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Episode #2320
There Goes the Neighborhood
Holt: “There goes the neighborhood” is an expression that refers to the unwelcome of certain newcomers to a community. And, recently, it’s the sentiment of longtime residents in some traditionally black neighborhoods. We’ll talk about the changes taking place in downtown Raleigh and Durham and who has a say, next, on Black Issues Forum.
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Holt: Hello, welcome to Black Issues Forum. I’m Deborah Holt, in for Natalie Bullock Brown and Mitchell Lewis. Many cities across the state are revitalizing to accommodate growth and improve the quality of life for residents. When these changes involve the replacement of low-cost property with higher cost property, drawing in wealthier residents and displacing long established lower income residents and businesses, it’s considered gentrification. It’s an action that’s been argued to infringe on certain democratic life. Today we’ll talk about why and how this could be the case with regard to two of the many growing communities in our state: Raleigh and Durham.
I’d like to introduce today’s guests. First, we have Lonnette Williams, Chair of the Central Citizens Advisory Council and President of the South Park East Raleigh Neighborhood Association. We also have Octavia Rainey, a long-time community activist and advocate, with membership in a number of state and local organizations, including the National Fair Housing Alliance, Community Reinvestment Association of North Carolina and the North Carolina Justice Center, just to name a few. I’d also like to welcome Mitchell Silver, planning director for the City of Raleigh, and Larry Hester, co-owner of Phoenix Square Shopping Center in Durham and also member of the Durham community organization Unity in the Community for Progress, as well as the Fayetteville Street Planning Group. Welcome to all of you.
Silver: Thank you.
Rainey: Thank you.
Holt: This is a very important issue, and a lot of people feel very passionately about it. And I think a lot of it has to do with that term, gentrification, so let’s kind of explore that first of all. Let’s just start off with you, Mitch. How do you define it?
Silver: Well, I have a working title that gentrification is really revitalization with tradeoffs. There are both positive and negative implication as a result of revitalization. The term started back in the United Kingdom, a sociologist, Ruth Glass, coined the term of the gentries, or a certain class, moving into a neighborhood, pushing out others. It wasn’t at that time based on race but class. But when it moved here, in the United States, in the 1970s, when people, or whites from the suburbs, were moving to the cities, they coined the term gentrification.
But, over time, it became a lot more volatile because, while in the UK it was just related to class, in revitalization in the US, it was race and class. We had a history of urban renewal and slum clearance that did not exist in the UK. And so, with that combination of that history of people being pushed out of neighborhoods, gentrification took on a new connotation, with race and class in addition to just class.
Holt: And we do have a lot of changes going on in our neighborhoods for a variety of reasons. Lonnette, can you share with us what’s happening in the neighborhood that you live in and that you represent in Raleigh?
Williams: I live in South Park neighborhood, which is a part of the downtown area, the newly defined downtown area, the City of Raleigh. And, essentially, what’s occurred has been economic as well as displacement of residents, for the purpose of rebuilding housing. Many black businesses have been eradicated and are no longer part of the area, and it’s been replaced with businesses that are not necessarily attractive to the African American culture.
South Park is, historically, a black neighborhood that was founded in the early 1900s by freedmen. And it is a part—it is on the National Register for Historic Places. And we are very concerned about eradicating the influence of black neighborhoods, one of the oldest ones in the nation, and yet we are powerless to do anything to retain our identity and to retain the properties that people currently own.
The new downtown revitalization effort has basically provided no goods and services that would support the quality of life that African Americans have always had accessibility to in the City of Raleigh, and that’s a real concern.
Holt: We certainly want to talk about what some of those goods and services would be, but first I want to get to you, Octavia. You’ve been working on these issues for a very long time in the Raleigh area, and now you’re—and you’re also with the National Fair Housing. Are there certain rights that get infringed upon when there’s so-called gentrification?
Rainey: Well, from the housing point of view, we look at it as a segregated tax, period. Because, when you move out of the lower income and bring in the higher income, what you’re doing is basically creating a higher tax base. And we need to be honest about that higher tax base. And when you create that higher tax base, it changes the whole flow of the economy. So, when you look at the inner-city, it’s basically becoming a higher tax base.
A prime example we can go back and look at for the city—this isn’t anything new—we can look at Smoky Hollow, which was an older black community. Look at Smoky Hollow now. There’s the 42nd Street Oyster Bar now, all those upscale restaurants. That’s where a lot of lower income African Americans live.
Then we can go and take another stab at South Park, was when they tried to go in and take half of South Park and do a street in. And that was to get rid of—what was it? Forty houses?
Williams: Forty houses.
