Angela Lee sits at her desk in the Hayti Heritage Center on Old Fayetteville Street. Through the window behind her, there’s a backdrop of cranes building apartments. To Lee, the center’s executive director, such projects don’t signal progress. They forewarn loss.
After all, when she goes to work every day, she walks into the last remaining structure from historic Hayti.
“When Hayti was a thriving community, along with Black Wall Street, we were all one,” Lee says. “There were houses and shops and commerce all the way from here to Parrish Street.”
In 1970, as a part of the city’s Urban Renewal program, developers constructed the Durham Freeway directly through the northeast part of the neighborhood. Urban Renewal displaced over four thousand families and five hundred businesses, and the freeway cut off Hayti from what’s now considered downtown Durham. City officials reneged on promises to replace the demolished buildings. The neighborhood has never recovered.
Now, Lee and the Hayti Heritage Center are trying to reconnect the neighborhood to downtown—and bring the voices of Hayti residents into discussions about Durham’s future—by improving pedestrian access between the two. Using a $12,500 nonprofit grant, Lee plans to study improving existing routes from Hayti to the Black Wall Street Gardens in the heart of downtown, and in the process do away with the false demarcation of N.C. 147 as the edge of the city’s urban center.
“It will get people reenergized about their community to feel like they are not being rejected or disregarded by the city,” Lee says. “That has been a prevailing attitude because, well, we have been.”
Hayti, wedged between Fayetteville Street and the Durham Freeway, began as a hub for freed slaves to settle after emancipation. By the early 1900s, it had grown so prosperous that W.E.B. Du Bois considered it a model for how black communities could thrive in the Jim Crow South.
Today, housed in what was once Saint Joseph’s AME Church, the Heritage Center stands tall, its steeple overlooking the Walgreens and the KFC across the busy five-lane road, lined with a cracked sidewalk void of pedestrians. It presides over a neighborhood of dilapidated buildings that house predominantly black residents, with an eviction notice rate nearly seven times Durham’s average.
Lee is tired of watching development intrude on Hayti without incorporating the community itself. While the Heritage Center focuses on Hayti’s cultural significance, Lee has also advocated for longtime residents who have watched their community deteriorate as other parts of Durham thrive and who continue to be squeezed out as more condos go up and land values skyrocket.
Lee points to Heritage Square, a shopping center down the street from the Heritage Center, which recently sold to a Texas developer for $12 million.
“Do you think that that shopping center is going to remain a shopping center with small businesses?” she asks. “What ramifications does a purchase like that have? How will that impact Hayti?”
Development in Hayti is inevitable. Durham is expected to add 160,000 new residents over the next quarter-century, and development has already begun to march south of the freeway. But while land values are rising rapidly—133 percent since 2016, according to a recent News & Observer analysis of the census tract that includes Hayti, which also includes some land north of N.C. 147—the median income for Hayti’s census tract is just over $18,000. Some residents whose families have been there for generations can no longer afford housing. According to DataWorks NC, 56 percent of the area’s residents are cost-burdened, which means that they pay more in rent than what is considered affordable based on their level of income.
Hayti is one of twelve communities nationwide that were awarded a grant in 2019 through the nonprofit Safe Routes to School National Partnership. The award provided a springboard for the Heritage Center to launch an initiative called Reconnecting Downtown: Restoring Hayti’s Connection to the Heart of Durham.
With the grant, the Hayti Heritage Center will partner with Extra Terrestrial Projects—a nonprofit that promotes sustainable and equitable city infrastructure—as well as local developers, artists, and Hayti residents to plan a safe walking route along Fayetteville Street to the Black Wall Street Gardens on Parrish Street, which commemorates the African-American business community that flourished in Durham in the early twentieth century.
Right now, it’s unsafe to walk almost anywhere in Hayti. Sidewalks are cracked and uneven, signage is lacking, and there are not nearly enough street lights, stoplights, or crosswalks.
“People are going to be more reluctant to get out and move about freely, daytime or nighttime, when it is hazardous,” Lee says.
A 2017 study in the Journal of Transportation Geography found that high-traffic volumes are a “known barrier to walking, bicycling, and access to transit, as well as a contributor to community severance and diminished social capital.” These high-volume roadways, the study found, were likely to be located near low-income neighborhoods and communities of color, as is the case here.
“I am most concerned with Fayetteville Street,” says Tara Mei Smith, executive director of Extra Terrestrial Projects. “Because if you’ve ever tried to walk it, you’re like, ‘Am I trying to die?’”
Hayti residents seeking to cross the freeway and access downtown without a car have but two options: Head west for a few blocks to Roxboro Street, or take Fayetteville.
Residents have been advocating for improvements for decades. In 2005, a resident group put together the Historic Fayetteville Street Corridor Master Plan, a detailed study of infrastructure needs that sought to strengthen public safety initiatives, improve the corridor’s appearance and function, foster economic and small business development, increase homeownership, and make transportation enhancements. While the city has adopted some of the plan’s ideas, residents contend their neighborhood hasn’t gotten the same attention as others.
“It is not that the [city] council doesn’t have the appetite for streetscape funding and streetscapes, for the other three gateways into downtown have all been funded, some more than once,” said Denise Hester, a member of the original 2005 Fayetteville Street Planning Group, at a city council meeting last month. (The other gateways are Old Five Points, Ninth Street, and Angier-Driver.) “Not sharing our city’s booming prosperity by [investing in] infrastructure for Fayetteville Street, I fear, will only increase the growing economic divide that threatens our city’s future, and I think that divide is apparent to everyone in this room as it manifests itself in all kinds of unfortunate ways.”
With the grant, Hayti residents can focus on improving their community and play an active role in assessing their community’s needs, the grant partners say. Smith and her team plan to engage residents in conceptualizing the most effective way to promote safety and accessibility. The goal is to complete the community assessment by September.
Lee and Smith will eventually present their plan to the city’s departments of transportation and parks and recreation, with the hope that Hayti residents’ voices will be better incorporated into the city’s capital improvement plans for the area.
“When we are thinking about new policy, it is really important to not repeat the mistakes of the past, and work to repair harm so that the descendants of the founders of our city can stay in place,” says Derrick Beasley, a local artist and consultant on the project.
Willie Bigelow, a longtime resident of Hayti, remembers when the city tore down iconic institutions like the Biltmore Hotel and the Regal Theater, places the community built for itself in response to its exclusion from white institutions like The Carolina Theatre.
“It’s like losing a friend from your childhood,” Bigelow says. “Now it appears that Durham is moving into the Hayti area instead of them adopting or connecting with Hayti.”
The city has taken steps to preserve affordable housing in the area. Nearby, a third phase of mixed-income housing is planned for the city-backed Southside redevelopment on Lakewood Avenue. Over the next decade, the Durham Housing Authority plans to redevelop three of its properties in the area into mixed-income and, in some cases, mixed-use neighborhoods, including Fayette Place, a vacant property that sits near where Grant Street was bisected by the freeway. And earlier this year, Mayor Steve Schewel proposed a $95 million bond.
“The city needs a new sense of urgency around implementing these equitable engagement strategies because once these things are built, we can’t go back, we can’t engage the community retroactively,” Beasley says.
Clarification: A line in this story has been edited to more precisely state that the initiative will not create a new route between Hayti and downtown Durham, but to study how to improve existing access.
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