The Historic
Dimension Series
A student publication series by the UNCG Department of Interior Architecture
Innovative Strategies:
Preventing Neighborhood Displacement
by Monica T. Davis Fall 2018
The goals and duties of
preservationists have
changed over the past
fifty years. Preservation can save important
places, enhance neighborhoods, and turn
historic resources into community anchors
that accommodate the ever-changing needs
of society. But, preservation should not be
something that just happens to communi-ties.
In The Past and Future City, Stephanie
Meeks suggests that affordability, displace-ment,
the rising cost of living, and loss of
neighborhood identity are all issues that
preservation and revitalization efforts must
contend with.
The prevention of gentrification has become
a paramount issue throughout African
American historic districts in North Caro-lina.
To some scholars and activists, gentrifi-cation
is a contemporary form of urban class
and racial warfare, a process that echoes in
history. This brief will examine innovative
strategies that strive to improve African
American neighborhoods without gentrifi-cation.
The strategies will be to the benefit
of the current residents and strive to prevent
large-scale displacement.
Gentrification: Urban Frontier Model
The urban frontier model of gentrification
portrays gentrifiers as urban homesteaders
or pioneers and labels the urban space that
they invade as savage, unexplored territory
inhabited by unknowns. It also constructs
gentrification as a process of “taming” and
civilizing wild urban areas and of “sanitiz-ing
public space” through the removal or
regulation of its original residents (Perez
2002). This framework labels those long-time
residents, who are often poor blacks
and Latinos, as socially disorganized,
unmanageable populations likely to benefit
from the presence of middle-class, white
urban pioneers.
Some argue that gentrification is beneficial
since the gentrification process creates more
development, rapid economic investment,
and supports projects related to consump-tion
and entertainment. The incoming
population of more affluent residents and
people of privilege is directly connected to
an increase in resource allocation to schools,
stores, and other development. While these
effects can be beneficial, the gentrification
process becomes detrimental when it forces
original residents to leave their neighbor-hoods.
If there is no widespread displace-ment,
and the shifts in the neighborhood
are carefully planned through community
input and involvement, gentrification can be
a good thing for the community, increasing
“socioeconomic, racial, and ethnic integra-tion”
(Schlichtman, 2017, p. 2). However,
this is rarely ever the case.
Gentrification: Racial Uplift Model
In the last 20 years, African Americans have
changed both their role in and orientation
toward gentrification. The strategy of at-tracting
middle-class residents to poor, black
communities is now gaining popularity,
provided the new residents are themselves
African American. This phenomenon is a
term coined “racial uplift.” Racial uplift is
the idea that educated blacks are responsible
for the welfare of the majority of the race.
“What peo-ple
don’t
seem to real-ize
is it isn’t
the mere act
of moving
into a neigh-borhood
that
makes you
a gentrifier;
it’s what you
do once you
get there.”
(Schlicht-man,
2017,
p. 3)
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Fig. 3: Graffiti written on a house in despair in the
Bronzeville Chicago neighborhood.
Racial uplift ideology has been defined in many ways
throughout history. Racial uplift ideology still retains
its potency in the contemporary period, where it is
expressed in arguments that role modeling by the black
middle class is the answer to problems of urban decline
and economic disinvestment. The crucial assumption
of 20th-century uplift ideology is that the successes of
individual, affluent blacks have a spillover effect, one
that either improves the material condition of all blacks
or “reflects credit on the race” (Drake and Cayton, 1993,
p. 172). As a result, modern uplift emphasizes that black
middle-class responsibilities are to use its resources to
advance the material status and mental mindset of all
African Americans.
Racial Uplift Case Study: Bronzeville, Chicago
A 2-year ethnographic study examined the Douglas/
Grand Boulevard neighborhood on Chicago’s south side,
at the far northern end of the city’s “black belt,” where
African Americans were segregated throughout the 20th
century. The neighborhood redevelopment plan sought
to revitalize the Douglas/Grand Boulevard area into the
single community of Bronzeville. The study examined
how black advocates of gentrification understood the
process and its implications for their neighborhoods. In-dividuals
in the neighborhood who supported attracting
middle-class blacks to the community saw their financial
and personal investments as a form of racial uplift. They
often saw middle-income residents’ personal and finan-cial
investment in the community as a communal act,
providing the benefit of raising the status of all blacks.
Grady Karl, a redeveloper in Chicago’s south side, em-phasizes
that black gentrification should take the form of
residential investment, asserting that the black middle-class
elite should purchase homes that will stabilize the
neighborhood (Boyd, 2005). The racial uplift framework
justifies gentrification, but it utilizes a different logic.