Rainey: Forty houses. And when the neighborhood said, “Oh, no, we’re not going for this,” the city just said, “Okay, we’re going to stop the flow of money over there.” and that happened for a long time.
Another incident we could go back and look at Manly Street. A lot of people do not know Manly Street existed in the City of Raleigh. It was connected to Fayetteville Street, where you had your three black, huge churches that the city demolished to make way for Fayetteville Street.
So, the history is very important when we begin to look at the downtown area. When I look at the downtown, I never hear Manly Street mentioned. And a lot of new people probably say, “Where in the world was Manly Street?” People have no idea, no idea that that was a viable street itself, but to make way and set the stage for what you have now.
Holt: And, Larry, I imagine you are experiencing some of the similar things in Durham.
Hester: Yes, Durham.
Holt: And you’re a business person. You own a shopping center, so you’re speaking not only from a residential perspective but also a business. Share with us a little bit about the business perspective.
Hester: Well, we own two shopping centers right across the street from each other, and the problem is, downtown, there has been an impetus to revitalize downtown. And we think that that’s good; that’s not a problem. I think one of the things that they did was that they created different sections of downtown. There was a DD01, DD02 and DD03, which actually dealt with the density of the downtown area. But what is occurring is that, when you look at Durham’s downtown, the DD01, which was supposed to have the greatest density, they are now pushing that over into our neighborhood, which can be very harmful; it can eliminate a lot of the traditional African American businesses that are in our community.
And so, when the plans were passed and they had laid out the plan, some of the areas in downtown should have had skyscrapers, and they were trying to make sure that the population was there for the businesses that are there. But what is occurring is that, when I look at the map and the Fayetteville Street corridor and the way that the corridor is being carved up, it means that there’s going to be an enormous amount of pressure on the businesses there and that the businesses, in 15 years, won’t look like the businesses that are there now. It’s the same problem that you’re talking about.
F: That’s right.
Holt: Well, let me ask the question, though. When you talk about “they,” who are we are we talking about? And what’s wrong with the change and moving forward and progress and a changing demographic?
Hester: Well, you ask a good question. I guess “they” would be—let’s reframe it a moment and call this an economic issue. They, as has been said, they are looking to increase the tax base of the city. But, inside the city, there are neighborhoods and there are people. There are young people, there are old people, and there are problems. It appears that what is happening is they are trying to move the problem to the outskirts of the city, or and run periphery of the city, and not solve the problems that are very inside the city.
There are problems with crime. There’s problems with youth. There’s problems in business development. Those things don’t seem to be the focus. The focus is to get the larger businesses in. And when I say “they,” it would be outside developers. For us, it would be the city because the city is also aiding by the policies that they create. They created the policies five years ago, and three years after, and those policies began to be implemented. And residents never know what’s hitting them until it’s right upon them; they’ve got to move out. There’s a system in place.
Holt: Well, Mitch, let me ask you, does this sound familiar?
Silver: It sounds familiar. But if you look back to cities, from the beginning of time, cities are dynamic; they’re always changing. Populations change, neighborhoods change. And I think, currently, you’re seeing a desire to build closer to the core. They call it “smart growth” because you’re using existing infrastructure. It is not new.
But I think that if you look at revitalization, gentrification, as I said earlier, it impacts homer owners one way, renters another way. And if you kind of had to boil it down to some of the critical problems, if you’re a home owner, there’s a concern about increased property taxes, there’s a concern about, as Lonnette said, the change in some of the stores, the cultural values—there’s kind of this clash of values, some of the newcomers and long-term residents. And there’s a concern about possibly, for renters, displacement, that you can be displaced.
And so this is not new. I think cities want to remain competitive. They want to have a strong tax base. There was a period in the ‘70s where people were leaving the cities, and now they’re coming back. And so now you see these pressures for precious real estate closer to the core. You know, later on, hopefully, we’ll talk about some of the good examples of how it does work, but this is common across the country because of all those pressures. But cities are always dynamic, interchanging, and I think today we’re looking at how do we make sure displacement and this change in culture that’s occurring in some of these neighborhoods remain intact, and so people are not pushed out and the culture is retained.
Holt: And, Lonnette—and I’ll get back with you in just a moment—I wanted to ask you how do citizens and residents who are currently in these neighborhoods make sure that they’re involved and that they have a say and that their interests are represented when these changes occur.
Williams: We’re trying to do it through our Citizens Advisory Council, the central CAC, and the South Park East Raleigh Neighborhood Association. We have updated with Mitch’s departments, so support the South Park’s neighborhood plan. We updated it, and it was approved by the council in 2007. As a part of that, we are doing a revitalization plan strategy with community development, which is our department that has HUD funds to help us provide housing in our neighborhood.
