Controversial comedian Dave Chappelle has been sort of quietly living his life in Yellow Springs, Ohio, for several years. His father lived in the town, along with a handful of other prominent names including John Lithgow and Mary Loritz, the secretary of the Young People’s Socialist League.
But just like so many cities across the nation, Yellow Springs has a housing shortage, so when the for-profit developers of Oberer Homes came calling to buy 53 acres, the biggest development to date, the draw was irresistible.
Village of Yellow Springs City Council Member Marianne MacQueen told Daily Kos that the initial idea from Oberer was to build about 150 single-family homes, creating, in essence, a subdivision. The council knew that the village’s residents would oppose that, so instead negotiated a different deal—one that included 60 single-family homes, 50 duplexes, six townhouse units, and two acres for about 28 affordable housing units, along with a park, a playground, and a constructed wetland.
But Yellow Springs residents didn’t want any of it. And Dave Chappelle led the oppositional charge.
“There’s been a misunderstanding from the beginning about what the Village was able to negotiate with the developer,” MacQueen says. She explains that the city of about 3,800 has become a huge draw for people and what was once an affordable little town has become expensive—too expensive for many of the struggling artists who call it home.
“I’m not sure why Dave is opposing, but some were aligned with him and they refused to believe there wasn’t a third option” MacQueen said.
Long before Chappelle moved in and bought up about a dozen properties (many of which are in the small downtown area) with a plan to pour millions more in to revitalize the town, Yellow Springs was a socialist enclave.
In 1825, Robert Owen and the Owenite families who were his acolytes came to the town to build their utopian communities based on the socialist notion of communally owning property and working together. Tourists came to drink from the nearby spring, the namesake of the town, for its curative properties.
The community contained one newspaper, seven churches, one sawmill, and a grain elevator. Yellow Springs also housed Antioch College, which the Christian Connection founded in 1852.
The town has kept its socialist roots. Just 17 years ago in 2005, Yellow Springs hosted the Young People's Socialist League's national convention.
Fast-forward to Monday, and the city council voted 2-2 against the revised “planned unit development zoning,” reverting to the developer's original idea of plain ol’ tract housing, without the affordable housing component.
Chappelle and others are outraged over the project. The actor has threatened to pull all of his money out of planned restaurant and comedy club projects and repeated his threat again on Monday night at the city council meeting.
“I am not bluffing,” he said. “I will take it all off the table.”
This is the same Chapelle who was blasted for comments he made during a November Netflix special that centered largely around being canceled and various onerous jokes about the trans community.
Chappelle speaks at 1:42:22
According to the Dayton Daily News, residents felt they’d been left out of the process with Oberer and the city council.
“I think it’s important to kind of understand the framing and also understand how those products attract different homebuyers,” resident Matthew Kirk, a member of the citizen’s board who worked on the project, told the Dayton Daily News. He added that he was initially excited but his view later “soured.”
“Yellow Springs was funky back in the day. It’s still surrounded by farmland and nature preserves. But housing has changed. The nation has changed, and because the town is so small, the market has drawn up the prices. This development isn’t funky,” MacQueen says.
Chappelle hasn’t said why he opposed the development, but Max Crome, an architect who works with Chappelle on his business interests in the village, told the Dayton Daily News last December that the development was never designed to serve the locals.
“It’s clearly not designed for the benefit of the villagers,” Crome said.
“What is that alternative?” Crome asked. “I don’t think any of us have seen it. I for one don’t think it could be much worse. I think it would be better.”
MacQueen says the whole thing is pretty sad. “We’re a small town. We’re not politicians,” she says.
