As long as money wins, black people will lose.
Margaret Kimberley
Chapel Hill is changing face fast. In the last five years, the downtown skyline has transformed dramatically. Medium-rise luxury apartment buildings and hotels, shopping areas and high-end restaurants have replaced smaller, scruffier buildings and storefronts.
And the town has garnered accolades like “most livable small cities in America.” Even the New York Times can tell you how best to spend “36 hours in Chapel Hill,” and, in October the travel section of the London daily, The Guardian, featured Chapel Hill as one of the top ten best small towns and cities in the US. The question of course is, “Best for whom?”
The savvy, sophisticated European traveller has money to spend and wants fancy digs, good food, microbrews, pumpkin spice non-fat lattes, and night life options– more like an upper class “theme park” (Kimberley) than a place where regular people are just going about their daily lives.
These trendy new businesses and dwellings are part of a larger trend some call the New Urbanism. Developers are marketing to young professionals who are no longer looking so much for a house in the suburbs but rather a loft or boutique apartment in upgraded downtown areas with specialty shops and a hip night life. Andrew Busch, writing about the last decade or so in Austin, Texas, comments on the “new interest in urban space, lifestyles, and consumption preferences,” and the developers and city managers eager to make profits from rents and property taxes.
While upscale development has been occurring on Franklin Street, which was always the student (white) part of town, developers recently have set their sights on Rosemary Street, a parallel street just one block north of Franklin. Under segregation, Rosemary Street was where Blacks owned businesses; it was the southern border of the Northside neighborhood, but customers also came from nearby Pine Knolls and Rogers Road. This area is now considered prime real estate for developers due to its direct proximity to the main business district.
Franklin and Rosemary Streets, downtown Chapel Hill
The urbanization of Franklin Street includes plans for “livable” condos with green patches; a new performing arts center; and new residential/commercial complex.
I’ve been telling the stories of the residents and former residents of Chapel Hill’s low-wealth African-American communities who have witnessed and fought this trend. During segregation, minorities were told where they could establish neighborhoods. Through racial redlining, town leaders placed African-Americans in places that benefitted whites and the university, which benefitted from the close proximity of its labor force, at very little cost to taxpayers. Social services, including paved roads, sewer systems, and ambulance service, were virtually non-existent in these areas.
And now that capital interests have shifted, many of the old residents and their kids and grandkids are driven out by market forces that are distinctly racist. Too much black is bad for business. The existence of black people and a low-income, mom and pop infrastructure is now considered blight that is “bringing down the neighborhood” where whites want to live and play.
Busch nails it when he writes:
The most deleterious outcome of gentrification is its effect on existing social cohesion, which is much more important for vulnerable and historically segregated neighborhoods of color where residents have fewer relocation options and are more dependent on the neighborhood for social structure than are residents of middle class neighborhoods. (Busch, Crossing Over)
He is spot-on when he observes that African-Americans who were cordoned off from the white community by written and unwritten codes had to rely on each other and organize themselves to provide each other basic services. Thus, they “tend to understand community in terms of place, especially in historically segregated locations.” When residents speak of growing up in the Northside neighborhood, they almost always say it felt like the only place they could really be safe and free. Jobs and schools were usually located outside. Otherwise, the neighborhood was a world unto itself.
Under segregation, an entire infrastructure was built in black-only neighborhoods: schools, businesses, recreation facilities. Often, these areas had no city services and had to provide for these services by organizing themselves. This meant that families had to develop tight social and economic networks and communities developed around a sense of place.
Some properties on Rosemary Street that have avoided gentrification include the old parsonage (now the Jackson Center for Saving and Making History), St. Joseph’s CME and Mama Dip’s restaurant. Mama Dip, her sister and children still live in the neighborhood.
As urban living became more trendy, developers quickly figured out that neighborhoods close to downtown would become desirable. In neighborhoods like Northside, they saw a “rent gap.” This housing was cheap and with some improvements and upgrades, could be rented at much higher rates, no longer affordable to low-income residents.
Rosemary in flux: a house on Rosemary listed by a realty company called, “Property Shark”; the new Mariot AC hotel that markets itself as a “new take on an old tradition” just steps away from the “bustle” of Franklin Street.