It does not distinguish between the gentrifier and the
displaced and attempt to understand their inequality;
rather, it omits the differences between the two and por-trays
their interests as compatible. Which framework has
the most negative impact on low-income residents: the
urban frontier framework or the racial uplift framework?
Both work to the disadvantage of poor and working-class
blacks, but the racial uplift framework creates the
illusion that gentrification strategies are implemented
both in the interests of and with the approval of the poor
black residents it displaces.
Strategies that Prevent Gentrification
Habitat for Humanity and community land trusts are
helping neighborhoods retain their existing socioeco-nomic
demographic, preserve their character, and resist
mass displacement. These innovative models seem to
have great potential going forward. Pioneering tools
and techniques in the field of preservation are essential
in helping neighborhoods move forward in a positive
direction; Habitat for Humanity and Community land
trusts are providing these possibilities in minority envi-ronments
throughout North Carolina. Stephanie Meeks
states:
Fig. 2: Black belt slum building 1950s, Bronzeville, Chicago
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Fig. 4: DCLT impact data, statistics that illustrates the
significance of the land trust.
Fig. 5: Habitat for Humanity, Cherry Street Revitalization
Project. Volunteers and homeowners working together.
“As preservation is helping to revitalize cities, we
also need to be concerned about how that revitaliza-tion
is affecting families. We can also use the tradi-tional
tools of rent control, homeownership assis-tance,
rehabilitation grant programs, zoning, historic
districting, and others to help stabilize communities
without contributing to unwanted displacement”
(Meeks, 2016, p. 223).
As historic buildings are creatively repurposed in ways
that will attract new residents, it is essential to also make
sure that current residents will remain involved in the
community’s future.
Habitat for Humanity as a Preservation Partner
Habitat for Humanity International has made strides
toward its goal to provide a simple, decent place to live
for families who otherwise could not afford to buy their
own homes. Habitat has built more than 75,000 homes
around the world, housing some 350,000 people in more
than 2,000 communities. The vast majority of these
homes are new construction, but, in 1998, 12 percent of
Habitat projects were renovations or rehabilitation of
existing buildings. Opportunities for this are increasing,
especially for Habitat affiliates working in urban areas.
Historically, there has been little formal interaction be-tween
Habitat and the preservation community, except
when members of the two movements have been at
odds. Each side has come to believe certain stereotypes
about the other: that Habitat will always prefer to tear
down an existing building in order to erect a new dwell-ing
as quickly as possible and that preservationists will
always want to save and restore every old building and
all its historic features regardless of the difficulty or cost.
But there is a new model, and it is changing these per-ceptions.
Some Habitat groups are choosing to reha-bilitate
older properties for affordable housing, making
an effort to maintain at least some of these buildings’
significant historic features. These groups have discov-ered
that reusing older buildings offers another way
to provide attractive, functional homes for low-income
families. An increasing number of Habitat affiliates are
choosing to rehabilitate existing buildings, especially
in urban areas where undeveloped land is scarce or
expensive. They have discovered numerous benefits to
this model:
•Older buildings may be constructed of superior
materials, such as brick facades, plaster walls, solid
wood doors, etc. Reusing existing fabric, rather than
obtaining and assembling new items, can both save
money and give homeowners a more durable and
beautiful finished product.
•Rehabbing existing homes in established neigh-borhoods
puts homeowners closer to jobs, public
transportation, and community services.
•Homeowners and volunteers can expand their con-struction
skills and learn specialized building crafts,
many of which have been lost in new construction
homes.
•By returning familiar and older buildings of a
neighborhood to productive use, under the care of
responsible owners, Habitat can help promote pride
and renewal throughout whole communities.
Preservationists can help Habitat affiliates by providing
expert consultation on aspects of design and construc-tion,
offering unparalleled resources for Habitat for Hu-manity.
With preservationists’ expertise and guidance,
affordable historic homes can become newly accessible
in once-forgotten neighborhoods.
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Habitat and Preservation in New Bern, N.C.
New Bern, NC, a city comprised of about 21,000 resi-dents,
features a rich variety of Georgian, Federal, and
Victorian buildings, some dating back to its beginnings
as the state’s colonial capital. New Bern is also a thriving
retirement area in desperate need of more housing for
current and incoming residents. The city has both an ac-tive
preservation organization and a Habitat affiliate. In
1991, with help from the city planning department, rep-resentatives
from both organizations and from the city
formed a city-sponsored Affordable Housing Task Force
to get the parties working together. Barbara Howlett,
executive director of the New Bern Preservation Foun-dation,
recalls: “We wanted to do a pilot project to show
that rehab was indeed a method of providing affordable
housing. We felt if we showed it could be done, that
would eliminate some of the bulldozing of older houses
and putting trailers in their place.”
