"It's sad. It's sad. It's sad how people have been manipulated." Those were the last words Mrs. Rebecca Clark said to me as I walked out her door a month before she passed away in early January.

When I left her house that day, I thought she was talking about just the Greenbridge project and a misleading documentary the developers used to sell the project featuring an interview with her, cut and pasted to tell the story they wanted people to hear. As she spoke, it seemed she could already envision the hulking, steel-framed towers that now overpower the neighborhood. And she was surely already seeing those towers -- but Mrs. Clark was more than merely prescient. I realize now she was also talking about things bigger and more pervasive than the towers. She was talking about a system of racial and economic inequality and segregation that seems to be perpetuated by every exchange of power and resources in our town.

It is a system whose power has become all the more apparent during the recently fast-tracked approval processes for Greenbridge and other "downtown" luxury condominium projects, many of which are now desperately struggling to sell their units. The Town Council's recent decisions sustain the development of a downtown Chapel Hill designed to house the affluent at the expense of the poor. They tell us that people may not be comfortable with living in downtown condominiums now, but that we will learn to adapt, because we have to adapt. The undertones of social engineering are hard to ignore. For people who live, work, worship or play in the Northside and Pine Knolls communities, the towers serve as daily reminders of what type of person is valued, of who is wanted to live in Chapel Hill.

The Sustainable Community Visioning Task Force is an opportunity for all in Chapel Hill to think about how segregation still poisons our communities. When I tell people that the Town created an 18-member task force without a single minority member, their jaw drops: "Not in Chapel Hill?"

Of course, the town, task force facilitators and the newspapers are quick to defend: No people of color applied. This knee-jerk response is, at best, a cop-out, at worst, characteristic neo-racism that blames black Americans and other minorities for their own disenfranchisement. Anybody claiming that the diversity deficiency on the task force is due to a lack of volunteerism among African-American, Asian, Latino/a and working class white citizens need only to come visit the St. Joseph CME Church Food Ministry, the IFC shelter or El Centro Latino, just to name a few examples where hundreds of hours of selfless service are put in each week by dedicated individuals. The task force is not segregated because minorities did not apply; the task force is segregated because Chapel Hill is segregated.

The theologian Howard Thurman said, "Contact without fellowship is the breeding ground for hate." Dr. J.R. Manley often says, "Integration at the foot is worse than segregation at the side." We have little assurance, and yet some hope, that the new 24-member task force will be anything more than integration at the foot, contact without fellowship. This is sad because the task force was ostensibly created so that community members and not just developers have a voice in growth decisions.

Rapid economic development without sufficient contribution to human development is doomed to fail. In good times it is hard to hear it amid the clatter of growth and promises, but in hard times it seems to fall heavier for all.

Rob Stephens is a member of United with the Northside Community NOW (UNC-NOW).