Duke Bought a Duplex That Housed a Thriving Community Space. Within Months, It Was Gone. Was That a Coincidence?

When you’re a kid, there’s something about a vacant space that announces itself as a clubhouse; it couldn’t be more apparent that the shed in the backyard needs a rug and a password and a sign on the door.

Most people lose that impulse somewhere along the way. Kelly Creedon never did. A few years after the now 48-year-old moved into the left half of a duplex at 407 Swift Avenue in Durham, the right unit went vacant and Creedon proposed converting it into a community gathering space that she could subsidize by booking it on Airbnb one week a month. Her landlord agreed, and over the next six years the space grew to become The Living Room, a wholesome hub for plant swaps, potlucks, and activist meetups that ran on the scrappy goodwill of a little free library.

On a given evening you might’ve walked up to the duplex to find a comedy troupe mid-rehearsal, or a yoga class stretching under string lights, or 15 people learning to build a trellis in the side yard while someone inside led a writing workshop. A few projects even got their start at The Living Room, like a monthly song circle called the Durham Ceasefire Chorus and a community garden that in summertime grew thick with radishes, tomatoes, okra, beans, peppers, and mini watermelons.

By last year, the space was hosting gatherings nearly every other day, and Creedon and other organizers had started thinking bigger: exploring grants, sketching out an infrastructure with other grassroots spaces around Durham.

Then, in September, Creedon got a text from her landlord, Canu DiBona.

Duke University was interested in buying 407 Swift Avenue, DiBona wrote. Officials would be coming by for a walk-through the following week.

Creedon’s stomach dropped. She’d long been aware that Duke had its sights set on the property, which sat amid swaths of Duke-owned land on the edge of the university’s Central Campus. But DiBona had always told her he wasn’t interested in selling to Duke, and so his text carried with it the particular sting of news you’ve taught yourself not to worry about.

Creedon texted back to ask if DiBona would consider selling to her. It wasn’t an idle question; she’d expressed interest in buying the property multiple times during her 10 years as a tenant. And the two had a record of easy collaboration: When Creedon asked to switch to a month-to-month lease she felt afforded her more flexibility, for instance, DiBona obliged. 

This time was different. After years of Duke pressing him to sell, DiBona had finally said yes, and Duke had come back with an offer DiBona told Creedon he didn’t think she could match. (DiBona did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Duke’s visit the next week made clear the sale was well underway. Officials arrived with a home inspector and property management. 

The deal closed on October 31. Duke paid $575,000 for the property, which in the spring had been valued at close to $526,000 by tax assessors. 

There is nothing unusual about Duke buying up property in its backyard. Its Central Campus—a long triangle of land with vertices at Duke’s medical campus, the Nasher Museum of Art, and a small residential pocket off Swift Avenue—is the product of a land-banking strategy that has, over decades, swallowed much of the surrounding neighborhoods. 

But at a moment when Duke is particularly invested in its image as a good neighbor to Durham, the way the university navigated its brief role as a landlord to Creedon—and in turn The Living Room—feels incongruous with its stated commitments to community partnership.

In late September, two weeks after the Duke contingent’s first visit, Duke Director of Real Estate Julie Siegmund returned to 407 Swift to talk to Creedon about her options as a renter. 

Creedon could keep renting if she wanted to, Siegmund said. But the duplex’s roof, HVAC, and electrical panels were nearing the end of their useful lives, she said, citing an inspection report—and Duke, which has no specific plans for the block but intends to someday redevelop it, was not interested in making long-term investments in a 1919 build it did not intend to keep standing. (Creedon, a documentary filmmaker, recorded the conversation. In North Carolina, only one party needs to consent to a recording.) 

Siegmund offered Creedon a six-month lease at her existing monthly rate of $950 with an option to renew, but made clear that the arrangement would “kind of limp along” until something broke that Duke was not willing to address.

“I don’t want to be in a situation where I have to give a tenant a 30-day notice to vacate,” Siegmund said. “You don’t want it from a planning perspective, either.”

Creedon told Siegmund she hadn’t been experiencing any issues. Siegmund agreed nothing major needed replacing immediately but reiterated concern about what could go wrong down the line, telling Creedon she didn’t want to be a “bad landlord.”

