We call on Duke University and Duke University Health System to make voluntary payments in lieu of taxes to the City of Durham and Durham County starting in 2024.

Durham has long struggled with poverty and underinvestment, followed by rapid gentrification and displacement. Durham’s skyrocketing cost of living places many hardships and heavy burdens on poor communities, seniors, and residents on fixed incomes. Meanwhile, our public services have endured years of austerity; disinvestment in public institutions has exacerbated educational, health, and economic inequalities, with especially harmful effects on communities of color. A city that has been so thoroughly shaped by Duke University ought to have an excellent public education system, yet Durham Public Schools is currently grappling with a $9 million shortfall, forcing its lowest-paid workers to suffer the consequences. This unsustainable path will continue so long as Duke maintains an antidemocratic relationship with the city and county it calls home.

Duke’s presence as an “eds & meds” economic powerhouse and the largest employer in Durham County has profoundly shaped the city’s landscape. As an anchor institution owning over 11% of the land in the City of Durham, Duke benefits handsomely from Durham’s rising property values without shouldering any of the accompanying increased precarity that puts communities at risk of displacement. Many of Duke’s lowest-paid essential workers can’t afford to live in the city where they work. Duke may not have direct control over the rising property values, but the tax burden is nevertheless pushed onto vulnerable communities. City officials have already discussed raising property taxes this year to meet the demands of a growing city. It is unjust to ask those already facing precarity and displacement to shoulder the increasing tax burden while not asking the same of Duke, an anchor institution with an $11.6 billion endowment supplementing its extensive property holdings.

Those who do live in Durham—Duke’s administrators, faculty, and staff—rely on functioning public services like infrastructure, transportation, public schools, and sanitation services. Moreover, its nearly 17,000 students enjoy access to Durham’s amenities like parks and trails. When Duke does not pay for the services and environment that make its work possible, others in Durham are left to make up the difference—or we simply go without. Duke’s divestment of the city and county is the divestment of the wellbeing and flourishing of the people of Durham.

Duke’s practice of investing in its immediate surrounding neighborhoods is not the same as paying its fair share. No amount of philanthropy, strategic community impact plans, or research-based interventions can replace public institutions available to all, financed by all, and capable of being held accountable through public procedures. Durham deserves more than targeted programs that Duke designs and administers. Duke maintaining control over how and when they choose to do community engagement is antidemocratic. If Duke truly wants to address root causes of inequity, then its work must extend beyond neighborhood partnership grants and experiential internships. Duke has a moral obligation to address how they have benefited from systems of public finance enriching already wealthy, private, primarily white institutions like itself while systematically underfunding public institutions and services.

Duke need not choose between making voluntary payments in lieu of taxes or continuing to offer community programming. Many of Duke’s thriving peer institutions, from Johns Hopkins University to Yale University, have long proven that it is possible to do both. Embedded within the suggestion that we must choose between one or the other is a threat, compelling Durham to accept whatever Duke offers and be grateful for whatever it has deemed appropriate for us. Without a mechanism for accountability, there is no openness to critique and willingness to change course. This deeply antidemocratic relationship must change.

So long as we have no democratic mechanisms to hold Duke accountable, the power imbalance prevents it from realizing its commitment to be a true partner and good neighbor to Durham. If this is the relationship Duke wants with Durham, we must collapse the power differential. True partners negotiate; if Duke wants to be worthy of the “partnership” it claims for itself, the people of Durham deserve democratic input over how Duke’s resources are used for the flourishing of the community. Good neighbors collaborate; if Duke wants to be a “good neighbor” to Durham, then it must be attentive to the cares and concerns of Durham’s citizens from all corners of the city and county with full transparency, communication, and dedication.

Fostering a democratic partnership between Duke and Durham begins with payments in lieu of taxes, but it doesn’t end there. Durham deserves Duke’s respect. If Duke claims to be a member of the Durham community, then Duke ought to be one democratic voice among the rest of us. We, the people of Durham, deserve to have agency over the course of our lives and the ever-changing landscape of our city. It is time for Duke and Durham to collaboratively build a community where all have access to thriving public institutions and truly affordable housing.

In the year of its centennial, it is time for a democratic partnership that Durham residents want, need, and deserve. It is time for Duke to contribute its fair share. It is time for Duke to respect Durham.