The Purple Bowl is a locally-owned small business based in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and is known for their healthy food options and accessibility. It has been a place of communal gathering for all Chapel Hill students, athletes, and residents, and its demolition would be a substantial loss for everyone in the community. The Purple Bowl has also gone above and beyond to be a welcoming place for people of all backgrounds, and hires individuals with disabilities to provide them with job opportunities and an environment where they can demonstrate their strengths. They have served our community and are an indispensible part of this town.

Longfellow, a real estate development company, plans to demolish the historic building in which The Purple Bowl, in addition to Blue Dogwood Market and Chimney, are currently located in. They wish to replace this with a 7-story corporate office building that will require multiple years for construction. This would force The Purple Bowl and two other businesses to relocate, which leaves an economic impossibility for The Purple Bowl to continue existing. 

The town of Chapel Hill is special for its charm and historic preservation, which is made up of the small businesses on Franklin Street. Turning it into a corporate city while tearing down local businesses is not progress, but rather destructive, and would disintegrate the very things that make this town a special place for the Tarheel community.

While the Town of Chapel Hill claims this development will bring economic opportunities to this town, the reality is that the destruction of our town's social fabric will far exceed any quantitative measurement of this development's profits. Their theory runs parallel with trickle-down economics and will bring greater benefit to corporations over our own community's residents, which will further exacerbate the living costs that Chapel Hill workers already struggle with. This is representative of the greater corporate conglomeration of America, as Walmarts and Targets wipe out small businesses, suffocating the local cultures of towns across this nation. We can prevent Chapel Hill from being next.

Sign the petition if you want to fight back against the destruction of our town. If we let this go, it will set precedent for future developers to enter and take away what makes Chapel Hill a special place to its residents and the UNC community as a whole.