Web Site Guide | News | About OWDNA | Neighborhood Info | Photographs of OWD | Media Spotlight | Citizen Resources | Home Durham and Goliath: Some neighbors fear Duke's plan to develop its campus could encroach on local businesses From the Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2004 On a weekday in late May, a week or so after graduation, a woman in a Duke University T-shirt sips coffee at a sidewalk table here. A few doors down, people browse through books for sale on a cart outside a bookstore. A waitress at a popular restaurant flits between patrons dining alfresco. Dubbed "Durham's alternative shopping district" by those who make a living here, this stretch of Ninth Street and the surrounding area just a few blocks from Duke University's East Campus has long been an off-campus outlet where Duke students and local residents socialize while supporting a business district that is an integral part of Old West Durham. Lately, though, some local merchants and residents have been talking as if Ninth Street's days were numbered. The source of their anguish is a plan by Duke to overhaul its 200-acre Central Campus, which is situated between the East and West Campuses and within about a mile of Ninth Street. The project's first phase calls for new student apartments, restaurants, and shops. Duke says it simply wants to serve its students better. But some merchants suspect that the university is pursuing a strategy to keep more student dollars on the campus while providing retail options that would also appeal to local residents. They say Ninth Street and other business districts in Durham would suffer and surrounding neighborhoods would eventually be stripped of their character. "This is the kind of thing that would cause a slow erosion," says Carol Anderson, owner of Vaguely Reminiscent, a clothing, accessory, and gift store that has been in business on Ninth Street for 22 years. "One person would go out of business and then another person and then another. It would damage the whole persona of what has been a thriving area." The tension recalls the days when Duke's neighbors and others in the city saw the university as an isolated, arrogant, and sometimes clumsy behemoth that had little outward regard for local folk. That image has changed in the past decade as Duke has been credited with improving the neighborhoods and schools around its sprawling campus. But clearly, as far as the relationship between the elite, wealthy, private university and some local residents is concerned, mistrust continues to lurk beneath the surface. Conflicts over campus retail services have become increasingly common as colleges and universities strive to meet the expectations of students, compete with other universities, and in many instances draw more student dollars to university coffers. At Iowa State University, a new $15-million community center offering a variety of eateries has been a headache for some nearby restaurant owners who say that the center has caused sales to drop as students increasingly skip going off campus to buy meals. Pennsylvania State University weathered criticism from local downtown developers when it renovated and expanded its student union four years ago to include several restaurants, including national chains. As the list of things college students can buy on campus continues to grow, merchants in college towns, like those on Ninth Street, have to work harder to keep students as customers. These days laptops, fast food, apparel, books, groceries, artwork, and more are all for sale at stores just steps away from residence halls or classrooms. Duke officials have publicly maintained that the community's worries are unfounded -- that any deterioration to an area so close to the campus would hurt Duke as well. That message, however, doesn't always resonate amid the fuzzy, sometimes conflicting details of a plan that Duke officials insist is a work in progress. A Gothic Haven Shops first began to sprout on Ninth Street around a cotton mill that opened in the late 1890s. After operating for nearly 100 years, the mill closed in 1986, which left the once-thriving village in bad shape. In addition, a shopping mall that opened on the outskirts of town contributed to the transformation of Ninth Street into a hodgepodge of vacant storefronts. Today, after a concerted effort to redevelop the area, Ninth Street is home to a blocklong stretch of eclectic stores, trendy restaurants, and bars. Books on Ninth, a used-book store, has been there since 1991. John Browner, the owner of the shop, says students shop at his store, but most customers are families that live in three neighborhoods near Ninth Street. "Ninth Street has character, a quality sadly lacking in Duke's plans," said Mr. Browner in an e-mail interview. "I jumped at the chance to move my business to Ninth Street ... because it's the last place in Durham where you can walk up and down the street, window-shop, and chat with your neighbors and experience town life." The role Duke has played in that town life has evolved over the years. For decades the university, the city's largest employer, with its reputation as a Gothic