The unique way one NC community is confronting gentrification
For years, the Northside neighborhood in Chapel Hill has been known for its perseverance. The community began with the descendants of enslaved people who built and maintained the university; it was the center of the town’s Civil Rights movement.
By the 1990s, however, student housing began cropping up as neighbors grew older and sold their homes to developers. Aside from age, the demographics of Northside are stereotypical of a gentrified neighborhood; a Jackson Center survey found that 80 percent of student residents in Northside are white, despite the community’s roots as an historically Black neighborhood.
Gentrification is an ever-growing wound in the Triangle and urban North Carolina. Earlier this month, The News & Observer published a series on the historical displacement of marginalized communities in Raleigh and Durham, which continues today.
If gentrification is the Triangle’s ailment, the efforts spearheaded by Northside’s neighbors offer a potential remedy, or at least a balm to soothe the aches.
Instead of allowing tensions to fester, the town, university, and the Marian Cheek Jackson Center have been working on a Good Neighbor Initiative to educate students instead of letting their version of Northside overtake its history until the last of the long-term residents are gone.
Jackson Center Executive Director George Barrett, a 2014 UNC-CH graduate, says the center has approached the situation by not blaming students for their presence in the neighborhood, since many of the properties they occupy are unlikely to revert to long-term housing any time soon.
Instead, students are encouraged to join the fabric of the community — which includes being educated on how to be a good neighbor, and “setting the norms” for behavior with the university’s help.
“We don’t blame students, but we also do not accept having a crazy loud party next to a family with children, or an elder who’s in their 80s, and having that until two in the morning,” Barrett says. In the last five years, this part of the Jackson Center’s work with the town and university has led to a significant reduction in noise and nuisance violations in Northside.
“One of the really beautiful things that has come out of all the work that’s been done is real relationship building — across generation, across race, across life experience — among UNC students living off-campus in neighborhoods and longtime African American residents,” says Sarah Osmer Viñas, Chapel Hill’s director of affordable housing and community connections.
Aside from the Good Neighbor Initiative, there’s a financial initiative to keep homes in the neighborhood affordable.
The Northside Neighborhood Initiative, a partnership between the Jackson Center, the university, the town of Chapel Hill, and Self-Help Credit Union led to a land bank, similar to the ones created by municipalities. When a homeowner begins thinking about selling their property, they can choose to sell to the land bank, instead of having it bought by developers.
After this, Northside neighbors determine what they want to see happen to the home, and a partner like Habitat for Humanity or Community Home Trust will renovate the properties, find people who need affordable housing, and pay back Self-Help. The land bank also assists in renovating existing properties.
Since 2015, the initiative has purchased more than 40 properties and continues to move families into the neighborhood.
This isn’t a perfect solution, especially since the initiative’s financial component ends in 2025. So much of the damage has been done. But Barrett says he could see similar initiatives working in other gentrifying neighborhoods, like Durham’s Walltown.
“The model of community direction, decision-making and self determination, matched with capital and resources are factors that I think are necessary to any other community doing similar work,” Barrett says. “So how that is put together is based on who’s in those rooms.”
If cities really want to combat gentrification, they need to listen to the people in rapidly gentrifying communities, and give them the resources they need to shape their neighborhoods.
