When the Gown Moves Downtown
Can universities be a positive contributor to urban revitalization?
Resting on hefty endowments, private universities can be a beneficial partner to struggling downtowns. However, the best interests of schools and cities do not always align. With these difficulties in mind, what role should universities play in their city or town’s development? Twenty years ago, downtown Durham was struggling and substantially vacated, but today the city’s center houses dozens of biotech companies, a suite of Google offices (with Meta on the way), and a growing skyline. What happened?
Scott Selig has served as Duke University’s Associate Vice President for Capital Assets and Real Estate for the past twenty-two years. At that time, Selig drafted and executed an answer to this question for Duke’s hometown. “Durham needed to get better if Duke was going to get better,” Selig remembered, “and we needed to help Durham get better.” This perspective fits with the symbiotic nature of Duke and Durham’s relationship. Throughout the past century, the two have leaned on each other for support, the head and shoulder roles switching as times changed. Duke was not always the benefactor in this relationship—the university’s infamous role in the failure of the Durham-Orange Light Rail is one example—but like a true friendship, Durham and Duke’s greatest accomplishments occur when they work in unison.
Likewise, Duke’s success in the early 2000s could not occur independently of Durham’s. When Selig took his position in 2001, Duke could have focused its real estate strategy on expanding on-campus office space and university centers. This approach, however, would not have served this dual purpose. Like many universities before it, Duke set its sights on the city.
In many ways, such an approach can come across as paternalistic at best and detrimental at worst. What does a private university know about the needs of a diverse city operating on behalf of more than 200,000 residents? Why should a resident trust an institution that answers to a distant board of directors, not to Durham voters? Given the city’s history of redevelopment projects that dramatically and disproportionately harmed its thriving Black community, how would an entity like Duke ensure their approach didn’t exacerbate past injuries? Not every question has a straightforward answer, but Duke’s partnership in Durham did its best to learn from others’ failures and act in Durham’s best interest.
Compared to other universities, Selig’s approach in Durham was new. In the short term, it would have been less expensive for Duke to buy up buildings in the downtown and redevelop them themselves, but Selig did not trust this strategy to serve Duke and Durham’s best interest. Other schools have tried this strategy, with poor results. In the case of Yale and New Haven, university input downtown resulted in the replacement of dozens of small businesses by national chains. “My main hope for Durham is that they stay authentic,” Selig says. “You go downtown and there isn’t a single chain. It won’t stay this way forever, but I hope downtown continues to be locally-owned.”
Duke’s current strategy leaves such decisions to the local community and market. Selig comes from a private real estate background. In his experience, the market is smarter than any university in deciding what businesses a downtown needs. A school that buys a lot of commercial property will have its good years, but it will be slow to respond to changing market forces and will experience drastic lulls in the off years. To work, a university can’t just be in downtown, it needs to become of downtown, putting the needs of the city first.
Selig’s strategy made Duke of downtown. When Duke began its plan to contribute to downtown Durham’s revitalization, the city was experiencing a lull. The blocks of grand old tobacco and textile mills—relics from decades of industrious prosperity in the city center—stood vacant and neglected. The weathered brick bones held immense potential, but their size and centrality made them massive endeavors for the wary developer. Someone needed to take the initial charge.
Duke’s strategy was to catalyze redevelopment, not monopolize it. Instead of buying a building, they offered to lease space in it, contingent on another tenant leasing a space as well. “Duke was the anchor tenant,” Selig explained. In the case of the American Tobacco Campus (ATC), for example, Duke agreed to lease 150 thousand square feet, after another tenant committed to do the same. This relatively small commitment catalyzed the redevelopment of the ATC’s more than one million square feet of commercial and office space. With the anchor in place, the ATC was reenvisioned as a local attraction and business hub, complete with a public park, venue space, eateries, shops, and upper-story housing.
Another example of Duke’s anchor tenant strategy is the redevelopment of West End. Bordered by some of Durham’s most compact residential neighborhoods (Burch Avenue to the north and Morehead Hill to the south), the similarly dense “West End” neighborhood has historically contained a short commercial strip of stores and services catering to the surrounding homes. Like many neighborhoods near downtown, West End experienced a decline in the latter half of the twentieth century and lost its eastern portion to freeway construction.
West End’s commercial strip sits squarely within a three-cornered system of streets that connects Duke’s West Campus, East Campus, and downtown Durham. It likewise held the potential to serve all three areas in addition to those immediately around it. To restore its commercial vibrancy, Duke signed a lease to an office building planned for the district’s westernmost corner.
The project, dubbed Kent Corner, was carried out by Self Help, a local credit union that works to expand low-income home ownership. Duke contributed funds to the redevelopment and signed on to occupy part of the office space once it was built. With Duke’s support, Self Help built a grocery co-operative, Durham Co-Op, on the lot adjacent to the office building. With an employment hub in place, vacant buildings around the office began to receive new life. Grub Durham, a locally owned and operated biscuits-and-more restaurant, now occupies a former gas station across the street.
Other examples of Duke’s strategy downtown include One City Center (5 stories of office and retail space under a luxury apartment tower), The Carmichael Building (a state-of-the-art research hub in a former tobacco mill), and Brightleaf Square (another tobacco renovation—this one into a mixed-use courtyard mall). Duke’s strategy is largely regarded as a success, and many attribute the rebirth of Durham directly to Duke and Selig.
But the approach is not without its critics. Ten years after the creation of Kent Corner, Selig receives backlash for a project that was originally well-received. The new brick against the old brick seems to many like a harbinger of gentrification, and the surrounding neighborhoods have experienced pricing pressures in the years since the project’s opening, as has the rest of the city. In reality, redevelopment tends to worsen neighborhood affordability, in the absence of protections. One such protection, the Durham Community Land Trustees, owns more than 130 rental units in West End and has ensured their sustained affordability.
Economic development will always be a game of tradeoffs. Though preservation and progress need not be at odds with each other, every decision will prioritize one over the other. As residents understandably lament what Duke could have done differently, the strategy remains one of the most successful case studies yet for university-initiated downtown revitalization. As campuses across the country–and the globe—look to Duke as a model for town-and-gown partnerships, the university’s next big test will be its response to the boom it helped build.
Adeleine Geitner is a rising senior at Duke University studying public policy and economics. She is the Duke Urban Studies Initiative Fellow on Sprawl Repair and Nodal Development.