“I don’t want you to be dealing with a roof that can’t be fixed and an owner that’s not going to replace it,” Siegmund said.

Creedon did not feel that any of this added up to a real offer to stay. She signed the six-month lease but only after ensuring it included a provision allowing early termination without penalty. As soon as she found new housing, she left, relocating to Northgate Park in February. She’s paying about the same rent as she was at 407 Swift, though she has a roommate now.

In a statement to the INDY, a Duke spokesperson emphasized Creedon had moved out voluntarily and said the six-month lease offered “more security” than the month-to-month deal she’d had with DiBona. The spokesperson also noted that Duke had made repairs to keep the property “safe and habitable” for Creedon, referencing a handful of minor fixes. 

Creedon was, per city directories, the latest in an unbroken line of largely working-class renters at 407 Swift stretching back more than a century: machinists, textile workers, postal clerks, waitresses, painters, students. Her departure means one of Durham’s increasingly scarce parcels of naturally occurring affordable housing has seen its last tenant.

It also means The Living Room is gone. The space shut down in February, when Creedon moved out. 

It was important to Creedon that Duke understood The Living Room’s legitimacy as a community institution. When officials came for their initial visit, Creedon pointed them toward the firepit where community members gathered for song circles and the rooms where groups held workshops and retreats. The space had hosted more than 100 events so far that year.

“It’s been a very collaborative model and a lot of folks are invested,” Creedon told Siegmund.

Siegmund was receptive to hearing about it. But she did not indicate that the presence of a community space would change Duke’s willingness to invest in the property. 

Creedon came away feeling deflated about Duke’s “math.” 

“They’re talking about this frame of potential financial costs,” Creedon told the INDY. “But they’re not weighing that against the very real human and community costs of losing a community space.”

By all appearances, The Living Room simply hadn’t factored into how Duke chose to handle the property. Unless, of course, it had.

In his 1989 book The Great Good Place, the late sociologist Ray Oldenburg coined the term “third places” to describe informal gathering spots, distinct from home and work, where people go to decompress and find connection.

Oldenburg stressed that third places are not merely an escape from the rat race but something with their own positive gravity: “an essential element of the good life,” he wrote, where “community is most alive and people are most themselves.”

Based on criteria articulated by Oldenburg, few spaces have embodied the concept as fully as The Living Room did.

Oldenburg contended that the best third places are shaped almost entirely by the people who use them—a model that’s difficult to achieve, because most gathering spaces are businesses, and bottom lines tend to limit what a space can become. 

The Living Room pulled it off. Creedon and an early collaborator, Ligaiya Romero, kept things intentionally vague when launching the space: they threw a housewarming, asked people to bring furnishings, and didn’t prescribe much else. Over time, the space took form as a sliding-scale venue that sometimes served as temporary housing for people in transition. Creedon managed event bookings and cleaned up after Airbnb guests, but with no incentive to turn a profit, the place required little else in the way of active management. 

The Living Room also captured what Oldenburg considered a paradox of the best third places: It had all the trappings of a home—a full kitchen, a foldout couch, a big backyard—yet it was not anyone’s actual home, sparing visitors what Oldenburg described as the inevitable feeling of intrusion that comes with entering someone else’s space. That ease showed in the range of things people felt comfortable doing there: Spanish-English interpreter trainings, a monthly Jewish kids’ meetup, a resource share called Free Coffee for a Free Palestine, performance art rehearsals, writing groups, film screenings, and book packing for incarcerated women, among dozens of other activities.

Oldenburg ascribed two more qualities to third places that resonate with what went on at The Living Room. He wrote that they nurture a kind of amateurism, compelling visitors to discover personal capacities that the rigid social roles of everyday life tend to bury. And he considered them “political fora of great importance,” where people realize the collective power essential to democracy.

The Durham Ceasefire Chorus—one of the projects that The Living Room truly incubated—bore both traits out. Most of its members were not trained musicians. Rather, they were people who discovered, through the act of sitting in a circle and singing together, that music could be both a salve and a form of resistance. 

Jess Dickerson came across an Instagram post about the chorus in 2024 and showed up to what turned out to be the group’s very first meetup.

“I never thought there was a place for my music,” Dickerson told the INDY. “But I realized there is a place for it here.”

