Nature takes over
One of my first memories of downtown Durham (when “downtown” was still lower case) was of a fox running down Chapel Hill Street past the empty storefronts where the Civic Center is now east towards the post office. I’d just moved to Durham to become the Marketing Director of Central Carolina Bank. I’d left a position with a much larger bank in downtown Richmond and an office in a brand new building with a spectacular view of the historic Virginia state capital that Thomas Jefferson designed. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. The fox seemed to symbolize nature reclaiming the barren streets of my new community.
My daughter, who hadn’t wanted to make the move at all, was bused every day from our home in brand new American Village west of the Duke campus to Chewning Junior High, a good forty minutes each way. We were “city-out” which meant she attended the county school system like most white families that had left the city system. Every day as the bus exited I-85 at Red Mill Road she wished it would keep going up the highway another hour and a half and deposit her back in Richmond.
A decaying downtown and a divided school system were the two most glaring blemishes on the luster that a major research university and medical center and RTP should have brought to Durham. The low point in my opinion was when American Tobacco closed its doors in 1988 shutting down a million square feet of space for most of the next 20 years.
Lagging community image
The contrast between then and now is pretty remarkable although there is much to still be done both in Downtown and with the now unified school system. However, what is persistently lagging this real progress is the image of the community. This is not limited to outsiders. In fact, it may be more pernicious among Durham’s own citizens who have watched this real progress take one step backwards for each two steps forward year after year. It’s easy to forget how bad things once were.
Impact on the Luxury Home Market
So, what has this got to do with real estate and especially luxury real estate? When I prepared the report on the luxury real estate market in Durham that is available free through a link to the left of this post, my primary intention was to show that in a buyers’ market where there are more sellers than buyers, that more sophisticated marketing of the homes is required. What surprised me a little bit, however, was that in Durham the market for luxury homes has been depressed for many years even while Wake, Orange, and even Chatham, were booming.
Clearly Durham’s image is holding us back and it’s time for the real estate community to join with the Chamber, the DCVB and Downtown Durham, Inc. to actively promote the community through their listings. This is not just to benefit the 80 or so “luxury” property owners that have homes on the market at any one time. An active luxury home market also adds to the tax base, improves the overall community image and keeps the talented professionals that are coming to RTP and our universities in the community and involved in our civic life and in our schools. There are no quick fixes proposed. It took 20 years to get from that low point to where we are now and that’s been more than anyone involved in downtown development ever imagined when we organized Downtown Durham, Inc.
With this blog I will try to follow and pass along developments but I hope other interested parties will participate. For more details use the link on the left for “What’s this About.”