We have about 90% occupancy of renters in the South Park neighborhood—not good for stabilization. And one of the primary focuses that we have is for home ownership opportunities. Now, that can be a two-headed sword, as we have seen with some community development initiatives in the City of Raleigh. When the houses were built—well, first of all, land was acquired and displaced African Americans, who traditionally lived in these neighborhoods.
Holt: But they were—their property was purchased. They sold their property.
Williams: Well, it was acquired by the city. Most properties were rented, were rental properties own by absentee landlords, and allowed the property to go into ruins and not upkeep. And so the city acquired it because it was blighted property.
Now, that property, once it was revitalized, the way homes were built upon it, somehow or another we ended up having almost 95% of the new people who return to the neighborhood as home owners were not African Americans. The question gets to be: what is the marketing strategy? How is it African Americans don’t know about these first time home buy opportunities that allow you to become a person who’s building equity in where you live? Well, that’s an issue, and that’s what we’re concerned with. So we’re trying to stay on top of that and work with city departments and the people that they contract with.
That’s the key—the developers who bid on these properties. They have to be monitored to see what kind of marketing strategy they’re using. And we have seen that happen 99% of the time in the South Park neighborhood.
Holt: Now, talk about some of these marketing strategies. I should think that there’s a property that’s available, anyone has the opportunity to come and purchase and qualify, and anyone would have the right and has the right to come in and purchase that property. But you mentioned marketing strategy [OVERLAPPING COMMENTS]
Rainey: Well, for example, marketing strategies, I pick up this newspaper called the Downtowner. And when they were developing housings in the Cooke Street area, it said, “First time home buyer, downtown, in the downtown area.” Idlewild is not downtown. That was misleading. The article never talked about downtown. I mean, never mentioned Idlewild community; it always used downtown. It also went to say “young couple,” and I’m like, “Young couple, who would like to walk to downtown, who would like to enjoy the restaurants?” It used a lot of buzzwords that, for me, I had some concern. I’m saying, so you’re not marketing to elderly people, you’re saying young professionals. And I was—so I was like, “What is a young professional? Downtown, you can walk to the restaurant. If you love your dog, you have a great backyard.”
[OVERLAPPING COMMENTS]
Rainey: I was like, “Hold up here.” And I kept looking, I kept looking, I kept looking at it now. At what point will you say “Idlewild”? When you accept that the RFP [ph] is still Idlewild, but your marketing strategies never said “Idlewild.”
Holt: It’s the right of the owners.
Rainey: But, not only that, they used CDBG funds, so they’re supposed to have, in Affirmative Fair Housing Marketing strategy. Who’s monitoring that strategy?
Holt: Who, indeed.
Rainey: Who monitors it? Not only that, then, when I picked up another news article, I was shocked. Right next to Mordecai, right next to Oakwood—it never mentioned College Park, never ever.
Holt: And all of these are African American strictly…
Rainey: No. No, it was their marketing strategy. And I [OVERLAPPING COMMENTS] and I was like but you—this is Idlewild. Idlewild was never ever mentioned, never.
Hester: Well, one of the things, this is a good debate. It’s—Mitchell mentioned how cities are changing and how are neighborhoods are changing. Well, what we did is, ten years ago, we began to look down the road to say cities are changing—they’re changing in the North; they’re changing everywhere—what’s the best approach so that we can protect our neighborhood, protect that infrastructure, and also improve our neighborhood. So, we went about beginning to develop strategies and plans that we could present to the city, city council, for support.
We asked for increased policemen, police protection for the businesses, walking and bicycle patrolmen. We got two, downtown got 32. There’s been a disinvestment in our community, and part of that disinvestment also goes into the city’s plan to redevelop. Because, when the land is cheap, people can go in and accommodate, accumulate land and then build large projects. But what we did, we were trying to be proactive, so we pooled people together—well, 200 people came together to begin to build a community plan, which was the Fayetteville Street Master Plan. We asked the State Department of Transportation, the Planning Department, the Housing Department, the Economic Development Department.
And so, for a year and a half, residents came together. They imagined what they wanted the neighborhood to look like, what they wanted it to be. And we created a vision. We wanted the Fayetteville Street corridor to be friendly to tourism. We had created the Fayetteville Street historic district back in 2000. And so what we were doing was saying, okay, let’s take a proactive approach to this.
Holt: And so what’s the status of that project and that…?
Hester: Well, we presented a 119 page plan to the Durham City Council. They said it was too comprehensive to actually adopt. They also said that—it was too comprehensive. They admitted it was well written. They—we gave it to the planning department, they looked at it. And it involved quite a bit of changes in what the first parts of the plans were, that we went through every neighborhood and began to look at what needed to be done in each neighborhood—what did the neighbors in those neighborhoods want. So we did an assessment, whether they needed streetlights, do they need street bumps for traffic calming—there are all types of things that were put in the plan.
