July Update

Whew! What I have done since I last wrote?



Well:

• Pored through Orange County Land record databases to get an idea of Northside land transfer over the past 10 years
  
• Studied the following document, compiled by a private planning firm to guide development efforts in Chapel Hill (slightly disturbing). http://www.townofchapelhill.org/Modules/ShowDocument.aspx?documentid=6806


• Read and took notes on two 100-page papers on affordable housing options for combating gentrification


• Researched and took notes on rent ceilings, zoning laws, and affordable housing policy


• Researched Chapel Hill development plans


• Researched pertinent Chapel Hill Town documents, such as the Northside Conservation District Plan, and portions of the comprehensive plan.


• Finished the book Gentrification by Lees


• Spoke with Northside residents (both elderly traditional residents and one younger graduate student)


• Made a visit to the office of Bill Rohe at UNC's Department of City and Regional Planning where he transferred about 20 massive studies on the Northside conducted by his students between the years of 1990 and 2002


• Read above-mentioned documents


• Met with the Pastor of St. Joseph CME Church multiple times to talk about my progress


• Interviewed an expert on Tax Assesment at the UNC School of Government


• Interviewed a tax assessor at the Orange County Tax Assessor's office


• Began to create flow charts detailing all the potential transfers of property ownership and the reason(s) for each (see below).

The current status of my project is that I finally feel as though I have a grasp on the situation that I have been trying and trying to understand since before this project began. (Yay!)

How has my experience compared to my initial expectations? Well, that's an interesting question. I first decided to research this topic because I realized that although I could spout off about the "ills of gentrification" and the negative effects that students and luxury developments have on a traditional neighborhood, I knew I could never have answer more than surface-level questions about the actual economic and political mechanisms driving the change much less have suggested logically-founded soultions. Somebody suggested that I apply for a SURF grant, and I did, hoping that by the end of it I would be able to trace out the trajectory of this neighborhood's process of gentrification, understand the factors responsible for such changes, and provide proactive suggestions on the issue. So this, in a sense, was my very first expectation--that my project would be structured in the form of a broad interrogation, and truthfully, that is what it has turned out to be.

But then, as I got deeper into the application process and then into my IRB request, I began to understand that "broad interrogations" are not considered acceptable research. ONE question please, and narrow it down. It made (and still makes) complete sense to base a research project on one or two manageable and directed question that are not too vague and not too broad. So after shaping and honing and narrowing and generating questionnairres, my new expectation was to spend the summer furiously interviewing resident after resident on one topic--reasons people have sold their houses and why they have sold to who they have sold to.
But that has not gone entirely according to plan.
My research has not been research in the sense of rooting out and gathering together a large collection of previously unknown data. Rather, I have dabbled my way to an understanding of the larger framework within which the complexities of gentrification have played out. Throughout much of this project, as I have talked with residents, read gentrification theory, and pored through town documents, I have felt deeply confused. Confused to such an extent that at times I have not even been able to articulate the source of my confusion (pathetic, no?). Perhaps this is because I had never before studied anything relating to the real estate market. I did not know how properties were priced for sale, how property values and property taxes were assessed, how deeds and wills function, etc. The more I asked questions and heard stories, the more I began to realize the variations in how property has changed hands from situation to situation. This meant that I could not have one set of explanations for one phenomenon.
I also had no framework within which to order any of the information I was taking in. I had lumped together all of the affected populations, when really there is a great variety of different groups that are affected by the situation in distinct ways. I realized I could not accurately analyze the situation without knowing these different populations and the demands and desires of each. To begin with, there are renters and homeowners. Among the homeowners are elderly homeowners who have been in the neighborhood for the majority of their lives and there are the children of traditional Northside families. Among these children, there are those who wish to stay in the neighborhood and those who do not. Additionally, when looking at Northside gentrification from the context of affordable housing, it is important to take into account the "hypothetically displaced"--that is to say, those lower-income individuals who would have rented or purchased a home in the Northside were the homes to be affordable.
Also frustrating my research efforts has been the fact that it has been nearly impossible to get in touch with many of the residents who have sold their properties.
Finally, as it turns out, many Northside residents are just plain tired of being interviewed, as they have been the subject of one UNC student report or another almost every year. It was at this point, after having a particularly honest conversation with one resident, that I realized how much I still needed to investigate and understand before I began asking questions to interview-weary individuals.

So I have been investigating. Broadly. I have interviewed residents and experts and read town documents and policy-based reports and theoretical books and have ended up creating an extremely detailed flow chart that shows all of the different ways that property ownership has changed hands. I have numbered each property transfer on the flowchart (pictured above), and created a corresponding report that outlines the harm caused by each transfer, questions the inevitability of each particular type of land transfer, and explores options for intervention at each point on the flowchart. Out of this, I have been able to produce a list of informed proactive suggestions.

It has been rewarding to muddle through confusion and come through on the other side with a little more wisdom than before. (I hope I didn't lose everyone during this post! I know my posts are not quite as exciting as some of the others, and for that reason I have not posted more often, but feel free to ask me questions if you are curious about anything. I actually love to talk about this topic!)