Churches hit the decks.

• Author: Hetzer, Michael
• Position: Raleigh, N.C. parking structures

Churches hit the decks

Faith can move mountains, the saying goes. But halting "progress" in the 1990s may take more of a miracle than parting the Red Sea. That's what members of Tabernacle Baptist Church and First Baptist Church are finding out as they confront Raleigh's proposal for two parking decks, one beside each of the churches in adjacent blocks east of Fayetteville Street Mall.

"We have withstood prejudice and urban blight," Brad Thompson, a deacon at First Baptist Church, said before a packed City Council meeting Dec. 5. The 700-member church, founded in 1812 by slaves, has been in the same building since 1848. "But we cannot endure your parking deck."

Nearby Tabernacle Baptist Church - a 1,000-member, white church founded in 1881 - is faced with a deck within a few feet of its building that will gobble up 104 of its 110 parking spaces. "I don't want a compromise," senior minister John Allen says. "We just want the thing to go away."

The conflict, pitting progress against tradition, underscores the irony that cities across North Carolina and the nation face as they come home from the suburbs to dilapidated downtowns - and displace the people and businesses that stuck it out there during the lean years.

"It's going to have to happen," says Peter Batchelor, professor of urban design at N.C. State University. "It's a natural law of economics. When urban land is profitable for redevelopment, then economic forces take over and put pressure on people to redevelop land for higher and better use. That's unfortunate because it displaces people who stayed to fight it out when the going got tough."

On the site of the proposed parking deck, Tabernacle Baptist Church would like to install a playground for its day-care center. In terms of tax base, the thought of monkey bars and swings on 89,700 square feet of downtown land - valued at $2.1 million - must make city planners cringe.

The showdown began in October when the Raleigh Planning Commission announced plans to acquire land for parking decks to serve First Union Capital Center, already under construction just a block away. The decks would be built to the city's specifications by a private developer, who would be chosen later. The problem stems from the fact that the First Union building has just 200 parking spaces of its own, but it needs another 600 to 700, according to David Betts, a Raleigh downtown planner involved in drafting the proposal. "There is a serious deficit," he says.

Betts...