Introduction to my project

This summer I will not jet off to an exotic land.

Since transferring to UNC in the Fall, I have been attending church at St. Joseph CME in the Northside Community of Chapel Hill, a traditionally African American community built to house university service workers. The Northside has an incredible history of civil rights activism and deep community traditions. However, in recent decades, traditional residents of the neighborhood (coming from second, third, and fourth-generation families) have begun to notice drastic changes in the neighborhood. It has been estimated that homeownership has dropped from around 80 or 85% to 20% (statistics that I will be working to refine in a supplementary portion of this project). In place of traditional homeowners, property in the Northside is now being purchased by developers, who, in most cases it seems (again, this information will be validated through further research) are converting the properties into student rental units and selling them at prices unaffordable to low-income families. With new developments in the Northside such as Greenbridge (an extremely contentious project throughout Chapel Hill and especially in the Northside), property taxes are reportedly rising, posing problems for homeowners of moderate-to-low incomes.

As I have listened to frustrations and confusion and witnessed the efforts of the community to negotiate with the developers of Greenbridge, I was first struck by one particular quandary:

What exactly does this change look like? There is no documentation, no statistics, no maps, and no concrete data of this change. This both makes it difficult for the community to fully understand the changes happening all around them, and also frustrates negotations with developers and town officials.

As I began to look more deeply, I was struck by a further quandary. Why, really, is homeownership changing hands from traditional community members to developers and student renters? Through casual conversations with community leaders (prior to any official research), the complexity of the situation has begun to present itself. Present in discussions is certainly Greenbridge, but also broader changes in town development policy, changing family dynamics, real estate politics, etc. Are people moving out of the neighborhood and selling their houses, or are homeowners passing away and leaving the property to be sold by their children to the highest bidder? If people are moving out, is it because of social or financial reasons? If it is because of financial reasons, when did the financial burden first become to heavy to handle?

As a result of all these quandaries, I decided to spend my summer investigating why homeownership is changing hands, and what is facilitating that change. How are the potential factors (listed above) interrelated? Are some of them more relevant than others? To begin uncovering these factors, I plan to interview previous homeowners, asking why they decided to move, and why they made the decision of who to sell to. I am also interested in documenting how the community understands the changes occuring. In addition to this qualitative portion of the research, which I will conduct alone and will be the core basis of my CBR project, I will be working with a dedicated citizen of Chapel Hill and software guru to sift through Orange County land records and quantitatively map the change over the last ten years.

I am excited to begin, and believe this research is importnat. Before we get to questions of "is this inevitable?" it is important to have a clearer picture of the phenomenon and also to understand the complex factors m0tivating such changes.

I hope I will be able to answer some of these questions and have some great conversations with community members in the process.