Did you happen to see this article about City Space Investment Group’s plans to add 42 houses in the area where South Saunders Street meets Lenoir St? The block pictured here always looked more Southern to me than any other block of Raleigh.
This project has been discussed here and here and it surprises me how many people think this project is a great idea. Bobby Lewis’ Metropolitan condo project failed to launch because the public seemed smart enough to realize they’d have city views on one side and housing project views on the other. It’s clear from the discussions of this development that the barriers to entry are too high, even for many in the middle class.
“In the middle of the neighborhood, the houses presented a surreal facade of cheer. They might have been intended to inspire, but the impossibility of acquiring something so close somehow had the opposite effect. The proximity made the failure pointed and personal.” from Random Family, by Adrian Nicole Leblanc
This isn’t the process of artists and hipsters moving into the neighborhood and making it “safe enough” for gentrification. Comparisons to Halifax Court are silly because in that instance, they demolished and redeveloped the housing project and then the private development followed. This South Saunders Street project is just bulldozing, displacement and then occupation but who knows, maybe they’ll be greeted as liberators.
“”When you’re done trolling for girls at the bars but don’t want to move to the suburbs, this is the place,” said Richard Johnson, a City Space partner.” From the N&O
What a charmer that man is! But still, he’s doing a great thing, right? These houses have been owned for years by terrible slumlords, who allowed them to fall into disrepair and rented to questionable characters and he’s saving Boylan Heights from those absentee landlords who have profited from these properties while allowing the houses and the neighborhood to rot.
Johnson, who developed an eight-unit condo project on Cabarrus Street in 2006, began buying Saunders Street homes more than a year ago after being approached by Boylan Heights residents fed up with police sirens and reports of prostitution, drugs, petty theft and public drunkenness.
What a guy! But wait! In the comments section of the New Raleigh post, the commenter “Deb” did some research on our favorite, guilty pleasure, website and found the truth might be different from the spin.
I reviewed the Wake County tax records for the properties you mentioned, and Johnson & Hamill have owned most of those properties since 1998, and paid less than $25,000 each for them (one they only paid $10k for!). To me, that just stinks to high heaven. They could have very easily renovated these properties and sold them at a price range affordable for middle-income buyers, improved the neighborhood, and still turned a very nice profit. Granted, they wouldn’t be making literally millions of $ in profit, and the Boylan Heights neighborhood values wouldn’t skyrocket, but I think it would have been a better move for the community as a whole.
Right on, Deb! Unfortunately, most of the readers aren’t as healthily skeptical. Reading through the UrbanPlanet and NewRaleigh.com discussions, it becomes apparent that urban development has become a spectator sport and with its own armchair quarterbacks. And maybe even its own armchair versions of Robert Moses.
Are we supposed to play our violins for renters who want all of the perks of progress but won’t take the true risks it takes to achieve progress?
That’s a quote by Dana Mcall in response to a post on Urban Planet lamenting the closing of King’s Nightclub. It’s shocking to me that people think that renters don’t have, or deserve, rights and aren’t really investing in the community. Doesn’t the development of downtown require that tenants rent space in those shiny new buildings? Dana was an early proponent of the redevelopment of the South Saunders area; he made this suggestion on Urban Planet almost 3 years ago:
..the area that really needs to be redeveloped to make the whole downtown vision work, is the area between Dorothea Dix and the Progress Energy Center (Memorial Auditorium). If that area were totally redevloped from the ground up with high and medium density, 3-story row houses, then people could feel safe living on the new Dix property and in Boylan Heights. Once that piece of the puzzle is changed, then you have a west side of downtown in which people feel safe walking. That means an area from the Farmer’s Market all the way to Peace. You get people feeling safe between those two places and downtown will explode. Trust me.
That’s a really large area to bulldoze. Let’s hope there is an armchair Jane Jacobs to protect the interests of the people who actually live in these neighborhoods and to protect the “layered complexity and seeming chaos” that are key to vital cities. It would be wonderful if that section of Raleigh suddenly looked prosperous and healthy. Making the poor people disappear through displacement would certainly be the easiest route for the developers but improving the existing neighborhoods and the lives of those who live there would be a far better solution for the city. Raleigh and Chapel Hill are rapidly losing the rental housing stock that has long housed the most important but underpaid segments of our society: teachers, artists & bartenders; increasingly, Raleigh’s loss is Durham’s gain. Hello Durham! We visit you more and more often.
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Guys, I’m with you on this one. Despite the bad eggs in the South Street neighborhood, the majority of residents are good people, struggling, like us all, to make it through this life. This is where I become a flaming commie pinko as I bear witness to the market-driven, private sector taking huge liberties with people’s lives, with community’s lives. Of course this area of town could use some help and, clearly, the City (i.e. We, the People, as represented by our Council and Planning Commission) would rather not inject the funds to balance the needs to the residents with the safety of all its citizens. But with downtown coming back to life, and the wolves moving in for the econimic kill, we’ve been seemingly left with only one possibility of improvement: cut-throat capitalism that justifies its gains by the product yielded while the process is surpressed from view.
I thought Cabrini Green ( http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/12/11/60II/main532704.shtml) was a good, large scale precedent of how gentrification could be designed to accommodate all interests. But I’m not so sure because a) the South Street conditions are a bit more ambiguous than a public housing project in Chicago and, b) it would take a tremendous amount of density - more than the land values could justify - to keep all residents within the new neighborhood while simultaneously bringing in middle- and high-income residents to offset the costs.
Also, when this neighborhood is all people know, their fear of displacement -the unknowns that lay beyond its boundaries- is enough to keep them right where they are, despite how bad the conditions may be: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/18/us/18cabrini.html?ex=1174881600&en=1ea9d5cb6d705d75&ei=5070&emc=eta1
To describe the place as a bunch of law-abiding, caring renters with landlords who won’t spruce the place up is a grave misrepresentation of what’s going on in the area.
