INC NEWS - East Durham uplift effort under way (Durham News)

[John Schelp]

Great article...

Better homes and advocates
East Durham uplift effort under way 
Jim Wise, Durham News (N&O), 19 Jan 2008

East Durham has a history of decline and a reputation
for crime. It also has historic housing stock, streets
lined with mature trees, a population of Ph.Ds,
ex-cons, and old-timers to just-comes -- and
neighborhoods where the neighbors are downright
neighborly.

"We want people to know there is pride in our
neighborhood," said Aidil Collins of Vale Street.

To demonstrate that point, Collins and some of her
neighbors are holding a tour of homes next weekend.

"We're all," she said, "not a bunch of crazy
hooligans."

Collins is chairwoman of Uplift East Durham, a
residents' organization in the Driver Street-Angier
Avenue area.

That area is at the southern end of the East Durham
National Register Historic District. It is also the
area where, last fall, the Durham Police Department
installed its first wireless surveillance cameras to
discourage criminal activity.

It is also the area where entrepreneur Joseph Bushfan
wants to revive a derelict business district and a
place that 45-year resident India Tuck says is a whole
lot better than it used to be.

"I used to be afraid all the time, there was so much
bad stuff going on," Tuck said. "It's so nice to live
here now."

On Jan. 27, Uplift East Durham and Preservation Durham
are sponsoring a three-hour open house and tour, an
event for real-estate sellers and prospective home
buyers.

"You sell what you know," Collins said. "It's a
terrific area."

Cotton-mill history

The East Durham historic district, which went onto the
National Register of Historic Places in 2004, is
bounded by Holloway Street on the north, the railroad
on the south, Hyde Park Avenue on the west and Guthrie
Avenue on the east. Most of the district is
immediately east of North East-Central Durham, a
long-troubled area that the city singled out in 1993
for rehabilitation efforts that have been slow to show
results.

Both areas share a cotton-mill history. They developed
after Bull Durham tobacco magnate Julian Shakespeare
Carr and partners from Greensboro and Concord built
the Durham Cotton Manufacturing factory -- on the
farmland that is now the 2000 block of East Pettigrew
Street -- in 1884.

More textile plants followed, forming an economic base
for a community that became known as "East Durham."
(It remained outside the Durham city limits until
1925). However, the entire U.S. textile industry went
into a decline after World War I, which was only
aggravated by the Depression. With it, East Durham
entered a long, slow decline of its own. By the late
1930s, it was already known for pockets of poverty,
squalor and crime.

In 2008, "It's trying to come back," said City Council
member Eugene Brown, himself a real-estate broker.
"It's exceedingly difficult to do it anyway ... [and]
there is that reputation."

'Teriffic area'

"There are enough people out there talking about the
problems," Collins said. "Not enough talking about the
benefits."

East Durham's National Register district consists of
50 blocks with 950 structures on 226 acres. Its
housing stock is characterized by Victorian,
Craftsman, Queen Anne and other styles popular around
the turn of the 20th century. The commercial buildings
around the Driver-Angier intersection are from the
same era.

"We've put together an opportunity for Realtors to
see," said Collins, who works for the nonprofit
Question Why and is working on a graduate degree in
counseling at N.C. Central University. "[To give]
potential buyers ... the dream of what it's like to
have that bungalow or Victorian home in a historic
district.

"It's a terrific area."

Marketing is also intended to "throw a wrench" into
East Durham's image of mean streets, drug dealing and
danger.

Bushfan, who also works in personal security and
protective services, grew up in the Roxbury section of
Boston.

"What they call 'rough' here is not really rough" by
comparison, he said. "I've been in there with the guns
and drugs." People do loiter on East Durham's street
corners, he said, and some of them have criminal
records. But he added, "They're not monsters, they
just need some help."

Historic East Durham does, of course, have some
troubles. There were 508 crimes -- assaults,
robberies, break-ins -- within a half-mile radius of
the historic district's center in 2007, according to
the Police Department's Crime Mapper; and 457 in 2006.

"That neighborhood is really struggling," said Dan
Hill III, a former City Council member and a member of
the Durham Roundtable, a citywide civic group that has
made crime reduction a primary program. He said he is
impressed with Uplift East Durham.

"This group of people is willing to come out and say,
'No more, we're taking our community back.' That's a
first step, and it's a huge step. ... They have
grabbed the bull.

"They are trying so hard," Hill said. "When you see
people that are trying hard to bring a community back,
it is worthy of some assistance."

"We're not trying," Bushfan said. "We're doing."

Uplift East Durham grew out of some meetings between
Preservation Durham and East Durham homeowners soon
after the historic district went onto the National
Register, said David Arthur. He and his wife, Rebecca
Byrd, bought a 2,800-square-foot house, built about
1910, on Vale Street in 2005.

The group undertook neighborhood cleanups, spread
information within the neighborhood, made its issues
known at City Hall and worked at making the
neighborhood attractive to potential home-buyers,
renovators and investors.

"There are a lot of things we liked," Arthur said. "We
liked the house itself. ... We really liked the
neighborhood, the feel, the mature trees. ... We liked
the fact that, when we visited the house the first
couple of times, that neighbors on the street and up
the block came up to us and talked about the
neighborhood. ...

"It felt like a neighborhood that is welcoming to
anyone who comes here and wants to make a home."

Collins lives, with her husband and daughter, across
the street from Arthur. They are two blocks from the
notorious Driver-Angier intersection -- and walk
around the neighborhood at night with no problems. She
said she had lived in North Raleigh, Chapel Hill and
the Southpoint area before buying into East Durham
five years ago.

"This is my favorite," she said.