Taiwo Jaiyeoba is chasing something bigger than the 2040 plan

Taiwo Jaiyeoba withstood the racial attacks. He’d endured people posting photos of his house on Nextdoor. He’d been accused of having an agenda.

Jaiyeoba, Charlotte’s planning director, tells me he could tolerate all that. But then on June 17, his daughter Moyo, a rising high school senior, sent him a text.

“Dad,” she told him, “my friends are saying it’s on social media that you may be fired.”

That was the moment that made Jaiyeoba, 52, realize that the bitter debate over the 2040 plan, an aspirational document designed to guide Charlotte’s future, had become too personal.

He’d crafted the document that promised to change the course of growth in a city where development has benefitted the same few affluent parts of town — and this was no easy battle to wage. He went from being revered as a 2020 Charlottean of the Year to facing vitriol on a daily basis.

Now on that June day, Republican council member Tariq Bokhari had called for his firing on Twitter, and his child was concerned.

Why it matters: Jaiyeoba is the public face of the 2040 plan, which delves into how to accommodate the nearly 400,000 residents expected to move to the city by 2040. It devolved into a political war borne out in yard signs and ad campaigns, largely centering on the controversial idea of eliminating single-family-only zoning.

• I sat down with Jaiyeoba last month to find out what the tumultuous few months had meant to him.

He says he is open to healthy debates over issues like density. But as a Black man who has made it his mission to challenge the status quo, he also believes that some of the criticism of him has been racist.

That’s not new for Jaiyeoba, a native of Nigeria who’s been told to “go back” to his country while working in other cities.

• “I feel that we had a bigger goal in mind, we had a bigger vision,” he says of the 2040 plan. “And I wasn’t going to let something so narrow-minded just stop us from achieving it.”

The day he saw Bokhari’s tweet, though, Jaiyeoba left the office and went home, because no matter how much he loves his job, family comes first, he says.

“I will be honest that I was discouraged for the very first time, not because of what was said, but because of what my daughter felt,” he said.

But his wife shared some wisdom with him that helped him pick himself up and go back to work the next morning.

“Nothing worth doing is ever easy.”

Jaiyeoba describes himself as a “Sesame Street kid.”

He was born in 1968, about a year before the show started, and grew up watching it on a black and white television at his home in the Nigerian city of Ile-Ife. Like on the series, his neighborhood was tight-knit, and even when his parents weren’t home, he knew he was safe because the neighbors looked out for him.

He didn’t realize it at the time, but it’s part of what made him fall in love with urban planning.

“The way the homes and the streets were designed were wide and close enough that they allowed community,” he said. “You couldn’t live life as an individual, you lived in community.”

Jaiyeoba didn’t know he wanted to make it a career until after four years studying geography at what was University of Ife in Nigeria (it was later renamed), when his father told him he should be a planner because: “Planners change the world.”

Halfway through a Master’s in Urban and Regional Planning, he realized he had fallen in love with the field.

“Once I got into it, it’s almost like an addiction,” he said. “Once you are in the planning environment, all of a sudden, everything is different. I found out what my dad was saying was true. You’re able to map out vision.”

He took a job as a planner for the government of Botswana after graduation, but then in 1995, he won the Green Card lottery. In his journal, he wrote just before coming to the United States that he would one day become the planning director of a major American city.

In 1996, he moved to New Jersey, then California, where he would work as a director for the Sacramento Regional Transit District. He later worked as a planning director in Grand Rapids, Mich, and then lived in Atlanta and worked in the private sector.

The consulting firm he worked for transferred him to Charlotte in 2015, and he moved to Union County, where he still lives.

That has been the subject of ire for some, who believe Charlotte’s planning director should live in the city.

• Jaiyeoba said Union County was where he could have the space he needed for him, his wife and seven daughters (and, he’ll point out, one male dog).
• He already lived there when he took the job with the city in 2018, and didn’t want to relocate the family.

When Jaiyeoba started in January 2018 as the city of Charlotte’s first permanent planning director in several years, council members were eager to revive an effort to rewrite the rules governing development.

But he put that on pause.

Before deciding on the regulations, he said at the time, the city first had to envision how it would grow, through a document called a 2040 Comprehensive Plan.

Charlotte had not had such a plan for the whole city since 1975.

His department embarked on the first phase, which involved extensive community listening sessions, from early 2018 through the spring of 2019.

The most contested piece of the 2040 plan, the elimination of single-family-only zoning, began to emerge at the end of that phase. In March 2019, I attended an event with Jaiyeoba and officials from Minneapolis and Grand Rapids, Mich., two cities that had already made such zoning changes.

The thinking is to provide redress for harmful zoning policies that helped segregate neighborhoods. Proponents say it would help add to the already tight housing inventory by allowing duplexes or triplexes in areas where only single-family homes had previously been permitted.

For all the arguing this year, it’s true that single-family zoning kept Charlotteans of color locked out of wealthier neighborhoods for decades, because many had deed restrictions that banned non-white people from purchasing single-family homes.

That contributed to the present-day wealth gap, one Jaiyeoba believes he needs to help solve: “If we don’t have a vision that challenges some of our past in order to deal with today’s issues, then what are we doing?” he said.

Minneapolis became the first major city to decide to eliminate single-family-only zoning in late 2018.

