Author, Brock Sliter, wrote this paper on sustainable development and gentrification within the context of his hometown, Durham, NC.
Cities with sustainable development plans first and foremost combat gentrification whenever the wicked problem arises. Such cities also have complete streets which allow people to access amenities with as small a carbon footprint (Beatley 8) and cost possible independent of socioeconomic class or mobility. The most notorious antagonist of sustainable cities in the automobile, and cities’ proclivity to cater to the automobile at the expense of other transportation modes. The polar opposite of this strategy entails prioritizing public transit first, followed by pedestrians, then bicyclists, and automobile drivers at the bottom rung. Sustainable cities have high density urban cores which, in concert with integrative land use policies, discourage suburbanization, instead funneling growth inward rather than outward (Weir & Zomer 2016). Suburban models of growth have a considerably larger carbon footprint, are more costly due to increased infrastructure costs, and encroach on natural spaces humans and other species rely on for environmental services. In addition, suburbanization exacerbates racial and class disparities, lowers average quality of life, increases average cost of living, and is inherently anti-progressive (Beatley 6-13).
Urban sustainable development in Durham, North Carolina is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore within Durham’s downtown urban core. Over a ten year period, from 2000 to 2010, the city’s population increased a relative twenty two percent (“Demographics:Durham, NC 2011). This growth is largely immigration-based as Durham’s appeal as an education, tech, healthcare, and arts hub reverberates around the North Carolina piedmont region and beyond. Among families who move to Durham for its reputation of safety and quality of life, the population influx has been absorbed by suburban expansion, pushing populations further north and east. There is no foreseeable end in sight to Durham’s growth, leaving city planners to scramble with retrofitting the city’s core. Mirroring college towns in the southern United States of comparable size and population, Durham has two distinct nodes of development, the first based around geographically-centered business districts, office space, restaurants and high rises, and the latter to the west of downtown encompassing Duke University and Ninth Street, a district catering specifically to the needs and interests of the university’s students.
There are two additional less sizable nodes. The Hayti district, southeast of downtown, includes Durham’s other educational institution, North Carolina Central University, an HBCU which has been systematically ostracized from the greater Durham area but continues to enrich the city's culture and attract talent from across the country. Hayti is the last remnants of a prosperous black neighborhood which settled on the east side of town post-Civil War.
Black Wall Street, as Hayti was fondly known, was raised up by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois as an archetype of Black excellence. In the thirties, Hayti would be systemically ostracized by redlining, the practice of banks not granting home loans to predominantly minority neighborhoods. Durham later became known as a hotspot of civil rights activism, most notably including the 1957 Royal Ice Cream sit-ins (Davidson 88), which inspired the more famous Greensboro sit-ins three years later. The neighborhood went through urban renewal in the fifties and sixties, and was later decimated by the construction of NC 147 in the seventies (Ehrsam 3,8). The last important urban node, another historically minority-resided district known simply as The Village, is located northeast of downtown. The area, which was once connected to Hayti, is rich with Latino, African, and Caribbean influences.
Durham’s urban nodes underline the city’s stark class and racial divides. Ninth street and the west side is decidedly White and wealthy, while Hayti and the east side is minority-populated and working class. Durham’s downtown urban core is the meeting place of these two worlds. City planners must focus on this core to stave off runaway gentrification, discourage suburbanization, and enact environmental justice. The downtown core must be reconnected to historically maligned nodes like The Village and Hayti, in doing so unifying and centralizing growth rather than perpetuating de facto segregation. Duke is closely interlocked with the downtown urban core. Free university shuttles and city buses take students to and fro, whereas the minority and poor parts of town are separated by highways, and have inadequate public transit options. The roads connecting Duke and downtown are also frequently repaved, and have ample sidewalks, bike lanes, and flashing crosswalks.
Morgan Street, which runs through the north half of Durham's downtown core, connecting east and west Durham, is perhaps the best starting point for examining the district's relative sustainability in planning. The street runs one way, east to west. It is mostly two lanes, but further west, near the Carolina Theatre, the street widens to three lanes and an additional parking division on the left hand side. Because of the street’s directionality, drivers often use this road as a speedway. While the speed limit is 25 mph, it’s not uncommon for cars to go 35 or even 40. Because of this, pedestrians must be very cautious when crossing intersections, particularly at Foster and Morgan. Despite the dangers, the aforementioned intersection sees heavy foot traffic. Further down Morgan, where pedestrians head to the Carolina Theatre from the adjacent parking deck, the city has installed a crosswalk with yellow diamond-shaped pedestrian signage. Unfortunately, the crosswalk is not equipped with flashing lights, which considerably diminishes the crosswalk’s effectiveness. Drivers often blow past the crosswalk.
