The citizens of Salisbury and the City Council keep asking for affordable housing. The Mayor keeps trying to block it.

Green Street Housing is building it anyway!

Mayor Taylor claims SBY Market needs 140+ parking spaces. That number isn't in the zoning code. It isn't in any traffic study. It isn't backed by any qualified planner, engineer, or consultant. It isn't even supported by the Mayor's own staff: SBY Market has been through the City's entire site plan review process over many months, and not a single communication from the City's Department of Infrastructure and Development (DID) has ever indicated that our parking is inadequate or out of compliance. The City's own planning department — the people whose actual job is to evaluate this — has signed off on the parking we're providing.

In other words, the Mayor is making up numbers that even his own staff and own department won't substantiate.

It's bar napkin math — pure and simple.

Here's how downtown actually works.

Walk around Main Street Salisbury right now. Walk down Main Street in any town in America. You'll see the same pattern every time. Storefronts opening onto the street. Buildings touching buildings. Apartments above every shop. Zero lot lines. No on-site parking. That is typical downtown development in America — and it's how real downtowns have been built in this country for over a century, going back to the early days of the automobile. That's not a flaw. That's what makes a downtown a downtown.

That's why Salisbury has a Central Business District zone with no on-site parking requirement. It's why the City established a Parking Authority. It's why the City has run a dedicated downtown parking district since 1960. It's why the City built the downtown parking garage. And it's why — before Mayor Taylor killed it — the City had fully planned a second garage to serve the next generation of downtown growth.

Providing parking for downtown is the City's job. Not each individual property owner's. That is the entire design of a Central Business District, and it has been Salisbury's formal policy for 65+ years.

Don't take our word for it. Here's Salisbury's own City Planner, on the record, explaining the parking rules for a project in our same zoning district:

“The code language says, because the project is in the Parking Tax District, there is not a requirement for the development. Parking falls under the Parking Authority.”

What SBY Market actually has access to:

• ◆23 spaces on our own site
• ◆23 more on the adjacent city-owned lot — the lot the City already agreed to lease us in a signed contract (see 03)
• ◆~230 spaces in three city-owned public lots, each a 90-second walk from our front door
• ◆~20 street spaces on surrounding blocks

That's nearly 300 parking spaces within a 90-second walk of a 50-unit building with a 10,000 sq ft food hall. In a Central Business District that legally requires zero.

We're not underparked. We're overparked — by every honest measure.

The contradiction that gives it all away.

In one breath, Mayor Taylor says we don't have enough parking. In the next, he refuses to sign the 99-year lease — a contract the City already committed to — that would give us 23 more spaces on the adjacent lot.

You can't publicly demand more parking and privately block the agreement that would create it. Unless parking was never the real issue.

It isn't.

This isn't about parking. This is about affordable housing — and a Mayor who campaigned on fixing it, then set out to stop it.

When it comes to Salisbury's housing crisis, a city leader has three choices. Actively solve the problem. Ignore the problem. Or actively make the problem worse.

Randy Taylor campaigned on the first. He promised the first. And he has chosen the third.

He doesn't just fail to support affordable housing. He actively opposes it. He pulled the SBY Market application out of DID — Salisbury's own published one-stop for development review — and parked it in an executive office with no engineers, no planners, and no statutory review function. He has not signed the PILOT agreement the LDA requires. He has not signed the 99-year lease the LDA references. He has not issued the building permit. He is publicly citing a 140-space parking number that does not exist anywhere in the Salisbury zoning code. His charter duty is to faithfully execute the City's ordinances. He is doing the opposite.

It's the difference between a driver who passes a pedestrian lying injured in a crosswalk — and the driver who hit him, left, and came back only when he had to.¹

Randy Taylor isn't just passing by Salisbury's housing crisis. He's the one running it over.

The Council wants affordable housing. The State is funding it. The community has been asking for it for years. The law requires the City to support it. The Mayor campaigned on delivering it.

And he is doing everything he can to make sure it never happens.

Salisbury City Code, Chapter 3.26 — enacted unanimously by City Council in 2021 — entitles affordable housing projects like SBY Market to a 40-year PILOT (payment-in-lieu-of-taxes agreement). Not as a special favor. As a matter of right. The Code specifically calls out LIHTC developments like this one.

The City and Green Street Housing then formalized that entitlement in the Land Disposition Agreement (LDA) — a signed, binding contract with specific terms.

Mayor Taylor is refusing to sign the PILOT agreement that the LDA requires.

He's not proposing different terms. He's not raising an objection on record. He's simply refusing to sign — a refusal that departs from the path Salisbury City Code Ch. 3.26 lays out and leaves the City out of compliance with the LDA it already signed.

That's not a policy disagreement. That's a Mayor refusing to execute an ordinance his charter requires him to faithfully execute.

The same LDA commits the City to lease the adjacent city-owned lot to us for 99 years at $1, so we can improve it as supplemental parking for residents and food-hall visitors. Signing it would roughly double our on-site parking.

Mayor Taylor is refusing to sign that lease, too.

The contradiction tells the story: he publicly claims the project doesn't have enough parking, then privately blocks the exact agreement — one the City already committed to — that would add more of it. You can't have it both ways.