Hours into the March 17 meeting of the Durham City Council, Nate Baker addressed a crowded chamber.
Attendees were there to hear the council’s decision on a contentious development proposal. After more than an hour of fiery public comment, which sought to build apartments on Pickett Road in southwest Durham, Baker spoke.
“I want to start by sharing a few positions that I hold in general, philosophically, on development and land use cases,” he said. “Some of which might be a little bit unpopular in the room.”
Baker, whom critics often call “anti-development,” is a former Durham planning commissioner who joined the City Council in December 2023. The youngest member of the council, Baker, 35, was the top vote-getter in his election.
Baker said he supports building more affordable housing that is well-connected to nature and transit. But he said he was “underwhelmed” by the Pickett Road plan.
“I think it could be better,” he said. “That’s where my vote is leaning.”
An hour later, Baker and peers Chelsea Cook and DeDreana Freeman were on the losing side of a 4-3 vote that approved the project. The split is typical of many recent votes among council members — all of whom agree that Durham needs more housing, but who differ on how to get there.
Development has long been a focus for Baker, an urban planner and Durham native. Like many millennials, his Instagram account is a scrollable list of his progressive priorities. He shares paragraphs about planning woes and wins, memes supporting local unionization efforts and slides calling for followers to “fight fascism” in Durham. A self-described Democratic Socialist, he campaigned on a three-pronged platform: planning for people, protecting the environment and prioritizing good government.
Many constituents were excited by Baker’s campaign. They praised his background: “A professional planner who knows Durham inside and out, has a vision of a more equitable and livable city, and has pledged to not accept campaign contributions from developers or real estate interests? Sign me up,” wrote one Durhamite on Reddit ahead of the election.
Others were apprehensive and noted Baker’s frequent opposition to development. They questioned his stance on SCAD, or “Simplifying Codes for Affordable Development,” a controversial set of amendments to the city’s development code that the council adopted in November 2023.
In the end, Baker earned support from an unusual constellation of groups, including the often-moderate Durham Committee on the Affairs of Black People and the local chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America. But he was not endorsed by the Durham People’s Alliance, a group that often supports winning City Council candidates. Even so, he won his election with nearly 23% of the vote.
Local roots
Baker grew up across from the now-shuttered Northgate Mall and attended Durham Public Schools — E.K. Powe, Club Boulevard and Durham School of the Arts. After college at Cornell University, he returned to the Triangle for a master’s degree in city and regional planning from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has since worked for private firms and local governments on planning projects across the South, from cities like El Paso, Texas and Alexandria, Virginia to mountain towns like Black Mountain in western North Carolina.
In Durham, Baker says local leaders have failed to plan with community in mind. He worries about car-centric infrastructure, gentrification, limited access to public parks and green spaces, a sore lack of affordable housing and more.
“There are thousands upon thousands upon thousands of acres that are now the City of Durham but weren’t five or seven years ago, and that’s completely unsustainable for urban form,” he said in an interview. “100% of it is automobile-oriented and exclusionary in nature.”
What’s the solution?
Baker says it’s a balance of long-term policy changes and day-to-day decisions on zoning and development.
Last year, he led a push for the city to adopt new design standards for transportation infrastructure. The resolution, which received broad support from advocacy groups like Bike Durham, aims to make Durham’s streets safer for pedestrians, bikers and public-transit riders. The City Council voted unanimously in support in October.
In January, Baker became vice chair of the Durham Joint City-County Planning Committee. He’ll oversee the rewrite of Durham’s Unified Development Ordinance (UDO), a document that spells out local regulations for land use and zoning.
The weight of the role isn’t lost on Baker.
“It’s one of the most powerful documents in the city, regulating tens of billions of dollars worth of real estate,” he said. “You make one small tweak, and it can make great changes or terrible changes.”
Then there are the seemingly smaller choices; the individual permitting and zoning cases brought before the City Council each month. But Baker says those choices are just as vital in shaping Durham’s built environment for the better.
