Stepping up to the podium to talk to Raleigh City Council members, lifelong resident Octavia Rainey is visibly angry.
“I am here to talk about the TOD [Transit Overlay District],” she says, snapping out every syllable. “As I look at New Bern Avenue, I am not happy. You have no right to change our zoning.”
“Y’all did a great job of removing the Blacks [from downtown] in 1986,” Rainey adds scornfully. “The footprint of downtown should not be on New Bern Avenue.”
Rainey, in a months-long campaign, attended the October 17 meeting to talk about the city council’s plan to redevelop more than 700 acres of land along New Bern Avenue, a major roadway through Southeast Raleigh.
She and others are worried that the proposed zoning changes—which would allow taller buildings, allow more apartments and townhomes, and discourage driving—will worsen gentrification in the historically African American community.
The issue is deeply personal to Rainey, who has lived in the College Park neighborhood almost her entire life. She has been talking about issues of gentrification and public transportation in Raleigh since at least 2007.
“I love New Bern Avenue,” Rainey tells the INDY. “That is my beloved community. And when it comes to my beloved community, you’re gonna hear my voice.”
It started with a bus line
The argument over whether to enact zoning changes along New Bern—which has played out in neighborhood and city meetings for more than a year—started with a bus line.
In 2016, Raleigh and Wake County officials proposed investing in Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), a new bus system that would operate like the subway, giving people regular, convenient access to downtown Raleigh.
At the time, residents demanded that Southeast Raleigh be prioritized over other locations, says Mayor Pro Tem Corey Branch, who was involved in the planning process and represents District C, where the New Bern BRT is now being built.
“The community back then was always saying, ‘Why are we always last to get things done?’” Branch says. “‘Why do things have to happen to other communities and then you come to Southeast Raleigh?’”
In light of those sentiments, city council members decided to start their rollout of BRT on New Bern. In an effort to ensure the success of the bus system (and secure federal funding), the city council also proposed a set of zoning changes dubbed the Transit Overlay District (TOD). These changes, they said, would encourage denser development along the bus routes and increase ridership.
Today, however, some critics argue that the proposed rezoning will also encourage developers to build bigger and more expensive housing, leading to the displacement of longtime Black residents and the disappearance of Black-owned businesses.
“What I’ve heard today are all the reasons this is going to promote economic development,” said Russ Stephenson, a former city council member and planning commissioner, during a Planning Commission Committee of the Whole meeting last month.
“I haven’t heard anything that said, ‘This is how these are going to serve the lowest-wealth communities’ … or ‘[Here’s] how we’re going to protect those families from displacement.’ I’m very concerned that everything here is framed around growth and development and all the promises we made to the community back in 2016 seem to be missing.”
The proposed zoning changes—encompassed in cases Z-92-22 and CP-7-22—are expected to come before the city council on January 30, where a massive and complex conversation about gentrification, housing equality, and Black neighborhoods will likely continue.
A legacy of distrust
For Charles Thomas, a Charlotte philanthropist working for the Knight Foundation, investment in Black neighborhoods starts with talking to the community. In longtime African American communities like Raleigh’s Battery Heights, which government officials have historically neglected, there’s a lot of distrust, Thomas says.
“You’re going to have people who just think any kind of investment is bad because of gentrification,” Thomas says. “[But] don’t all communities deserve certain amenities? It is a very fine line, so that’s why trust is critical. Otherwise people feel rolled over.”
Thomas has watched many skilled community engagement professionals retreat in the face of harsh criticism from residents, but “it’s not personal, it’s historical,” he says.
That historical distrust is clearly on display with activists like Rainey. She argues that the BRT and proposed zoning changes will “destroy Black neighborhoods.” For years, she’s tried to get city council members to invest in the area, only to be met with denials or empty promises.
“The city didn’t meet us halfway on nothing,” Rainey says. “They came in with change in mind.”
Rainey cites one provision of the TOD that might remove some working-class businesses from New Bern Avenue—businesses that already employ and serve residents. The provision prohibits land around the transit corridor from being used for drive-throughs (like the ones at the existing Bojangles and Cookout locations), major vehicle repair businesses, gas stations, and other uses that are “incompatible with a high level of transit service.”
“The reason why I talk about gentrification and how the city wipes out Black neighborhoods goes back to the Raleigh Redevelopment Commission back in the 1940s,” Rainey adds, referring to a time when city officials openly attempted to oust Black residents from certain areas of Raleigh. “The city hasn’t changed at all.”
In Charlotte, Thomas says, the Knight Foundation is focused on including residents in conversations about development. The nonprofit helped fund the Five Points Forward Plan, a vision for the city’s West End developed in part by residents. The Knight Foundation also gives money to local community groups that are already doing work to improve their neighborhoods.
“The idea is that by providing resources to residents to influence development, they will be the best ones to guide it towards benefiting the historic Black community,” Thomas says.
“We fund resident-based organizations who have started economic development groups that are doing small business attraction and retention. They’re brokering deals, they’re getting control of land, and they are actually the group leading the planning effort as well.”
