Cleveland-Holloway, the Indy, Home Tour, etc.

Kevin over at Bull City Rising had an excellent piece up yesterday in response to Mosi Secret's article in the Independent this past week on neighborhood change in the Cleveland-Holloway neighborhood.

I'd intended to write something about the neighborhood and the home tour today, but Kevin has largely made the point that I wanted to make - that drawing binary conclusions about neighborhood change gives short shrift to the people involved - and the complexity of neighborhood dynamics. Given the Indy's historic outlook on such issues, I actually found the article a bit of a relief in that it avoided a straight-out gentrification template story. Largely I attribute this to the fact that Mosi has put in enough time over months in the neighborhood to know the people involved - a rarity in media coverage these days. Typically, a breathless reporter from one of the TV stations comes and asks if you can meet them in 30 minutes to interview you for a spot on the evening news. Your interview is edited to a single sentence that conveniently slots you in whatever role you've been assigned in the simplistic conflict narrative that dominates the news stream.

I don't have any insight into what led to the story, or whether it was an assignment, but it felt to me like an assignment to write a gentrification story, into which Mosi introduced some nuance, because he knows the people involved. What will happen in East Durham moving forward is not a binary story, simply because people are not binary.

Cleveland-Holloway isn't unique - it's much like many neighborhoods, particularly in East Durham, that had fallen off the city's radar screen - largely because of a lack of organization in the neighborhood allowed individual voices to be drowned out by the voices of well-organized neighborhood associations elsewhere. (And also because the city found a convenient group of leaders from far-east Durham to designate as representatives of all of "North-East-Central Durham" - a reductionist neologism for a group of varied, diverse, and complex neighborhoods that were convenient to lump into one box.)

Proceeding honestly, it should be extraordinarily difficult to make a summary judgment about whether the people involved in neigborhood change are 'bad' or 'good' - how do you quantify such things? If the canary in the neighborhood coal mine is the impoverished renter, what is the assessment if, hypothetically, five renters move, and five stay in a neighborhood that is no longer under the thumb of the drug dealers and finally has the city listening to their unique voice? What if the five that moved proceed to better housing conditions in another neighborhood because the slumlord they rented from decided to sell the unmaintained house he/she owns to a person moving in the neighborhood? What if the person moving in the neighborhood gets shot by a drug dealer when they try to stop crime in their new community? What if they left a house in another neighborhood that sits empty until their old landlord rents to a drug dealer in that other neighborhood? What if the 'slumlord' has had tenants destroy his/her property in the impoverished neighborhood over and over again? Are they supposed to keep putting money into it? Or should they sell?

Who are the bad people and who are the good people?

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

Clearly though, it's a good thing for neighborhoods to be safe, cared-for places with a diversity of people who are psychologically invested in their community. By that metric, Cleveland-Holloway is in far better shape than it was 2 years ago. I'd encourage you to check out the Cleveland-Holloway home tour today, starting at 1pm at 406 Oakwood Ave, and appreciate the complexity that makes Durham's older neighborhoods interesting places, and places thus worth caring about.