The full length of Morgan Street lacks dedicated bike lanes, making bicycle travel quite hazardous as well. As the writer of this article can attest, drivers will honk at and potentially hit bicyclists who choose to ride in the street, and riding on the sidewalk can warrant a twenty five dollar ticket. Another consequence of Morgan Street being one-way is the underutilization of land along the street’s left hand side. Massive parking lots, notably 204 West Morgan Street Parking and Parking Lot #14, take up an unacceptable amount of space within a downtown’s urban core.
Morgan Street is just one of several one-way streets in downtown Durham. These roads tear through the core, limiting flow, stifling high density growth, and isolating the urban core from the greater Durham community. These roads must be converted into two-way streets. City planners are fairly resolute in their agreement that a conversion would fall in line with a complete streets agenda. Back in 2010, the city commissioned a feasibility study from Kimley-Horn & Associates. A more ambitious version of the plan called for street reconfigurations involving eleven roads and fourteen intersections. Kimley-Horn & Associates further recommended the depaving of three roads and the paving of an additional lane along Holloway Street near its intersection with Roxboro Street (Beckmann 2010).
The conversion project has not gone anywhere because the estimated price tag is between twelve and twenty four million dollars. From an environmental economics perspective, the plan is cost effective. De-paved roads would prompt a decrease in impervious surfaces, causing less run-off and potential pollution. The triangular grass area left by the transitioning of Liberty Street and Holloway Street into Morgan Street (A) could then be turned into a park, a direly needed resource in the downtown core. Additional trees at such a park would save money in the long term by sequestering carbon dioxide. Two-way, complete streets allowing easier movement through the area via alternative transportation would lower the number of miles driven.
Roads would not have to be as frequently repaved, resulting in lower public works spending (Beatley 13). De-paving Liberty Street between Mangum and Roxboro (B) would connect such a park to downtown and allow for better pedestrian access.
Converting Morgan Street into a two-way will likely increase the flow of traffic. To combat this, the city must consider placing a traffic circle at the intersection of Holloway and Roxboro (C). Not only would this relieve congestion along Roxboro, a major throughway for commuters, but a traffic circle would slow Morgan Street’s traffic to conform with the posted 25 mph speed limit.
A traffic circle at Holloway and Roxboro would also slow Roxboro’s traffic. Roxboro Street acts as a class and racial separator between downtown Durham and east Durham. Durham County Main Library (D) and Urban Ministries of Durham (E), a homeless shelter, exist in their own bubble on the wrong side of Roxboro. Pedestrians, bicyclists and people with mobility devices must cross five lanes of traffic to access the library. Roxboro Street from between Main and Holloway must be narrowed to three lanes. The additional two lanes, one on the right and one on the left, should be converted to separated bike lanes. Every street in the downtown urban core must eventually have bike lanes, but to conserve both money and energy, bike lanes should be added in the order of when streets need restriping. Fortunately, Roxboro Street is quite decrepit. The street is also wide enough to accommodate two separated bike lanes. Other spots, such as Morgan Street near the Carolina Theatre (G), is only wide enough for one separated bike lane divided into two directions of traffic.
Besides expanding bike infrastructure on existing roads, Durham has the opportunity to encourage bicycling through the development of a greenway. The abandoned Norfolk Southern Railway track was purchased by the Conservation Fund of North Carolina in 2017 with the intention of transferring the land to the City of Durham once they acquire the funding. The 1.7 mile rail line, which would effectively connect the American Tobacco Trail from the south and the Ellerbee Creek Trail from the north, is situated on eighteen acres of mostly private land. The potential trail includes seven opportunities for public space and four redevelopment spots. There are also plans to convert an adjacent abandoned lot into a stormwater retention pond. Despite these expected positive impacts, some residents of the working-class neighborhood which the trail would run through worry about environmental gentrification.
There is a strong correlation between higher real estate values and proximity to public spaces. In the City of Durham’s master plan for the trail, the median household income for the surrounding area is $38,500, about $1200 below the city’s median (McKeel 38). Additionally, the surrounding area is 42% minority populated, slightly below the city average (McKeel 38). The report does not go into detail about what must be done, specifically, to address the possible environmental gentrification, but it suggests alternative transit options and affordable housing must be offered.
Further south, Hayti activists and community organizers have received a grant to build a safe, walkable path along Fayetteville Street, which runs parallel to Roxboro, connecting the Hayti district to the Black Wall Street Gardens on Parrish Street. The official path is in the works, but it will likely run from Fayetteville Street north to Pettigrew Street, and then west to Magnum. The details of what the connector path will look like are hazy, but wider and repaved sidewalks, narrower streets, and flashing crosswalks will most likely be involved.