Dickerson fell into the rhythm of the chorus’s regular gatherings, and they found something deeper when the chorus carried that music out into the world, singing at demonstrations for Palestinian liberation and other causes.

Last year, Dickerson ruptured their Achilles tendon and encountered another phenomenon Oldenburg attributes to third places: mutual aid. For three months, Ceasefire Chorus members showed up at Dickerson’s door with meals, cleaned their house, and sang to them.

“It was just this next-level form of community,” Dickerson said.

Even in 1989, Oldenburg warned that third places were vanishing on a large scale, for a few reasons. 

They tend to occupy old buildings, which makes them perpetually vulnerable to redevelopment. And their natural role as political gathering places has a way of putting them at odds with powerful institutions.

Within a few hundred feet of 407 Swift, Duke owns three other century-old houses—all of which currently have tenants in them.

One Duke has owned since 1997. The other two it acquired within the past two years. During one of her September visits, Siegmund offered to check whether any were available for Creedon (they weren’t).

It’s hard to know what condition those houses were in when Duke bought them relative to 407 Swift. Siegmund described them as being in better shape than the duplex but indicated that that was at least partly a result of investments Duke had made—including replacing HVAC units and installing a new roof.

A tenant living in one of the houses Duke purchased within the last two years told the INDY in March he’d been there about six months and was not aware Duke owned the property; he’d only dealt with a third-party management company. He described the house as old, with water spots on the ceiling, but said he’d had no trouble getting repairs done.

Aerial imagery suggests that repairs were made to the roof of that house in fall 2024, a few months after Duke bought it. Roof repairs were something Siegmund adamantly told Creedon that Duke would not be willing to make at 407 Swift, speculating during one visit that Creedon could end up with “pots and pans holding up the roof.” Was 407 Swift in that much worse shape than this other property? 

A Duke spokesperson told the INDY that “every property has its own maintenance challenges” and “whenever Duke invests in real estate, we work cooperatively and in good faith with any tenants.”

Several noted critics of Duke’s land use practices speculated whether dimensions beyond the condition of the duplex could have influenced the university’s approach to 407 Swift.

“The Living Room was a space that especially elevated the voices of the oppressed, including the Palestinian struggle,” said Durham City Council Member Nate Baker, noting the duplex’s prominently placed Free Palestine yard sign and the political activities the space hosted. “Was that a motivation for Duke to shutter The Living Room? I don’t know. It would not be out of character from what universities across the country have done to silence recent anti-genocide and anti-apartheid campaigns.”

“Duke has three priorities,” John Schelp, a former Old West Durham neighborhood president who spent years negotiating land use agreements with Duke, told the INDY. “Number three is sports and academics. Number two is money. And number one is image. If there is a house that they just bought that is creating a headache, they will protect their image, first and foremost.”

A Duke spokesperson told the INDY that “any activity hosted in or near this space had no bearing on Duke’s decisions regarding the property.”

Whether or not politics played a role, Oldenburg might argue there’s a kind of accountability either way. The democratic cost of losing a third place is the same whether or not anyone set out to cause it.

“Is the result any less negative without the intent?” he wrote.

The closure of The Living Room comes at a conspicuous moment for Duke. 

At once one of Durham’s largest landowners and exempt from property taxes on most of its holdings, the university has faced sustained pressure in recent years to contribute more directly to city and county tax bases. While private universities are legally entitled to tax exemption on academic properties, critics argue that Duke’s stature makes it a poor fit for the standard carveout; its $12 billion endowment puts it among the wealthiest universities in the country, and Durham, where affordability is a growing crisis, is straining under the lost revenue, critics say. 

The Duke Respect Durham coalition thinks Duke should cough up as much as $50 million a year to make up for the forgone tax revenue. There is some precedent for such payments in lieu of taxes, albeit smaller ones, at peer institutions including Yale, Brown, and Cornell.  

Duke has responded, in part, with a messaging blitz touting its existing contributions to Durham. In the fall, its “Duke For Durham” campaign—splashed on yard signs, Facebook ads, and fact sheets—highlighted its employee benefits, the infrastructure it maintains at its own expense, and the property taxes it pays on non-academic properties, like the land it has banked in the Central Campus area.

The university has also opened its wallet. Duke last month announced “HomeGrown,” a $203 million initiative that over the next three years aims to direct more spending into the Triangle, including $38 million in deposits with financial institutions that fund affordable housing.