The group chose to rehabilitate the c.1890 Charles Harris
House and a 1940s cinderblock house next door, both
in the traditionally African American neighborhood of
Long Wharf. The Affordable Housing Task Force, the
New Bern Preservation Foundation, and Habitat for
Humanity of Greater New Bern all worked as part-ners
to execute this project. Board members and other
volunteers from the Preservation Foundation were able
to produce architectural plans and provided the tools
and skills needed for replacing decorative woodwork.
Habitat provided licensed electricians and plumbers
who were willing to work at cost.
As the sponsoring groups hoped, there is now a prec-edent
for rehabbing older homes for affordable hous-ing
in New Bern. Fred Kruck, a Habitat volunteer who
worked as the construction supervisor in the final phase
of the Charles Harris rehab, reports that Habitat’s rehabs
in Long Wharf “brought the whole neighborhood up.”
Several residents in the neighborhood have since made
improvements to their homes or built compatible new
houses on vacant land.
Without this new model of Habitat and preservation, a
commercial builder can simply bring in a bulldozer, tear
down an older building in one day, and start over. This
bulldozer method is often deemed prefereable because
there is so much labor involved in rehabbing. But with
Habitat, the labor is free. In the historically African
American neighborhood of Long Wharf in New Bern,
Habitat took a house that was so dilapidated, it was only
worth about $4,000 in tax dollars, and rehabbed it into a
home worth $40,000 to $60,000. This model revived the
community and helped owners get a product for less
money.
Habitat for Humanity: Cherry St. Revitalization
Built on the rapid growth of business in the early 20th
century, Winston-Salem’s Cherry Street was a thriv-ing
African American neighborhood from the 1930s to
1950s. Cherry Street was listed in the National Register
of Historic Places in 2004. The district is composed of a
diverse collection of housing types and styles, includ-ing
the Y-stair apartment building. In 2003, the city’s
redevelopment plan, which targeted Cherry Street and
the surroundig area, hoped to combat severe problems
of vacancy, absentee ownership, physical disrepair, and
an open-air drug market. Thirty-nine new construction
homes were built in the surrounding area by Habitat
Forsyth, but the challenge was to address the “island of
disrepair” between downtown and Wake Forest Univer-sity.
Fig. 7: Transformation of housing units after Habitat for
Humanity intervened.
Fig. 6: Cherry Street housing before Habitat Humanity
restored housing units.
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Habitat for Humanity and the historic planner for the
City of Winston Salem collaborated to generate a change
on the street. After a site visit and initial conversations,
they began to formulate a strategy for intervention fo-cused
on maintaining affordability, reviving the original
streetscape, retaining historic fabric through rehabilita-tion,
and constructing architecturally compatible infill
structures. A conscious decision was made to step back,
assess the neighborhood’s historic and community con-texts,
and build a partnership capable of satisfying some
of the bigger needs. The North Cherry Street Master
Plan (2009), was an unofficial but sympathetic update to
the city’s 2003 redevelopment plan. Habitat built homes
for the neighborhood and found people who wanted to
live in them. Cherry Street was neither a preservation
nor affordable housing project alone; it was a commu-nity
development project that employed preservation as
a strategy to highlight and conserve the meaning of the
district.
Habitat’s model of using volunteer labor on typically
single-family homes helps to break down the finan-cial
barriers that might otherwise impede small-scale
neighborhood intervention, which generates the kinds of
consistent change that can become cumulatively trans-formational.
Putting “affordable preservation” realisti-cally
into play at the neighborhood scale should be the
central goal of the preservationists’ work. As Donavan
Rypkema pointed out, “We have to find ways to reinvest
to so that existing neighborhoods are stabilized” (Wat-kins,
2011, p. 26).
Community Land Trust (CLT)
Community land trusts are nonprofit, community-based
organizations designed to ensure community steward-ship
of the land. Community land trusts can be used for
many types of development (including commercial and
retail), but are primarily used to ensure long-term hous-ing
affordability. To do so, the trust acquires land and
maintains ownership of it permanently. With prospec-tive
homeowners, it enters into a long-term, renewable
lease instead of a traditional sale. When the homeowner
sells, the family earns only a portion of the increased
property value. The remainder is kept by the trust,
preserving the affordability for future low- to moderate-income
families.
The length of the lease (most frequently, 99 years) and
the percentage earned by the homeowner vary. Ulti-mately,
by separating the ownership of land and hous-ing,
this innovative approach prevents market factors
from causing prices to rise significantly and hence guar-antees
that housing will remain affordable for future
generations. As of 2012, there were 258 community land
trusts across the United States.
