Dave Chappelle has never been one to do the expected. In the aughts, the comedian abandoned his beloved TV show, walking away from a fortune, because he wasn’t comfortable with how it was being received. Over the last handful of years, though, he’s left people really puzzled, mostly by doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and so forth on trans jokes that enraged many, including employees at Netflix, who paid a fortune for his specials. Now he’s found another way to be controversial.
According to Dayton Daily News (as caught by The Daily Beast), Chappelle is one of a number of residents of Yellow Springs, Ohio who put the kibosh on what would have been a block of affording housing. Developers and the village had worked together on a new development, with plans to include a spate of single-family homes, duplexes, and townhouses. They also earmarked space among the allotted 53 acres to later turn into affordable housing.
Not so, said a number of Yellow Springs residents, Chappelle among them. Chappelle went further than most. He had threatened to pull his planned businesses from there, including a restaurant, a comedy club, and his own company, which had recently purchased a former fire station.
On Monday, during a city council meeting, Chappelle stood up to reiterate his threat.
Dave Chappelle personally came to a city council meeting and threatened to remove his $65m dollars of investments from his city if they allowed a developer to move forward with an affordable housing program. The objection wasn't to the build, but the affordable housing component. https://t.co/3ahCy1KqmN pic.twitter.com/l8MTxhhlJ7
— grimm (@ExileGrimm) February 9, 2022
“I am not bluffing. I will take it all off the table,” Chappelle told the council. They then voted to go along as originally planned, without the space earmarked for affordable housing. Chappelle’s reasons for blocking the deal have not yet been made public. In the meantime, add “helping destroy housing for low-income people” to the list of shocking things the beloved comedian has done lately, including “taunting high schoolers.”
(Via Dayton Daily News and The Daily Beast)