A changing community
Gentrification is already under way along New Bern Avenue, according to Bynum Walter, Raleigh’s assistant director for planning and development.
Since 2000, property values and housing costs along New Bern Avenue have increased, Walter reported during a city council workshop in mid-November. Developers are tearing down older homes to build bigger and more expensive ones, and the supply of housing is increasing only “incrementally,” she added.
“If we just leave things to the existing market and zoning, the result is just gonna be more of the same,” Walter bluntly told the city council. “We can expect to see these same patterns of an increasingly white population with higher household incomes and increasing housing prices. Doing nothing is probably the least equitable choice that we have.”
Making the proposed zoning changes—which include incentives for developers to build below-market-rate housing—will “create a different outcome from what we have been seeing in the New Bern corridor over the past 10 years,” Walter argues.
The city’s plan to support the Black community also includes dozens of government-funded programs designed to build more affordable housing, help people buy homes for the first time, and prevent the displacement of existing residents and Black-owned businesses.
So far, the city has invested more than $2 million in this work, funding local nonprofits such as Southeast Raleigh Promise and El Centro Hispano in addition to its own programs. City money has also led to the construction of 200 units of affordable housing along New Bern Avenue, with 672 more to come.
The city is also in the process of purchasing both a nearby gas station (Zack’s Gas 76) and the old DMV headquarters, in an effort to bank land for affordable housing or other public projects. In the meantime, city staff are working on a plan to increase assistance for low-income renters in the area, which city council members agree will be key.
How do we fight gentrification?
Research has shown that the way local officials plan for development around transit can make a difference. In Portland, Oregon for example, neighborhoods near light-rail stations experienced “counter-gentrification … due to more residents with high transit needs being able to occupy [light-rail transit] station areas,” according to a 2017 study.
Some, however, are still worried that the city is not doing enough to ensure a good outcome for people who live along New Bern Avenue.
“Since we know [gentrification is] happening already, we’ve got to take extra care to not further that problem,” says Reeves Peeler, a longtime activist and now member of the city’s Planning Commission. “How do you keep people in this corridor that currently rely on the bus? That should be the underlying point of what we’re trying to do.”
Peeler says the city should be more serious about acquiring land in the corridor. He, like Knight, also supports the creation of a community land trust, which guarantees some housing remains permanently affordable.
In addition, Peeler says the city should be more aggressive in preserving naturally occurring affordable housing and disincentivizing the construction of luxury apartments. Ultimately, he’s also skeptical that some of the policies included in the TOD will work to produce enough affordable housing and other community benefits.
“As it currently stands, I don’t support a TOD being put in New Bern,” Peeler says.
Will a density bonus work?
One controversial provision in the TOD is the “density bonus,” which allows developers to build taller buildings if they include below-market-rate housing. This bonus kicks in if developers plan to construct buildings above four, five, or seven—or in some areas, 12—stories. Peeler, however, is doubtful that there’s a demand for buildings over four stories, he says, which “is gonna guarantee we get no density bonus.”
Rainey, similarly, is worried that the density bonus won’t serve the people most in need of affordable housing. The bonus encourages developers to build units affordable to people making at or below 60 percent of the area median income—which, in Raleigh, is $47,640 for one person and $67,980 for a family of four.
“The whole thing needs to be [at or below] 30 percent,” says Rainey.
She also wants the city to consider building a mental health center in the corridor, as well as single-room-occupancy housing, which could serve low-income workers and parolees.
Walter, the city’s assistant director for planning and development, argues that the density bonus is based on market research and that these kinds of incentives have been successful elsewhere in Raleigh, on Hillsborough Street and Glenwood Avenue north of the beltline.
Projects along these transit corridors include affordable housing and take advantage of the city’s Frequent Transit Development Option (FTDO), says Walter, which was implemented last year.
“The requirements of the FTDO and the TOD are pretty similar,” Walter says. “So the fact that the market is interested in this suggests to me that the math of the TOD bonus is likely to be appealing to the development market.”
For one affordable housing developer—who is building 192 units of rental housing at 3600 New Bern Avenue—the FTDO allowed them to move forward without a rezoning.
“So their project cost is less,” says Walter. “Everything we can do to bring down project costs for affordable housing is—that’s always the goal.”
The other projects, she adds, are being built by private developers without a financial contribution from the city of Raleigh, freeing up money for even more affordable housing.
Ultimately, Walter believes the BRT will benefit the New Bern Avenue community because the density bonus isn’t the only tool city staff are using to try and create equitable development.
“[The BRT is] not just a construction project,” she says. “There are all these other components that work together so that as many people as possible, especially existing residents and businesses, will benefit from that infrastructure investment.”
“The whole is greater than the sum of the parts,” she adds. “To me, that’s why it’s going to work, because there’s no silver bullet that we’re relying on here.”
Follow Staff Writer Jasmine Gallup on Twitter or send an email to jgallup@indyweek.com. Comment on this story at backtalk@indyweek.com.
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