I’ve also begun to interview some of the white and better-off residents—not so much the students who are moving into developer-renovated apartments and duplexes, but single-family (and single-owner) homes that used to belong to African-Americans. One of these homeowners, whom I’ll call Leo, confirms Busch’s point. He told me, “I bought the house because it was what I could afford. I didn’t know much about the neighborhood. And I don’t really have any contacts in the neighborhood. My community is exclusively outside of Northside.”
Since I’ve begun talking to him about his life, we’ve come back to this point a few times. He now says that he plans to make more of an effort to develop better relationships with neighbors, though he still finds some of the interactions awkward. He says some of the differences in speech and habits are difficult to understand. It should be said that he is an octogenarian who retired here after living most of his life in the Northeast and that there are definite cultural differences.
Many Northsiders and Pine Knollers are seeing their friends and family members being displaced by others who can afford the rising prices. Chapel Hill has seen a heavy outmigration of African Americans. Members of these communities are much more vulnerable to rent hikes that can be sudden and steep. As businesses that served minority communities are replaced by businesses like boutiques, cafes and restaurants, residents no longer have convenient shopping options for basics. When I first moved to town ten years ago, there was still a Rose’s on Franklin that catered to a low-income clientele. But this has since been replaced by a luxury movie theater. The closest discount store is the Walmart in Durham. Families can no longer afford to live in what are now apartments designed for and marketed to singles or couples.
Grassroots organizations like CHALT (Chapel Hill Alliance for a Livable Town) address environmental issues but rarely mention low-income residents or affordable housing; the incumbent mayor was defeated in 2013 and replaced by a candidate supported by many who want to slow down development, including the building of new housing. On the surface, this sounds like a good thing. But it does not address the dwindling lack of affordable homes and shops for low-income people. Roses might not be pretty or locally-owned, but it was one of the places low income residents could afford. When demand for housing rises and residents want to keep things the way they are, low-income people are driven out.
It’s hard not to feel local pride when your town is consistently identified as one of the most “livable” communities. And yet, I know this ignores the fact that it has become unlivable for the younger generation of Northsiders and other African-American and immigrant communities who called Chapel Hill home. In fact, the sort of development that makes it “livable” for hip young professionals requires that neighborhoods largely be purged of the businesses and housing that low-income residents need.
A few years ago, the mayor of Morgantown, West Virginia, returned to Chapel Hill where he’d been a student and, in an editorial, chastised then-mayor Mark Kleinschmidt for tolerating the “unkempt appearance” of the Franklin Street he used to frequent. He urged the town council to “apply their efforts to revitalize the cultural and commercial area on Franklin Street and beyond.” (“Mayors duke it out over downtowns, Morgantown News Herald, July 15, 2010) Neither he nor Kleinschmidt defended his efforts to improve downtown, mentioned the Northside neighbors or the idea of bringing in business and housing to support them. Implicit in his remarks is that the neighborhood and its infrastructure need to go, or at least be upgraded. Main Streets full of boutiques and expensive restaurants are more like theme parks for the well-to-do than livable spaces for everyone.
In a capitalist society, does it make sense to expect anything else? There is a growing movement of diverse people—activists, church leaders, community organizations, low-income people, concerned students—who are pushing back.
Making history in 1961 and in 2017.
A big part of claiming the places that are traditionally African-American is to constantly remind the town of its racist past. That’s what the Jackson Center is trying to do. And the history reflects the injustices of segregation, Jim Crow and racial violence as well as cultural resilience. So often when African-American neighborhoods are gentrified, a certain version of the historical heritage is celebrated. Although he was talking about Austin, Texas, Andrew Busch warns against “the problems of memorializing social domination.” He goes on: “As older residents and businesses leave, the segregationist past seems less relevant while the happy representations of … interracial community remain.”
It’s up to all of those who want racial and socio-economic diversity to talk about the history of segregation. If we’re not talking about race, we’re letting money run African-Americans, Latinos, Burmese, and other immigrant groups out of town. The past speaks and can guide all of us who want the moral universe to bend toward justice now.
Chapel Hill Stories 