- On a special "Black Issues Forum", we'll visit historically Black neighborhoods in two of the Triangle's hottest real estate markets, and meet developers on a mission to interrupt gentrification and build Black generational wealth.

- [Announcer] "Black Issues Forum" is a production of PBS North Carolina, with support from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Quality Public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you, who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ - Welcome to this special edition of "Black Issues Forum."

I'm Deborah Holt Noel.

We know that in the Black community, home ownership is key to building generational wealth.

But after COVID hit in 2020, housing prices skyrocketed, and Black home buying practically came to a standstill.

In fact, many traditionally and historically Black neighborhoods like Hayti here in Durham became targets for investment and development.

And today, they don't look anything like they once did.

We're gonna learn a little bit more about these neighborhoods and also meet some developers who are creating opportunities to create Black generational wealth.

We start with Marcus Greene in Durham.

Tell me a little bit about this neighborhood in terms of its heritage as a Black neighborhood.

- Well, we're currently right now here on Fayetteville Street, which is in the heart of the Hayti community.

Over 90% of the residents here in the early 20s were all African-American here in this community.

So this area, we're at the epicenter of the Black community.

This is 1211 Fayetteville Street in the heart of the Hayti community.

This property was built by a doctor, Napoleon Mills.

He was a very prominent doctor in the early 20s.

He sat on the board of the Mechanics and Farmers Bank, which is an African-American bank here in Durham.

Also was the medical director at Lincoln Hospital, which is a African-American established hospital here in the Hayti community.

Also served as the physician at North Carolina Central University.

So Napoleon Mills has a very strong legacy here in the Hayti area.

- Can we take a look inside?

- Oh, definitely.

- Great.

- So Deborah, we're here in the front foyer of the home.

As you can see, we're trying to keep as many of the original features of the home as possible.

This actual curio was an original feature back in 1917 of the Napoleon Mills family.

So we want to keep and preserve this.

So we're gonna restore this curio, as well as this banister, the railings.

And it is a very stately piece that we're trying to restore and bring back to its original.

- [Deborah] And the floor?

- The floor is a pine floor that we will restore.

This is the original floor that we are going to site sand and polyurethane and bring it back.

This is the original granite that was used in 1917 to erect this house.

You could look at the detail here.

The grapevining of the mortar is attention to detail that's not really used anymore.

- And did you use original materials as you built the columns and the rest of the home?

- Our goal was to salvage as much of the original material as possible.

So this column here, this wood here, was the original wood of the house.

And so we have repurposed it and we also had to add some new wood to take care of the wood that was rotted.

But we definitely tried to use all the original that we could.

- [Deborah] Well clearly, in its heyday, Black people were really contributing to the economic growth, not only of their own neighborhood, but of the surrounding area.

- The amount of businesses here on the Fayetteville Street corridor is staggering.

In the 20s, in the roaring 20s, we were at the height.

There were over 200 African-American businesses along the Fayetteville Street Court in the historic Hayti area alone.

And currently right now, we still, this area still houses the most concentration of African-American business in the state.

- And here we're experiencing in Durham, tremendous economic growth and development.

How much would you say Blacks are participating in those economic benefits?

- Unfortunately, I wish I could say we are benefiting tremendously, but if you look at any poll, any statistic, African American wealth is at the bottom of those polls.

Here in North Carolina, and we're no different than the rest of the country, we're at the bottom of those polls.

However, the percentage of African Americans that live here in Durham, we are a overwhelming majority.

We are 37% African American here.

However, we don't receive in direct proportion 37% of what we are here to do.

But I'm here to hopefully have a positive change in that.

And in my opinion, it starts with imagery.

So as people ride up and down Fayetteville Street, and they see people that look like them restoring things in their neighborhood, hopefully this project could be a catalyst for some change.

We really want to provide and show that we can do it.

My role is to be very transparent about what I do, how I do, and to show others that they can be a part of this as well.

And so I really want to pay homage to how our forefathers in this historic Fayetteville-Hayti area, how this was built, and it was built on real estate.

- I also visited the city of Raleigh, and met LeVelle Moton, well known as North Carolina Central University's championship-winning men's basketball coach, but rapidly making a name for his development company, Raleigh Raised.

He shared his vision for wealth building through home ownership and housing stability.

So where are we right now?

- They call it LeVelle Moton Park now, formerly Lane Street Park.

And this is my neighborhood, this is home.

This is exactly where I grew up.

So it's the place that changed my life, and created the fabric and the DNA of who I am.

And this is the basketball court where I spent the bulk of my time trying to master my craft and you know, dreaming to get my mom and my grandmother out of the projects so we could have a better life for ourselves.

- [Interviewer] And now one of the projects that you have is the Cottages of Idle Wild, tell me about that project.

- It's personal.

