forever change your life. But we support you. Just look at all the yellow ribbons on our SUVs.

So yes, affordable housing people, you are deeply wanted, and needed. But we don’t want you to actually live in our neighborhoods.

We’re sorry, but it’s just too costly for us. Here’s the math. If – hypothetically – we were going to build 34 luxury homes at the end of Pine Road, our law would require us to provide four affordable houses. We could only sell those for somewhere around $150,000. Compare that to the $600,000 to $1 million we’ll get for market rate houses, and you’ll understand that it’s just too expensive to provide affordable housing. We might only make $4.5 million on our project instead of $5 million.

Of course, I am being sarcastic, but I’m also sad. At Monday’s Planning Board session, I witnessed the dichotomy that exists in how we feel about trees, and how we feel about people.

As the Davidson Hall development off of Pine Road came to its inevitable approval, I was struck – but not surprised – by how the entirety of the conversation about this development centered around saving trees. The residents of Pine Road and the planning staff talked for hours about whether there should be a 20 foot tree save buffer, or 45 feet. What can we do to save our TREES?!?!

(For the uninitiated, a bit of background: The developer of Davidson Hall was granted an exemption to our affordable housing ordinance in exchange for giving the town three undevelopable parcels of land.)

Since the affordable housing exemption came to light last spring, hardly a word has been said in defense of the people who would have benefited from having affordable housing at the end of Pine Road. Few stood up at the various planning and town board meetings to demand protection for those who protect them.

Maybe everybody just “drank the punch” and believed the town’s explanations that the affordable housing exemption offered to this developer was the only way to secure a $600,000 grant for the Greenway. I’ve argued the fallacy of this argument before, and won’t repeat the arguments here, except to say that anytime a private citizen is given exemptions to the law worth several hundred thousand dollars in exchange for floodplain and sewer land, it’s not good governance. Especially when it’s done out of view of the public.

But, I’ll suspend reason for a minute and agree with the Town’s explanation. That leaves me with only one logical conclusion: The price tag for economic diversity is $600,000. Six hundred thousand dollars. That’s what it takes to sacrifice a stated core value of the town.

That sounds like a lot of money. Let’s put it in perspective. It is about one-tenth of one percent of the assessed value of the real estate in Davidson. It is therefore an even smaller percentage of the total wealth of Davidson. It is equal to the annual income of five average families in Davidson. In perspective, it is nothing. But that’s all it took to get an exemption to put affordable housing at the end of Pine Road.

So why wasn’t there uproar about the exclusion of affordable housing people from the end of Pine Road? Is it because in other parts of Davidson – primarily the west side – we have a lot of affordable housing? Imagine for a minute if that argument were made about trees. “Mr. Developer, since we already have a lot of trees in other parts of Davidson, we don’t care if you clear cut the property.” Or is it because at the end of the day many of us care more about our economic position than that of those who serve us?

I’m happy for the trees. I really am. They’re beautiful, and they benefit us in many ways. I’d like to see us keep more of them, and plant more of them.

But I’m sad for our people. Especially those who do the jobs of “affordable housing people.” Firefighters, police officers, teachers, military personnel, this developer let you down. Your town staff and elected officials let you down. The citizens who did not rise to your defense let you down. For that we owe you an apology. I would say that I hope you’ll forgive us, but I already know you will. Because you are a person who puts others above yourself. And for that, I’m very happy. And safe. And well-educated. And free. Thank you.

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