haven for a privileged few, was viewed with disdain by area residents, particularly those who were poor or working class. Duke was rapidly building its endowment (just over $2.7-billion at the end of March), attracting top-notch professors, and cementing its role as a premier research institution in a city that still struggles with drug and crime problems, a crippling poverty rate among residents, and budget crunches. Then, in 1996, under the leadership of President Nannerl O. Keohane, the institution made a conscious effort to focus on improving a dozen neighborhoods and seven public schools closest to the university. Ms. Keohane, who will leave Duke at the end of this month, could not be reached for comment. Duke dubbed its outreach effort the Neighborhood Partnership Initiative and has raised $10-million to help build affordable housing, health clinics, and local community centers. Many in the city have taken notice. "I know firsthand that Duke's contribution to the community is priceless," wrote Ann T. Denlinger, superintendent of Durham Public Schools in a letter to Duke in March. "Thank you for your ongoing commitment to students, schools and community." Meanwhile, neighborhoods in the partnership supported the city's new university-college zoning ordinance, approved just over a year ago, that was intended to make it easier for colleges to develop their campuses. The new zoning ordinance permits institutions to build dormitories, auditoriums, medical centers, and other buildings related to higher education. The ordinance also allows "limited retail" uses, such as "university-related bookstores and dining facilities located within other buildings" as long as they are "designed to serve the on-campus population of the university and not to attract additional traffic to campus." City planning officials created the ordinance with input from Durham's three colleges and neighborhoods near their campuses. A 'Main Street Village' Everyone agrees that the 1970s-era apartments on the Central Campus must be replaced. But Duke officials, who talk frequently about leaving their options open, have not been clear about such specifics as the kind of retail services the university wants to put on the Central Campus, how much space it plans to dedicate to those businesses, and how the new Central Campus, with retail outlets that would be tax-exempt, would complement locally owned businesses nearby, rather than hurt them. "We're certainly not trying to compete with anybody or build a destination shopping center," says Tallman Trask III, executive vice president at Duke and one of the key architects of the plan to remake the Central Campus. "People want me to give information based on what I don't know. Lots of things could happen with this. We just don't know." For the most part, the Central Campus has served as a thoroughfare between Duke's East and West Campuses, where most classroom buildings are located, since it was created almost 40 years ago. Duke officials want that to change. In the year or so of discussions about what the Central Campus could become, officials have talked of turning it into a "town center" or "Main Street village" of sorts over the next 50 to 75 years. The aging apartments on the Central Campus, where about 1,000 undergraduate and graduate students live, would be torn down and replaced with two multistory residence halls, says Scott F. Selig, associate vice president for capital assets, who oversees Duke's real-estate holdings. And Duke would work with developers to bring retail services to the Central Campus, possibly in the ground floor of the new residence halls. Duke's current retail offerings, scattered among all three campuses, are typical of many colleges and include a bookstore, a computer store, three convenience stores, and a Mexican cantina-style restaurant in the student center. Some of the retail outlets Duke already has could be relocated to the Central Campus, officials say. Over the next several decades, the Central Campus could also include offices and housing for faculty and staff members -- which would put part of the Central Campus back on Durham's property tax rolls. Other possibilities include a small hotel, a bowling alley, and an auditorium. No firm price tag has been attached to the redevelopment, but officials have estimated several hundred million dollars. "You get one shot to develop something like this," says Mr. Selig. "We want to make it a place that has an identity. Right now Central Campus is lacking that." Such a "town center" would be a "Duke place," Mr. Selig says. "Not something for all the region, or for Durham, but for Duke." Duke officials initially appeared to embrace the new zoning-district ordinance. Neighborhood groups found out, however, that Duke wanted to change parts of two clauses in the ordinance: "limited retail" and "on-campus population." Duke wanted the city to shave off the words "limited" and "on," which would broaden both the kinds of retail services that would be allowed and the customers they could serve. Residents sent e-mail messages to Duke officials, questioning the institution's motives. Although Duke eventually