“Zoning compels powerful and wealthy developers — capitalists — to the table,” he explained. “We don’t talk about it often, but a critical part of council is being really good at sitting down at a negotiating table and getting stuff for the public good.”
Since taking office, Baker has sometimes been out of step with a largely pro-development City Council. Critics online say he opposes any proposal that doesn’t perfectly align with his progressive principles. On Reddit, one commenter called Baker and colleagues Cook and Freeman “the new group of ‘no’ on City Council.”
Baker sees it differently.
“It’s like seatbelt regulations,” he said. “The purpose is not to give out tickets to people who aren’t wearing their seatbelts forever — it’s to change behavior over time.”
Baker’s critics reveal a citywide debate much larger than the council member: How should Durham grow?
The city lacks enough affordable housing as highrises sprout downtown, but disagreements around zoning and development often create roadblocks. Those questions spurred SCAD, the contentious set of amendments to Durham’s development ordinance that the council adopted in November 2023. Local developers and pro-growth activists said the amendments would make it easier to build affordable housing, while many Durhamites said the changes would harm poor neighborhoods and the environment.
“There are all these opportunities to build relatively short urbanism, and that includes office space, housing, restaurants, and allows that kind of organic messiness that people love about Durham but we’ve truly legislated out of existence,” local developer Aaron Lubeck told The Assembly in 2023.
Another Durham builder, Topher Thomas, wrote in an op-ed in INDY Week, “It won’t solve affordable housing, nor will it reverse the racial wealth gap. But it will be a small step in that direction.” To opponents, he argued: don’t let perfect be the enemy of good.
Baker, then a planning commissioner, disagreed.
“There are several benign and good provisions proposed within the full SCAD package,” he wrote on Instagram. “But the poison pills that would negatively impact Durham’s most vulnerable populations and our environment are not worth the tradeoffs.”
Taking on the ivory tower
Baker’s focus on land use extends beyond the City Council.
Last fall, he helped launch the Duke Respect Durham campaign, an initiative that asks the university to pay $50 million each year to the Bull City. You’ve seen the yard signs: Navy blue with bright yellow letters and the image of a bull, they line the residential streets around Duke’s campus.
Like many private universities, Duke is a nonprofit and largely exempt from property taxes. The school is also Durham’s largest and wealthiest private landowner, with an $11.9 billion endowment and land holdings worth more than $787 million.
As the university prospers, organizers say the town-gown relationship is lopsided. They point to peer institutions like Yale, Princeton and Dartmouth, which make voluntary payments to their home cities each year in lieu of taxes, called PILOT agreements.
“It’s past time that Duke University strengthened its partnership with the people of Durham, that it does what’s right, and that it begins to make reasonable payments to our local governments and to the collective good,” Baker said at the group’s launch event in September. He said he hopes to bring representatives from the campaign, city, county and university together to discuss a PILOT plan.
“It’s a land justice issue, it’s a tax justice issue, it’s so much wrapped into one thing,” Baker said in an interview.
“Use every lever of power”
Looking forward, Baker said that the City Council’s power — to regulate zoning, to set the yearly budget and to speak out on issues of injustice — is more important than ever as the national political landscape shifts.
At a meeting in early February, the council welcomed attendees with somber speeches about the state of the city and country. Despite their disagreements on development, the body is often unified on social issues.
“It feels like we’re holding onto a rail in the middle of a tornado,” said Mayor Leonardo Williams, referencing the flurry of executive orders signed by President Donald Trump in the first few weeks of his second term.
Baker agreed. “’Fascism’ is a fair word, and ‘oligarchy’ is another fair word, to describe who is running the federal government, and this is the context in which our city is operating,” he said.
But Baker’s tone lifted as he spoke.
“It does us no good to wallow in despair,” he said, looking into the crowd. “Here, at the local level, we need to use every lever of power that we have available to us to make the lives of our residents better.”
Above: Nate Baker listens to citizen comments at a City Council meeting earlier this year. Photo by All Kibria — The 9th Street Journal
