Several years ago, the city of Durham, NC announced that it had developed a ten-year program to eradicate local homelessness. Several years ago, city officials stated that additional housing for the poor and underprivileged was one of the city’s most sincere concerns. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like city officials have made due on their promises.
Instead, low income residents are being pushed out of their homes all over the city, especially in the communities surrounding Durham’s burgeoning downtown district. In the same manner the Durham Freeway was constructed through Durham’s historic Black community, eminent domain is once again uprooting mostly poor Black residents. Profit motives are replacing history and people with upscale restaurants and designer strip malls.
The communities of Southside and East Durham have already fallen victim to gentrification efforts. The district that Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois once praised, Old Hayti, is without a doubt, going to be next. Old Hayti was home base to North Carolina’s Black Wall Street. Knowing the history of Durham’s underground development plans, it’s probably already on the city’s gentrification radar.
Gentrification is the process of replacing low income distressed communities with new commercial and residential districts that cater to the middle and upper class. Communities targeted for such systematic face lifts are typically poor, Black and Latino. The popular claim is that corporations and city officials are reinvesting money back into the community, and that’s great, but dismantling low income neighborhoods is not the way to do it. Replacing families who depend on community ties to survive with coffee shops, specialty beer bars and dessert parlors, borders on complete inhumanity. Such decisions regarding the infrastructure of people stand as testaments to the disregard of human life.