Great post here. I totally agree with you and definitely think Deb’s quote was spot-on. (Good research done there.)
As I posted in one of the linked forums:
“It’s getting more and more frustrating these days looking at proposed downtown revitalizations. The developers in this town can’t seem to do squat unless it means kicking out everyone in the neighborhood that doesn’t make a six-figure salary….” (This is similar to the proposed Hinsdale Project.)
Also, “….Now don’t get me wrong…I don’t like dilapidated areas anymore than anyone else. But, why can’t affordable be replaced with affordable for once? I’m really beginning to miss the days when downtown wasn’t a ‘For Rich People Only Club’.” (I regularly browse real estate & rental listings for areas around downtown and I’ve noticed this becoming more true every year I’ve lived here.)
And I still stand by these words….regardless if certain elitist-types agree or not.
Also,
As an aside, renting is no less a noble habitation than owning your home. The US is one of the rare instances where home-ownership is prized more highly than other forms of dwelling. In many countries, good, middle-class citizens rent for life liberated from the toilsome troubles of maintenance or home-improvement. In large cities such as NYC, renting is prefered due to proximity to services and employment.
Offering a space for rent, along with having an economic incentive, is also great social responsibility. A landlord is providing space for those choose not or cannot afford to bear that burden. Not many landlords see it this way unfortunately.
here’s some additional info/images to add to your thread… links to a pdf of the developers initial proposal as well as his follow-up comments…
http://www.boylanheights.org/articles/Saunders-Presentation.pdf
http://www.boylanheights.org/articles/Notes-from-02-26-meeting-and-first-update.pdf
In re-reading the NewRaleigh.com comments, it appears I owe John Galt credit for the property tax record research, more so than Deb. Thanks John!
Dana, I agree with your statement but I don’t think my post was as simplistic as that statement.
I would argue this landlord has been assembling these properties over a decade and had no incentive to improve the area and create a community of tenants that was responsible to itself and to the city at large.
As a caveat, I will mention that I lived in a Boylan Heights house that was adjacent to an apartment house owned by Coleman Properties and managed by City Space. I called to complain repeatedly and even approached Richard Johnson, in person, to ask them to fix plumbing that dumped out the side of the house into a mosquito-filled puddle. Then I called the city few times. I now call Richard Johnson by the more casual name of “Dick”.
If you look at the photograph of South Saunders Street, you’ll notice the satellite dishes. Most of these houses are now inhabited by Latino families and workers, many of whom work at restaurants and businesses downtown. They are more commonly the victims of crimes in this area, not the perps but these are the people who will be forced out most immediately. The homeless and the criminals from the adjacent streets and housing projects will still be nearby.
does anything prohibit a group of concerned private citizens from banding together and implementing this vision of continued low-income availability?
Hi Bo, nothing prevents such an organization. You have a chance in the next 3 nights to help shape the rewriting of the Raleigh Comprehsensive Plan. Affordable housing is one of the issues to be discussed.
http://www.newsobserver.com/news/wake/raleigh/story/1011122.html
When you live and work outside the beltline, it’s pretty easy, yet irresponsible, to say “3-story row houses, then people could feel safe living on the new Dix property and in Boylan Heights”.
This doesn’t fit the character or history of this neighborhood. But as I said, when you live at least 9 miles away from this site, it is easy to project such irresponsible ideas on an area that has little or any effect on life in mall-laced North Raleigh.
The sad case of this area is that it was a victim of the urban renewal trends so popular in the 50’s and 60’s. There were neighborhood streets from Boylan Heights to Shaw University. However, the houses were already “substandard living” then and the city thought it was doing Raleigh a favor by bulldozing them then, building projects , then enlarging city streets and making many of them one way to facilitate traffic corridors in and out of downtown. This left housing projects surrounded by busy streets around and even overhead, with no pedestrian corridors and remnants of what was left of the old neighborhoods. South Sanders and the line of shops on South St are what’s left. When you strip a community of it’s neighborhood, then many transitional folks move in who are not invested in making that place a safe place for their kids and family, making many community members forced to leave.
So here we are 40 or so years later with the Raleigh Boom town still in swing even in an endangered US economy. Developers are making all of our urban planning decisions for us. Every one heralded Raleigh as being a great place to live, a place for the Richard Floridians or the “Creative Class” and so on. Why don’t we rethink the corridor between Shaw and Dix? Will we loose all bungalows and shotgun houses, warehouses and storefronts? Is not there enough gray space there for these condos and town houses to share in the making? If we do that I think we will loose our “Creative Class” that makes us a “hot spot”. Can we keep any sense of history left by creative re-use? We need to take stock in the buildings we have left and the future use of land such as Dix and the Convention Center.
If there would be a chance to save this windy street that has so much potential what could we do? There are many possibilities. Who in the neighborhood wants to stay? Could we not offer an affordable housing corridor where artists and others could get a home by renovating it, help other neighbors, partner with Habitat for Humanity? Save the flavor of the street by using what we can and building similar structures on what we can’t. What are the plans for the housing project across the street? Could we make that whole area more pedestrian friendly? How could we connect this all with the Greenway? What about the remnants of industrial buildings left in the area? Will they fall the same fait as Developers are the only ones who can afford them?
As an idealist, I say: Is there anyway we can work with developers more in order to bring in a larger picture instead of having them dictate to us our wants and needs. Lets put up this in-fill but lets do it in gray space when possible and preserve some sense of history. There are opportunities in this area waiting to happen. Bobby Lewis seemed to notice, can the city have input on this?