‘Hayti Reborn’: Durham equity research park to move forward without hoped-for grant
Durham researchers, academics and activists looking to bring new life into the city’s historic Hayti neighborhood and beyond are moving forward, despite missing out on a key grant.
The Durham Global Equity Project recently announced an ambitious $1 billion project to redevelop Hayti, with a focus on the abandoned Fayette Place housing community between downtown and N.C. Central University.
The property, now just concrete slabs and grass behind a chain-link fence, has remained bare since at least 2009.
If the project is successful, the 20-acre lot owned by the Durham Housing Authority would be reimagined as an “equity education research and development park.”
“The simple concept,” project director Henry McKoy explained in a statement, “is that by bringing smart and passionate people together in a permanent and ongoing environment with the challenging and audacious task of ending systematic racism in health, education, and economic development, innovation will happen in ways unprecedented from when they are separate.”
Hayti was a prominent African-American business and residential district during the segregation era. Hundreds of businesses thrived and thousands of Black Americans lived in Hayti until integration and the construction of the Durham Freeway in the 1960s and ‘70s.
Educator Booker T. Washington, upon visiting Hayti in 1910, dubbed Durham a “City of Negro Enterprise.” Today, the Hayti district is one of its poorest ZIP codes.
In March, McKoy, a business professor at NCCU, and his team applied for a $20 million redevelopment grant from the Kellogg Foundation. While “Hayti Reborn” made the first cut in May, it didn’t make the next in September and lost out on a $1 million planning grant.
Still, project organizers are moving ahead.
“While DGEP wasn’t named one of the nine global finalists, we are bolstered by the continued interest of great partners in this vision,” they stated in a news release. “Global experts gave our proposal a score of 92 out of 100.”
The Durham Global Equity Project has submitted a proposal to the housing authority for Fayette Place for a first phase project featuring a residential tower, Innovation Academy, office, grocery, retail, and surface parking totaling 266,6000 square feet. The construction cost for this phase would be $164.3 million.
The Durham Global Equity Project is relying on support from local and national partners like EVOKE Studio Architecture, the K&L Gates law firm, Tri Properties, the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University and WinnDevelopment, it said in a news release.
The project has also received $200,000 from the William R. Kenan Jr. Charitable Trust and another $100,000 split between Durham County and the city.
Over the course of eight years and in four phases, the goal is for Hayti to become the Durham Global Equity Project complex: a 2000-acre environmentally sustainable, mixed-use urban development with nearly 2 million square feet of commercial, lab, retail and residential space.
Eventually, the project would like to replicate its strategy in hundreds of other predominantly Black cities with neglected neighborhoods across the United States by 2030, and even around the world in countries like Haiti and Rwanda.