But groups like Duke Respect Durham say philanthropy isn’t a real proxy for contributing to the tax base. As long as Duke controls when and how it gives back, the university’s relationship with Durham remains lopsided, critics argue.

The debate takes on added weight given the history of Duke’s growth. Roughly 450 houses once stood on the land that now accommodates Duke’s Central Campus and parts of Highway 147. Home to workers at the nearby, long since defunct Erwin Cotton Mills, the houses formed a string of communities from the white-working class West Durham to the historically Black Brookstown and Hickstown.

Most were destroyed in two waves. Schelp, who has spent so long immersed in the history of the mill village that he has an Erwin Mills-themed bathroom, traces both to Duke. In the mid-1960s, the university purchased the former Erwin Cotton Mills property, including worker housing, and over the next decade cited minor defects to get the city to condemn the houses and tore down scores of them to build student apartments, Schelp said.

Not long after, more houses were razed for construction of Highway 147—a project that then-Duke President Terry Sanford supported “without reservation,” per a letter he wrote to a member of the state transportation board.

Today, granite curbs from the old mill village line the paths around the lake at Duke Gardens. On Central Campus, stone steps still rise into vacant lots where houses used to stand.

Much of Central Campus feels emptied out. The student housing Duke built atop the mill village land was torn down in 2019. A handful of institutional buildings dot the area—the Freeman Center for Jewish Life, an international enrollment office—along with a block of luxury student apartments and surface parking lots. But the prevailing impression is of space waiting to be filled.

Duke plans to overhaul the area eventually but has offered few details. When the university appeared before Durham City Council in 2024 seeking to rezone 10 parcels, it brought no development plans—just a request for broad latitude to build without further approval. The council approved the rezoning 5-2.

During one of her visits to 407 Swift, Siegmund told Creedon that her job is to “buy opportunities.” Duke told the INDY it’s still assessing its plans for the property. 

In February, The Living Room hosted its final event, a closing ceremony.

The ceremony played out as a kind of inversion of the housewarming party that had launched the space six years prior. Back then, people had scribbled ideas for what the place could become on butcher paper tacked to the walls. Now they Sharpied goodbyes straight onto the wall itself. All the furnishings that were donated at the housewarming were laid out by the door for people to take.

Attendees eventually ended up out in the backyard in folding chairs around the firepit. The community garden fanned out beside them, dormant for the winter save for some carrots and greens.

The garden sits on land that Duke has owned all along. DiBona negotiated permission for Creedon to use it back in 2020, and over the years it grew into a bustling operation with weekly workdays and workshops on native plants. Over the past two seasons it drew 150 volunteers and produced over 750 pounds of produce, some of which helped stock community fridges around Durham.

This is the one tangible outgrowth of The Living Room that Creedon and other organizers are fighting to keep alive. They decided against trying to relocate the space itself—finding an affordable equivalent space wasn’t realistic—but the garden, they believe, has a shot at surviving where it is. They’re in talks with Duke about how to do so.

It won’t be simple; the duplex is being scheduled for demolition, per a recent communication between Creedon and Siegmund, and once it’s torn down, there will be no water hookup and nowhere for volunteers to use the bathroom. But both parties seem cautiously optimistic that there’s a way to make it work. Duke told the INDY it wants to enable the garden “to continue for the foreseeable future, while also meeting our obligations to maintain the safety and accessibility of the property.”

Among the garden’s earliest volunteers was Jadyn Ward, who started showing up for workdays when the garden was still just a couple of beds. They liked that they didn’t need to bring any expertise or be on time.

Ward said the thing about The Living Room was that it could hold whatever you brought to it. After their mother died unexpectedly of cancer in 2023, they held her funeral in the space, hanging fabric from the ceiling to the floor to create a kind of womb. 

“I can’t imagine having that service anywhere else,” Ward said.

At the closing ceremony, Ward and a friend guided attendees in a grieving exercise around the firepit to mourn the space itself. 

“Rub your hands together,” they said, “and visualize the ball of energy that the space has given you.”

The group spent the following hours sharing memories. It was frigid, but as the afternoon wore on no one left. Instead they drew closer and closer to the fire until more than half were sitting in a tight circle on the ground, shoulders pressed together against the cold.

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