Another anecdote on neighborhood stability

Two shootings in East Durham yesterday provide a depressing reminder of the importance of one of the issues we talked about here late last week: how questions of neighborhood stability in terms of rental versus owner-occupied properties reverberate through social issues such as education and crime.

Ironically, on the very day Duke donated a quarter-million dollars towards the conversion of the old Holton Middle School to a community center, vo-tech facility and wellness center, longtime local residents were left to decry the transformation of East Durham in the time they've lived there.

A neighborhood that changed significantly due to the loss of industrial jobs in textiles and tobacco, as Gary noted in pulling up an excellent 1994 N&O article last year, and due significantly to the transition of properties wholesale to rental status.

As the H-S' Matthew E. Milliken notes in a very well-reported piece on yesterday's troubles that goes beyond the typical-media focus of guns-and-bullets:

[Willie] Allen, who identified himself as a local pastor, then heard a couple of shots fired, a pause, then three or four more shots fired.

Allen, who was initially reluctant to give his name for fear of retaliation, despite the fact he was unable to identify any of the people involved, said he has lived in the neighborhood where the shooting occurred for about 18 years.

Passersby might not know it from looking at the well cared for single-family homes, Allen said, but his neighborhood started going downhill about four or five years after he arrived and has deteriorated since. Allen said he has heard shots fired in virtually every direction around his house [on Taylor St.]....

Another neighbor -- who would not let her name be printed for fear of retaliation, even though she could not identify any suspects -- said she had lived in her neighborhood home even longer than Allen. The neighborhood used to be quiet, despite its proximity to a public housing project, the woman said. But as nearby family-owned and -occupied homes, many of them historic, were converted into rental properties, the quality of the area has declined sharply....

Elderly residents are reluctant to sit on their picturesque porches unless a few other neighbors are also sitting outside and keeping an eye out for trouble, the woman said. She said she will be much more reluctant now to open her blinds, let alone her windows.

 

There's a danger when you focus on a topic like this one or a subject such as gentrification, one of one's argument being commingled with that of folks who -- for the same root cause reasons of neighborhood stability -- generally oppose multifamily development everywhere. I've been to two different development project public meetings in the past year where I've seen neighbors fret over the economic impact of apartment complexes or condos on their property values; in one case, the community asked for guaranteed minimum rents to prevent the apartments from becoming lower-rent facilities over time.

Certainly looking at the experience of East Durham, one can understand the root cause source of their fear. The problem, though, at the macro level is that such fears have led to the creation of neighborhoods in cities like and including Durham that are almost 100% owner-occupied -- hastening the transformation of regions like East Durham to the inverse, opposite standard.

Which is the point I was trying to make last week: we need rental property everywhere in Durham, just as we need homeownership everywhere. And neighborhoods like Cleveland-Holloway, or large swaths like East Durham, have a long way to go in increasing homeownership before we can even start to worry about gentrification.

I doubt Milliken's focus on elderly residents in this part of East Durham is an accident. As with the N&O article above, many of those who are homeowners in this part of the city are long-time residents who've watched their quiet, peaceful neighborhoods deteriorate.

When over the passage of time they're no longer living there, who will choose to live there? Will it be families with some economic means just starting out, or looking for affordable access to inexpensive housing stock, as in Cleveland-Holloway? Or will the properties do as C-H did two generations ago: be sold to landlords, be allowed to deteriorate, and enter a cycle of low-rent, low-quality housing that only further isolates and endangers the neighborhood.

My friend Gary titled his blog "Endangered Durham" as a reference to the beautiful architecture being lost. I'd argue that we're every bit at as much risk of losing the ability to revive our endangered neighborhoods from a civic and social context, too.

Of course, the historic architecture is often the linchpin -- it attracts residents interested in owning, say, a beautiful old Victorian, and thus encourages the development of neighborhood stability. And in that way, perhaps our endangered buildings ultimately can come to help our endangered neighborhoods.

Comments

[GK]

Kevin

Good commentary on East Durham - I'll just note that my broader point in the title "Endangered Durham" involves how the value of history and landscape is intimately tied to the social context. When we place a higher value on new places, new roads, etc. than we do on places like East Durham (from a social, cultural, and policy perspective) we pay a steep downstream price. Sustainable development means social sustainability as well - not just watersheds, etc.

GK