Community land trusts play a critical role in building
community wealth for several key reasons:
•They provide low- and moderate-income people
with the opportunity to build equity through
homeownership and ensure these residents are not
displaced due to land speculation and gentrification.
•Most commonly, at least one-third of a land trust’s
board is composed of community residents, allow-ing
for the possibility of direct, grassroots participa-tion
in decision-making and community control of
local assets.
•In addition to the development of affordable hous-ing,
many land trusts are involved in a range of
community-focused initiatives including homeown-
Fig. 9: Before image, DCLT renovated the 3-story house
and the foundation provides ongoing services to the
residents.
Fig. 8: DCLT, a neighborhood march to “take back the
streets” in 1987.
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ership education programs, commercial develop-ment
projects, and community greening efforts.
Durham Community Land Trust
Durham Community Land Trust (DCLT) was estab-lished
in 1987 by a group of neighborhood residents in
response to rising housing prices, absentee landlords,
and housing disrepair in their community. The purpose
of the DCLT was to preserve homes that low-income
owners and renters could continue to afford as neigh-borhood
property values increased. DCLT also wanted
to restore the community to the vibrancy of years past.
In the early days, DCLT was invited to renovate housing
on the 700 South block of Buchanan Blvd. with a neigh-borhood
march to “take back the street,” illustrated in
Figure 8. The initial house was donated to DCLT. The
other four houses were subsequently purchased and ren-ovated
by the organization at different times in an effort
to target their impact on the street. Most houses were
complexes that were converted to single-family housing
units and sold to first-time homebuyers using the land
trust model.
The future goals of the land trust are very specific: focus
on the preservation of affordable housing, make capital
and energy efficient improvements to sustain a new
generation of useful life in DCLT apartments (many
of which were last renovated over twenty years ago),
expand rental housing development and acquire and
preserve multi-family properties (specifically targeting
those with expiring income and rent restrictions), and
advocate for permanently affordable housing. Figure 4
illustrates the impact the DCLT is having on residents
and communities.
Now, thirty years later, DCLT manages 280 permanently
affordable homes in seven neighborhoods: West End,
Lyon Park, Burch Avenue, Morehead Hill, Lakewood
Park, East Durham, and Southside. The West End neigh-borhood
is not only instrumental in stabilizing the West
End by revitalizing homes and creating homeownership,
DCLT also invests heavily in supporting neighborhood
associations, empowering residents, and developing
leaders. For example, Bridges Pointe Apartments is a
4-unit supportive housing project in partnership with
the Bridge Pointe Foundation, a non-profit organiza-tion
affiliated with the Duke University Adult Sickle
Cell Clinic. The apartments specifically house men with
sickle cell disease on the premise of the residents provid-ing
support to each other. DCLT renovated the 3-story
house and the Foundation provides ongoing services to
the residents. (Figures 9 and 10 illustrate Bridge Pointe
Apartment before and after the rehabilitation project.)
Conclusion
Gentrification of a community can alter and destroy
the cultural significance of a neighborhood. Stephanie
Meeks asserts that we need to make sure existing com-munities
of color continue to play a vital role in our
cities’ futures and that they are not being pushed out
by the current boom in urban development. Commu-nity
land trusts and Habitat for Humanity preservation
models are innovative strategies that can prevent large
scale displacement and retain the integrity of a historic
community.
Fig. 11: Neighborhood in despair that can benefit from
innovative strategies.
Fig. 10: After image, DCLT renovated the 3-story house
and the foundation provides ongoing services to the
residents.
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Biblography
Boyd, M. (2005). The downside of racial uplift: Meaning of gentrification in an African American neighborhood. City & Society, 17(2), 265–288.
Gray, K. A., & Miller-Cribbs, J. E. (2012). The Durham community land trustees. Journal of community practice, 20(4), 402–413.
Meeks, S., & Murphy, K. C. (2016). The past and future city. Washington, DC: Island Press.
Schlichtman, J. J., Patch, J., & Hill, M. L. (2017). Gentrifier. University of Toronto Press.
Watkins, P. (2011). Habitat for humanity’s neighborhood revitalization initiative: What it means for preservation. Forum journal, 25(2), 16–25.
Image Credits
Figures 2 & 3: Courtesy of Bronzeville, Chicago Preservation Office
Figures 4, 8, 9, 10, & 11: Courtesy of Durham Community Land Trust
Figures 5, 6, & 7: Courtesy of Habitat for Humanity
Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Claudia Brown of the State Historic Preservation Office for her contribution to this article.
The Historic Dimension Series is a collection of briefs prepared by UNCG students under the direction of Professor Jo Ramsay Leimenstoll. For information on other topics in the series please visit the website at go.uncg.edu/hds
