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