Holt: So a very comprehensive plan.
Hester: It was a comprehensive plan.
Holt: And positive things.
Silver: There are two points I’d like to make. I think that when we look at doing a plan, we had a very successful one with Lonnette and the CAC in South Park. We also had another one just north of that we called Old East [ph] Raleigh. For one ____ trying to find out what is a public intervention, what can we do from our part. We’re also finding out, in most cases, the city right now has kind of suspended activity until we complete these plans. But most of the gentrification newcomers coming in are existing property owners, who are just selling their homes and signing as time to sell [ph] and move, and you see newcomers coming in. Now, they’ll point to the city, saying, “What are you doing?” But I think it’s just a phenomenon, again, of just neighborhoods turning over. Some are speculators; some are first time home buyers that may not, again, be of the same class or race. And so you start to see this anxiety and uncertainty as the newcomers are coming in, as long-term time property owners are beginning to sell.
But we do another study in the Old East Raleigh. This is an area just north of South Park, just right next to downtown. And we found out that 1955, in this one area, there were 800 households and 128 businesses, about 16 units to the acre. You fast-forward to today, that’s now dropped down to about 250 households and 20 businesses. Now, a lot of that had occurred through the city’s past efforts of urban renewal that blighted and removed a lot of buildings, but, again, if you look at that reduction of 70%, how do you begin to revitalize when most of the new buildings or households need to be replaced? Many of those residents are gone, and if you do start to plan, how do you integrate newcomers with existing residents, retain that cultural identity of that neighborhood, when you want to get back those businesses and that population that made it so stable back in the 1950s and ‘60s?
Those are the challenges we’re facing today, and you could only do it through close collaboration of __ because you want to respect the culture, you want to respect those that are there, but also allow for that growth to come back. Because you do want the businesses, you do want to see crime improved, you know. So that’s why I am saying you proceed very carefully, but those are some issues that we deal with. We’re [ph] also saying we’re not selling the homes. These are, for whatever reason, some property owners are saying, “Look, it’s time to move on and retire or move somewhere else.” And then they sell, and then the newcomers come in.
Holt: And so ___ happening in Raleigh that you are working in a cooperative way.
Rainey: But now, but now, we need to look at the redevelopment area. I think that’s all the difference, because you go to the property that they acquire, it’s little property. Number two, the second properties that they end up acquiring is then the child live away and the parents passed, and they say, “Well, I don’t want to stay here anymore.”
M: Correct.
Rainey: And they end up selling it. The third way that they end up acquiring is basically through not—it’s basically through redlining. What the banks have not invested in a lot of the redevelopment areas. And so when you begin to look at that, two, I mean, the last point you can’t get around, a discrimination from the banking industry. There’s a different rule of thumb when you go to the bank to get your house fixed with an older home compared to when the City of Raleigh partnership with them for a second mortgage. Those are two differences. Those are two different entities.
And the City of Raleigh only have a relationship with the banks on their second mortgages. The City of Raleigh do not have a relationship to say, “Let’s talk about a house that is 50 years old. What type of interest rate will you commit and work with us on?” There’s a huge difference. The only time the banks enter the inner-city is when the city has cleared off all the _____ and say, “You are my partner and you’re going to do this second mortgage as a part of your CRA.” And you can just see the lines where the bank has invested. And you step over in College Park, you don’t see bank investment. But you come to Idlewild, only in the new development that you see the bank’s investment. So we have to understand that a line has also been drawn, and that line creates gentrification as well.
As a matter of fact, Channel Five or 11 did a series, when African American—I think it was Channel 11. It was, with Steve Daniels. When African Americans go to the banks to get loans, they were turned down. And their credit ratings were the same as a Caucasian. So why are they seeing different deals?
Hester: I guess you have to go back. If we go back in the process just a bit and start looking at some other things, too, because what’s being said is absolutely correct. When the city decides to begin to disinvest in an area, rather than to invest in an area and invest in the people in an area, then the area goes down. The city has a long-range plan, and they plan 10, 15, 20 years out—so does the Department of Transportation—for what they would like to change in the future. So…
Holt: And I’m going to interrupt us for just a moment. We’re going to continue this discussion here in the __ studio and make it available to our viewers online. But right now, I’d like to thank you for watching and joining us. And if you want more information on Black Issues Forum, please logon to our website at unctv.org/bif. And when you visit, please be sure to give us your comments and program suggestions. And you can also call us at 919-549-7167. For Black Issues Forum, I’m Deborah Holt. Thanks for spending your time with us.
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