rescinded its request and removed the Central Campus from its proposed university district, some say the damage was done. "What happened doesn't make me feel so good," says Risa Foster, who works as a network systems analyst at Duke's Medical Center. She is also president of the Trinity Heights Neighborhood Association, which supported the zoning. "I love Duke. They're a good neighbor. But their neighbors and the city have reason to be interested in what they're doing." Neighborhood Watch Business owners and residents were determined to have some say. John Schelp, president of the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association, armed with in put from other neighborhoods and merchants, met Mr. Trask at a Ninth Street restaurant about a year ago. Over lunch, they talked through what kinds of development on the Central Campus would be least harmful to Ninth Street merchants and the community. They agreed that residence halls, restaurants, a 99-room hotel, a bowling alley, a performing-arts center, a Duke apparel store, and a bookstore with a coffee shop could all be deemed necessary to serve the needs of the students living on the campus. "We recognize that we live in an urban setting and that Duke is a large player," says Mr. Schelp, who acted as lead negotiator for the 12 neighborhoods surrounding Duke. "We were trying to be reasonable." Representatives from the neighborhoods endorsed the agreement and voted in favor of it. But a year later, Mr. Schelp and others began to think that the agreement didn't mean much. In March, at the first opportunity the public had to view the proposed plans for the Central Campus, Duke officials raised the possibility that the university might seek more than the agreed-upon retail services and that the university-college zoning might not be suitable either. In response, Kay Robin Alexander, a former Duke employee and a longtime grass-roots activist in Durham, wrote a letter that was published in The Herald-Sun, a local newspaper, that said people with no ties to Duke "will be drawn to the state-of-the-art 'town square' design the university plans to build on campus." Others wrote of Duke's plans to "Walmart-ize" the Central Campus. Groundbreaking for the first phase of the Central Campus transformation was to have started as early as this fall, but since the public meeting, the "train has slowed down a little bit," Mr. Schelp says. Trustees will hear details of the first phase of the redevelopment at an October meeting. Meanwhile, whatever Duke decides to do must also be approved by zoning officials. Mr. Trask says Duke officials cannot commit to "limited retail" because the exact meaning of the term is unclear to them. He says that city officials have preliminarily told Duke that what it wants to build appears to be "limited retail," but applying for a "mixed use" designation -- which paves the way for a wider range of retail options -- is a possibility. Jean Fox O'Barr, founding director of Duke's women's-studies program, lives close to the Central Campus on a street filled mostly with fellow faculty members. "We are all concerned with the nature of the development and the apparent lack of clarity in what is being proposed, promised [and] planned," said Ms. O'Barr in an e-mail message. Rom Coles, a political-science professor at Duke, e-mailed that although there has been some improvement in Duke's relationship with the "broader Durham community, many of us think there is still a long way to go before Duke is doing its full share." Indeed, Durham city leaders have long asked Duke to make an annual payment to the city in lieu of the property and sales taxes it doesn't have to pay because, as a nonprofit educational institution, it is largely tax-exempt. Just last month, Durham's city manager, in a letter to Ms. Keohane, asked Duke to pay $1-million a year for the next decade and give at least $10-million to help pay for a performing-arts center proposed for downtown. A few wealthy institutions, such as Harvard and Yale Universities, already make payments to their cities in lieu of taxes, and Tufts University recently agreed to do so. Duke officials say they might charge retailers enough rent to cover what Duke would pay in property taxes and then give that money to local government, but "we're not going to give up our tax-exempt status," says John F. Burness Sr., senior vice president for public affairs and government relations. Once people move into the homes likely to be built on Central Campus land, that would increase the density around Ninth Street, Mr. Burness says, "and traffic would increase over there." Ms. Anderson, one of the Ninth Street merchants, sees it differently. "I think it is inherently wrong," she says, "for an institution to make money off retail and be in competition in a city where they pay no taxes." source: http://chronicle.com   John Schelp is president of the Old West Durham Neighborhood Association, a Duke-Durham partnership neighborhood that includes Ninth Street. "Whatever I have done in the past, or may do in the future, Duke University is responsible in one way or another." -Richard Nixon Back to top