Overview:
Love Your Block program implemented residents’ ideas to transform four sites in the Walltown neighborhood last year. This year, it has funding to take on projects in Lakewood.
On Sedgefield Avenue in Durham’s Walltown neighborhood, a gathering spot is tucked between homes, a brief reprieve from the street’s buildings.
A pair of cornhole boards sit near a life-sized Connect Four board and a chest of other toys. The mulched area has a concrete stage, adorned with stringed lights, and a picnic table that the neighborhood kids have autographed and drawn on in bright-colored paint pens. One edge of the site has a Little Free Library, with a birdfeeder nearby, overlooking Dye Creek.
A path lined with rocks leads to the creek, where neighborhood children have added their own fairy houses to the space.
Before neighbors began work on the site, resident Carina Barnett-Loro said it was overgrown with vines and invasive species. Now, passersby can see the creek, which was previously inaccessible, and enjoy the space.
“It’s so special to have this little wild spot, more or less in the middle of the city,” Barnett-Loro said.
Sedgefield Community Place is one of four sites that has been transformed through Love Your Block (LYB), a resident-led neighborhood revitalization grant program. The program, which focused on Walltown for its first year, includes initiatives like removing invasive plants, installing outdoor seating, and transforming vacant lots into gathering spaces. LYB grew out of an idea to reclaim “paper streets”—city-owned land that is designated for streets but undeveloped—but has shifted its focus to repurposing underused areas.
Residents submit proposals for their neighborhoods, and if selected for grant funding, the city implements their ideas. The Sedgefield Community Place received grants for three projects to clear the vacant lot and turn it into a gathering and play space last year. Barnett-Loro, who worked on the proposal, said the site has been a chance to connect with neighbors while renovating the space and meeting new ones after its completion.
“I think that this felt like a really responsive project, and also a project where we just had a lot of autonomy and a lot of leeway from the city to envision something new and just go for it,” Barnett-Loro said.
As year one of LYB wraps up, more city-funded neighborhood projects are on the way; this time to the Lakewood, West End, Morehead, and Lyon Park areas.
Last week, the Durham City Council approved the city manager to execute contracts with the Bloomberg Center for Public Innovation at Johns Hopkins University, which funds LYB projects across the country. The city will receive an additional $60,000 for this next phase of LYB projects.
Lyndsay Gavin is the manager for the city’s Innovation Team, which oversees LYB. Gavin said the goals of the program are to build community through volunteer work, harness public space, and address illegal dumping in underused spaces. This was a focus for Walltown’s projects, as eight locations in the neighborhood were reported for illegal dumping in the past year.
“Even though these are pretty small beautification projects that we’re able to fund through this program,” Gavin said, “it does give neighbors the ability to take some action a little bit more immediately on a shorter timeline… [and] to be able to bring to life what they want to see in their neighborhood.”
LYB started with Walltown because of the small area plan the city completed in August, which identifies development and infrastructure projects based on the community’s priorities and needs. Gavin said the LYB projects are following the city’s small area planning process in an effort to expand on the resources the city is putting toward historically underserved communities. This makes the Lakewood area, which the city is currently developing a small area plan for, a natural next step. (The city is currently accepting LYB applications; winners will be announced April 22.)
LYB is expected to approve eight or nine projects in its second year, scaling funding down from Walltown’s $5,000 per-project allocation to $3,000. The program’s funding will run out by October, but Gavin said the city is considering how elements of the program could be integrated into existing services.
Some Walltown residents took issue with LYB proposals, arguing that the unused spaces the program targets should be left as natural habitats for the animals that live there, and clearing them could invite drug usage and more traffic to the area. LYB has worked with neighbors to address concerns , Gavin said.
Erin Parish, another neighbor who submitted a proposal for the Sedgefield site, said the project has been an opportunity to create a space that children and adults can gather in, learning about the environment as they do. It’s also been a way to try to make up for the lost space at Walltown Park, which the city has closed due to lead contamination in the soil, Parish said.
In the process of creating the Sedgefield Community Place, Parish said she talked with neighbors whom she hadn’t spoken with before, bonding over mulching the site and pulling weeds.
“I think that that’s how you really build relationships, is working together on a shared project,” Parish said. “And I think, right now, it’s just a really hard time in our country, and it’s really easy to get down about so many things. I think that’s one of the big reasons why I wanted to do this project was to be able to build something … that was better than how we started and would make us stronger as a community together by just doing work together.”
As the city is preparing to accept additional funding, Andrew Holland, assistant director of the city’s Office of Performance and Innovation (which oversees LYB), said Walltown should be looked at as a case study for what a neighborhood can accomplish.
“It’s really a testament of ongoing, meaningful engagement that Durham is leading,” Holland said.
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