Max Benbassat’s family emigrated from Argentina to Chicago in the early 1980s, spurred by an economic crisis.
Following the drift of the textile industry, they soon moved south. Benbassat was raised in Burlington, and his father worked the next county over in Greensboro.
The young man graduated from a Catholic university in Chicago, met some friends from New York City and relocated there, working in advertising, imports and bartending. Last year he moved back to North Carolina to work for his father’s Greensboro textile company, Bentex Mills.
Benbassat, 27, represents a new phenomenon in Greensboro politics — an urbane outlook with an international perspective that transcends the South’s traditional black-white civil rights paradigm.
He envisions Greensboro becoming a vibrant metropolis, more dense and less sprawl-y, with an expanded public transit system and flourishing community gardens, a town with a compassionate heart for the poor and a plan to lure its wayward youth back from delinquency. In short, the Greensboro Benbassat envisions could be a fractional slice of Brooklyn transplanted to the South.
Having declared his candidacy early for one of Greensboro City Council’s three atlarge seats, Benbassat has found himself in a crowded field that includes two incumbents — Sandra Anderson Groat and Robbie Perkins — a seasoned politico named Nancy Vaughan, a young professional named Ryan Shell with a sophisticated media campaign and a gang leader named Jorge Cornell who has upstaged the rest of the slate with an uncanny ability to connect to the man and woman on the street, and with a campaigntrail arrest.
In describing his campaign platform during a late lunch at the Old Town Draught House on Spring Garden Street, Benbassat’s words flowed in halting jumble, leaping from one idea to the next. His positions don’t fit in neat columns, but rather reveal a holistic skein of interconnectedness.
“There’s a couple of groups here that are doing community gardens,” he said. “For example, if we organized the gardens a little more to where we could get the food from the gardens to our restaurants. That ties into a buy-local campaign, generally the beautification of our neighborhoods, pride in our neighborhoods. Same with bus shelters.
You put something nice in, and people feel good about. It’s about an organic Greensboro, a real city. We have character here.” At another point in the conversation, he predicted that an additional set of bus shelters installed to enhance the transit system and corresponding crosswalks placed to improve pedestrian safety would naturally attract vendors, creating both vitality and added law enforcement cost. Benbassat said he does not favor authorizing municipal bonds to pay for expansion and added amenities for the city’s public transit, but suggested that the city sell advertising on shelter panels and bus wraps.
“I’d like for it to pay for itself,” he said. In late July, Benbassat met with four prospective campaign volunteers at New York Pizza. He said he has decided to fund the campaign out of his own pocket and not accept any contributions.
“I used to work for a cigarette company,” the candidate said. “If I were to accept a contribution from them it would cloud my judgment on regulations of smoking in workplaces and public places.”
Like all the candidates, Benbassat received a questionnaire from the Triad Real Estate and Building Industries Coalition. One of the questions, phrased two different ways, asks whether the candidates support requirements that there be a certain amount of green space, Benbassat said. He answered yes. His hunch is that the industry group is opposed to green space requirements.
“That’s why they want to contribute,” he said. “You can tell that they you want to sell your soul to them.”
Benbassat said that, if elected to council, he would take a more critical view of annexation and rezoning requests by developers.
“I think we should develop inward instead of outward,” the candidate said. “Greensboro has more sprawl than it should have for a city of its size. It’s dangerous for fire coverage, and crime’s going to go up with all the vacant space. The city council has sold its soul to developers. There has to be parameters in this city to control growth, and make it be sustainable. We say yes to everything, and it’s dangerous. If we control growth, it will help properties increase their value.”
Benbassat’s purist attitude towards politics contrasts with what some may see as a troubling association with organized crime.
The candidate was employed for a short time by a catering hall in Queens, NY that was alleged by the New York Daily News to be skimming money for the Gambino crime family and he ran an Italo-Argentine import business that associated with some people who were indirectly involved with organized crime in New York City.
“The allegations connecting me to organized crime in New York or anywhere, for that matter, are false,” Benbassat told YES! Weekly.
As the youngest candidate in the race, Benbassat said he is confident he would do a good job if elected. He applauded the slate of at-large candidates.
“I think it’s beautiful,” he said. “It’s good that I’m
running; it’s good that Jorge is running — the people that ordinarily wouldn’t
run. I think this is going to be a different campaign. We’re pulling from
different pools of voters — people who have never voted in a municipal
election.”