Community organizers also hope to incorporate art along the path that relates to Hayti’s storied history (Williams 2019). Hayti activists are interested in prioritizing pedestrians because there is not a cost burden associated unlike bicycling, which has both an upfront cost and maintenance costs. The difference in strategy between Hayti’s and Duke’s corridors to downtown exemplifies the unsaid class privilege of bicycling. Complete streets doctrine acknowledges this privilege, counteracting it by expressly prioritizing public transit and pedestrians before bicycling.
The City of Durham has not accomplished any of Condon’s seven rules for sustainable, low carbon communities (2012). Many sustainability projects are in that existential black hole referred to as “in the works”. Three of the seven rules are in the works, namely designing an interconnected street system, creating linked areas of natural areas and parks, and investing in lighter, greener, cheaper, and smarter infrastructure. Several of Condon’s rules have been completely overlooked by city planners. Most schools are dispersed among the suburbs, with only one urban public school. Employers such as Duke Hospital and offices in the Research Triangle Park are located far from the urban core. Durham has never been, and will likely never be, a streetcar city. The majority of the city is not organized under a grid system, and where a grid is present, one way streets and an excess of lanes restrict pedestrian and bicycling flow. Weir and Zomer argue for linking land use integration with public transit funding (2016). Durham must improve in both arenas. Zoning reforms at the county and city level are non-existent. Suburban expansion continues at a rapid pace. From 2010 to 2016, only 4.78% of new housing units were located downtown, while 67.94% of growth was suburban. While the provided data is a few years out of date, and the city has recently completed several mixed-use high rises downtown during that time, the data up to the present year would not radically adjust these percentages.
GoDurham’s bus system is diminutive. Only three routes have services which run the most frequently, every fifteen minutes. Only eleven routes run daily.
The city has a host of projects which must be pushed forward into actuality. Downtown Durham’s two-way loop conversion project would radically increase the urban core’s connectivity to isolated
minority communities in The Village and Hayti, encouraging bicycling and walking by lowering the speed of automobile traffic.
Durham should officially adopt a complete streets agenda. Roxboro Street, running along downtown’s outer edge, should be narrowed and the excess lanes should be turned into separated bike lanes. Assuming a complete streets agenda is adopted, Durham should prioritize street reconfiguration projects in Hayti and The Village as a form of reparations. The future greenway along the abandoned Norfolk Southern Railway tracks should not proceed until the city provides concrete affordable housing plans. GoDurham’s budget should be greatly expanded, and routes should be added which better connect Durham’s four distinct urban nodes: Duke and Ninth street, downtown, Hayti, and The Village. The frequency of routes and number of personnel should also be increased. In concert with a better-funded and utilized bus system, the city should incentivize high density development within the downtown urban core, a percentage of units being reserved for affordable housing. The city should also incentivize businesses to headquarter closer to downtown, and when appropriate, move schools closer to the city’s core.
Works Cited
Beatley, Timothy, Beatley Timothy, and Kristy Manning. The ecology of place: Planning for environment, economy, and community. Island Press, 1997.
Beckmann, Ellen. “Downtown Loop 2-Way Conversion Feasibility Study : Durham, NC.” Durhamnc.gov, The City of Durham, 2010.
“Demographics: Durham, NC.” Demographics | Durham, NC, City of Durham, 2011,
Condon, Patrick M. Seven rules for sustainable communities: design strategies for the post carbon world. Island Press, 2012.
Davidson, Osha Gray. The best of enemies: Race and redemption in the New South. UNC Press Books, 1996.
Eanes, Zachery. “What It Will Take to Turn the Duke Belt Line into a Downtown Durham Greenway.” Heraldsun, Durham Herald Sun, 28 July 2017.
Ehrsam, Frederick. "The downfall of Durham's historic Hayti: Propagated or preempted by urban renewal." Durham, North Carolina, US: Dissertations and Theses (2010).
McKeel, Dale. “Durham Belt Line Trail Master Plan (2018): Durham, NC.” Durhamnc.gov, The City of Durham, Durham City Council, 6 Aug. 2018.
Wier, Emily, and Alisa Zomer. “Land Use Planning: The Critical Part of Climate Action Plans That Most Cities Miss.” The Nature of Cities, The Nature of Cities Summit, 13 Mar. 2016
Williams, Erin. “A Half-Century Ago, Durham Separated Hayti from Downtown. Now, the Neighborhood's Leaders Want to Reconnect It to the City's Core.” INDY Week, 17 Apr. 2019.
(Images Courtesy of Google Maps and durhamnc.gov)
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