Heather Worthington, former city planning official in Minneapolis, warned Jaiyeoba to expect nastiness in the fight to change single-family zoning. Worthington was told at a tense community meeting that she was the most hated woman in Minneapolis, Minnesota Public Radio reported in 2018.

But surely, Jaiyeoba thought, that would not happen in Charlotte. After all, it’s a Southern city.

People here are polite, he thought.

To understand how zoning became the most controversial political issue in Charlotte, you have to go back to the 2020 presidential campaign.

Then-President Donald Trump suggested that Democrats wanted to “destroy” the suburbs with low-income housing in an attempt to win over suburban voters.

In July, after Trump tweeted that he was rescinding an Obama-era rule to fight housing discrimination, Jaiyeoba took to Twitter.

THIS here is wrong and false on many levels: one, people who live in low income housing are not criminals; two, people who live in the suburbs are not better off than those living in cities; three, living next to affordable housing will not destroy your property values. pic.twitter.com/kPVlNv9Req

— Taiwo Jaiyeoba (@winnerspath) July 29, 2020

“THIS here is wrong and false on many levels: one, people who live in low income housing are not criminals; two, people who live in the suburbs are not better off than those living in cities; three, living next to affordable housing will not destroy your property values,” he wrote.

His opponents have used comments like that to argue that he has a political motive. But Jaiyeoba says that as a city planner, he has to be able to acknowledge the reality that housing is rooted in segregation and racism.

“Because I’m a Black man in this position saying this, people think you have an agenda,” he said.

The racist rhetoric around low-income housing and crime cuts deep for Jaiyeoba.

When he moved to the United States in 1996, his income was $2,000 a month, and his family shared four bedrooms and one bathroom with another tenant. They lived in a community of immigrants from places like Ukraine and Vietnam.

Jaiyeoba is not a politician, he says often, but he is a policy person. He’s someone tasked with coming up with the solutions to the city’s deficit of roughly 34,000 affordable housing units, or to the challenge of building out a transportation system.

Just days before the election, on Halloween, Jaiyeoba and his staff finally unveiled the 2040 plan to the public at a drive-in event at the Park Expo.

It generated little discussion at the time. In fact, major opposition didn’t emerge until early March, one month before the scheduled April vote.

Some neighborhood leaders criticized the single-family zoning changes, housing advocates voiced concerns about gentrification and the real estate lobby argued the plan would increase the cost of building in the city.

The city council delayed the April vote to June.

The debate grew more and more heated in May. And some of it had clear racial undertones, he says.

• He heard a resident ask why a planning director who is “not even from here” was trying to change their “way of life.”
• According to Jaiyeoba, one developer suggested that the first 35 pages of the plan, which deal with the history of redlining and segregation in Charlotte, be removed because it made the city look bad.
• “I said, ‘I will not be a good planner if we start planning for the future from today, without acknowledging the past. If we don’t, we’re gonna likely repeat it.”

Bokhari, who ultimately wrote the tweet calling for his firing over what he called “ethical failures,” was perhaps Jaiyeoba’s biggest critic.

In an interview with us in June, Bokhari said of Jaiyeoba: “f— that guy.” Bokhari said he used to like Jaiyeoba, and that Jaiyeoba once even praised Bokhari’s defense of the police.

I spoke with Jaiyeoba the Friday before the piece on Bokhari ran, and he couldn’t understand how, in his view, Bokhari could like him when they agree, but dislike him when they don’t.

“You can’t cherry pick when you don’t like people,” he said.

Yet after all of that, Jaiyeoba says he still does like Bokhari, and his sense of humor.

“I’m the planning director at the end of the day,” he said. “I cannot afford to not work with our elected officials.”

Eventually, the 2040 plan was approved on a narrow 6-5 vote, and it has largely faded from the public discourse.

Jaiyeoba has other fires to tend to now:

• The Unified Development Ordinance will set the regulations that actually implement the 2040 plan’s goals. Jaiyeoba expects to release the first of several drafts in late September or early October.
• At the same time, the city launched the policy mapping process late last month for the 2040 plan, which will map the various concepts in the 2040 plan to specific locations.

He’s also working on the city’s transit and mobility plan, which has an uncertain fate after a string of controversies.

• Jaiyeoba came under fire for not presenting the full results of a poll that showed transportation was not the top priority for voters, WFAE reported.
• Jaiyeoba said, and the poll conductors confirmed in an email he shared with Axios, that he was presented the information he was given.
• Meanwhile, the fate of the LYNX Red Line, which would run from center city north to Huntersville, Davidson and Cornelius, is uncertain. Norfolk Southern owns the tracks the line would run on and refuses to share them.

Planning is what gives Jaiyeoba purpose, but even he couldn’t feel the joy of working on the 2040 plan by the end of the process.

“I think the only thing I can say is that I felt a relief, that temporary relief that, okay, at least we have a path forward,” he said.

That’s why I wanted to know: Was there ever a moment where he thought about quitting? In the height of the tensions, as he reassured his daughters that he was not going to lose his job on the night of Bokhari’s tweet, did he consider giving up?

No, he says. No, because he’s stronger than that. No, because this is more than a job, it’s a calling — no matter what hurdles are thrown in his path.

“It’s about finding meaning and doing it, and knowing that that purpose is bigger than yourself as a person,” he said. “And so when you hear some of these attacks, and some statements that were made, whether they bordered on race or they bordered on some other things, you don’t stop simply because of that.”

“Because there’s a higher vision.”