Monica Walker Wants to ‘Do The Work’ in District 2

After years of community engagement and a decade of working for Guilford County, Monica Walker wants the District 2 seat on the Greensboro City Council.

Walker is a partner with the Groundwater Institute and senior leader at the Racial Equity Institute, leading workshops on racial equity and undoing racism. She is a former executive director of Guilford County Schools’ Office for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, and has been a member of the Greensboro Convention Visitors Bureau Board, the Greensboro Board of Adjustment, and the Skyla Credit Union Board. She’s also the co-founder of the Gorrell Street Neighborhood Association and chairs the Southeast Greensboro Unified Neighborhood Council, which brought several neighborhood associations together.

“All of us are suffering under the burden of the same issues,” Walker said. “Lack of good infrastructure, retail, our housing conditions are pretty much the same.”

“It’s one thing to be on one side of the issue, which is to be asking for the assistance, the attention, the support, that is needed to advance our communities,” said Walker. “If I’m on that council and no longer in the position of begging for the things that we need, but having a say, [I am] representing my community in a way that we have a direct vote, direct input, and what’s going to happen in districts.”

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why is city council the board you believe you can make the most impact serving on?

I think the decisions of the city council are broader.

School board decisions are very strategic and specific, the governance of how we do education here … The [Guilford County Board of Commissioners] encompasses a number of things and impacts schools. But the decisions that are made by the city council are huge, and they impact everything. Number one, the city council has great governance over this whole new “Road to 10,000” [A city initiative to create 10,000 new housing units by 2030]. There’s the direct contact with decisions that get made about the development of communities. The decisions that get made, how we zone communities, how we develop communities, and the kind of housing that’s going in communities, affects everything.

[City council] impacts health care. It affects infrastructure decisions. What kind of grocery stores do certain neighborhoods have or not? … We just aren’t in the competitive market because of the housing conditions of our communities.

Those decisions—largely planning, zoning, redevelopment—are made by the city council. I live in a highly impacted community on purpose. I chose to live here because part of the plan is to get engaged with the redevelopment of this community. People with my resources have to move back to communities like these. As a Black woman, this is an African American community, and the income that I possess can make a difference here. 
The kind of house that I build or redevelop is going to make a difference here. That’s intentional.

But I’m trying to also paint the picture that, while I support affordable housing, we need mixed-income housing. 
We need $250,000-$350,000 homes. The real estate that’s available here, were we really to be intentional and strategic about that on the cusp of this economic development—Boom Supersonic, Jet Zero, Toyota—we’ve got all of this industry that is moving here and many of those folks are going to come with that.

If the right decisions are made at the level of the city council about zoning and redevelopment and the kind of developers and real estate that we’re driving into this community, we can make it happen. While I can talk about how the impacted areas of District 2, there are other well-developed areas of District 2. I want people who live in those areas to maintain what they have,
I want the investment in real estate that they’ve made to appreciate, and over time, attain equity that they feel good about leaving to their children. So there’s the maintenance of some communities, and there is the redevelopment of other communities that are not enjoying the same level of prosperity, the same level of service, the same level of resource that is important for everyone to have a good life.

How do you think the city should be addressing housing and homelessness?

Homelessness is a deep and a profound concern, because no one should ever be homeless. I feel that’s the responsibility of any system of governance, from the city council, the county commission. Homeless kids wind up in our schools, so you begin to see the connectedness that takes place. I think that many of the things that I’ve seen done to address the circumstances and situation of homelessness are putting a Band-Aid on it. Temporary housing, that’s what we’ve done.

I think we’ve got to be very comprehensive and really begin to evaluate the circumstances of people’s homelessness. People talk about mental illness. That is real, too. 
But it’s more than mental illness. This is about chronic joblessness for the people who’ve been out of work, not just for a day, a week, but there are folks that are years out of work. We got to figure those things out. And I think, again, we fragment and isolate rather than to look at what it’s going to mean when our economic development is the way it should be, to make sure that all of this new industry that’s coming in is trickling down and translating to jobs … 
We’ve got to figure that out, because the issue of homelessness is an issue of employment. Homelessness is an issue of health care. Homelessness is an issue of education. Homelessness is an issue of the environment.

What do you believe the city should be spending more on or spending less on? 

I haven’t studied the budget enough to say with any certainty where money should be moved. Here’s what I can say with great certainty in regard to the $390 million spent on infrastructure: I’m troubled by that. [Editor’s note: $420.4 million was spent on infrastructure during the 2024-25 fiscal year.] Because I haven’t seen the infrastructural changes or the spending translated to tangible things that I can point to in the community, a large swath of community that is the southeastern end of the city of Greensboro.

I can see the big budget. What I can’t see is, where does that go? You know, what streets were repaired? What lighting was repaired? I just don’t witness that in my community. I want to see more specifically how and where we’re spending money. And here’s the thing that’s troubling to me. That we’ve got these great economic studies that we invested in, trying to understand the condition of communities and developing a plan, supposedly of action. I want to see how the budget lines up against the many plans that have been done. I think we’ve got studies out of the wazoo. How does our spending line up? Every system in this country talks about a strategic plan, but strategic means that you have invested deeply in an understanding of where the problems are, where the gaps are, and you’re trying to close those.

Recently, the city of Durham passed a resolution making Durham a “Fourth Amendment Workplace,” increasing protections for city workers against U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids and arrests. What’s your position on what the council’s role is related to ICE and deportation?

I didn’t come from another country to be here in Greensboro. But I came from another state. And I’ve lived in at least five different states, 
And I absolutely believe that we are indeed a country of immigrants. I believe that we have long touted ourselves as that as a nation. And we’re just one city, one city, one state, in this great tapestry of a nation that said that it would be welcoming.

I believe that immigrants should be welcomed, and I think immigrants should be accountable and responsible. I think that our doors should always remain open. I think there is some position for a city or a city council to take on how we’re going to support those who are immigrants. The Constitution hasn’t changed for me. What we said in that Constitution, we haven’t always lived up to it. But I think that if there has been a promise made, it should be a promise honored.