It's probably the most personal project to me, because it's home for me.

It's right across the street.

It's where my grandmother lived, 911 East Lane Street.

I look over there, I get chills, I still get emotional.

I can hear her voice calling me like, "Puffy, come over here..." The store was right here to run.

So you know, I look over there, and not many people get an opportunity to, number one, be a developer, but be a developer back in your own community, number two.

But develop your old home, right?

Your old stumping grounds.

So it's really critical for me to be actively involved.

And you know, sometimes I show a lot more passion to them, and they be like, where's all this passion coming from?

And I'm just like, bear with me, because this is deeply personal to me, right?

And so it's gonna be 17 units, four of 'em market rate, 13 are affordable.

But it's critical because I always told them the the first fundamental right of generational wealth in this country is home ownership, right?

We've been deprived of that, you know, through systematic circumstances, through redlining, et cetera, the list goes on and on.

But we are where we are now.

And so you ask yourself, how can we change this?

And one of the ways to change it is to start giving people affordable housing, and also give them some equity where they could pass down to their next generation.

Because other people that's not from this neighborhood, we grew up thinking they worked extremely hard and so on and so forth.

And they probably did, but they had a head start, because they were able to pass some home ownership equity down to their sons and daughters.

- And here we sit in a park.

- Yes.

- [Interviewer] That is now called LeVelle Moton Park.

- Yeah.

- So what used to be here?

And what's it mean to you now to be sitting in this park that's named after you?

- It's amazing, because this is probably the only time I've ever sat down in this park.

You know, you see the sliding boards and the monkey bars and all of those things.

Well, none of this was right here, this was just a path.

Right here was a store, and this was a path.

And you pretty much had to be careful when you walk back here amongst this path.

The basketball court, it looks the same, although they've had some refurbishing done to it.

But it was one way in and one way out, right?

And so a lot of times, that made it dangerous because every week something was happening up here, right?

A fight or somebody shooting or something.

The ironic thing about this being LeVelle Moton Park, is that my mother never allowed me to be up here, right?

I would get in deep trouble, right?

Heavy spankings back then, right?

And she had eyes because back then everyone... My grandma could look out her window and see that I was up here playing.

So I would wait for it to get packed.

And my mom didn't want me up here because it was really no place for a 10 year old to be up here, right?

And this was during the inception of crack cocaine.

And so once that drug hit, it just became, things changed and shifted in our communities, right?

Everything became you know, every man for himself.

You know, pretty much kids that was my age was being recruited to sell the drug.

Most people was involved in the gang, or the, I'm sorry, the drug activity in some fashion or form because they were selling it to take care of their families or using it to deal with the fact that they couldn't, right?

And so my mom said, "No, this is no place for you to be up here."

But I just loved basketball so much that it became my sanctuary.

And I always wanted to be up here.

So my mom would catch me up here, give me a whooping, put me on punishment, and I'll come right back up here.

And so that's the ironic - That was the ironic thing.

So I think after a period of time she just started praying for me and for my safety.

But it's definitely no place a 10-year-old should have been hanging out.

- But now, this is a beautiful park.

- It's incredible, it's beautiful.

The city has done a magnificent job of cleaning up some things and putting some landscape and all of these things around, and they're beautified it.

And so, they have the statue, they have the murals, they have some incredible flowers.

And I always see people, I get tagged every day on social media with someone taking a picture right there tagging me.

And so I think it's a beautiful thing, but it's just a testament to the people in the community that pretty much invested in me, because you don't get here alone.

And so, some of those people they took care of me when I couldn't take care of myself.

AU trips were expensive, I couldn't afford that.

And so, a lot of the ladies in the community will sell fish plates just for me.

And give me the money so I could go on a trip.

So, me coming back here, me doing what I do back in the community, it's not only a moral obligation it's a social responsibility.

And I get asked the question all the time, why you do so much?

And my answer is simple, 'cause so much was done for me.

- To learn more about Black neighborhoods in Raleigh, their establishment and development, I sat down with Carmen Wimberley Cauthen, author of "Historic Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh".

Why do you think it's important to know that some of these spaces are historically Black neighborhoods?

- The book is "Historical Black Neighborhoods of Raleigh".

Part of the importance is the fact that the neighborhoods were created after slavery ended.

And there were just so many formerly enslaved people coming into Raleigh.

Not to mention there were already enslaved people who had been freed who were here and there had to be somewhere for them to stay.

Some of them stayed in the camp that had been set up at Camp Russell, but any number of them would work and could pay rent and real estate investors would buy the land had bought land from estates that where the owners had died or some of the estates had to be sold, because when the war, during the war, the families would send their money, their family, their literally their slaves to take care of the family members to the war.

And so, taxes didn't always get paid.

And so, some of the property had to be sold for taxes.

And real estate investors were buying the land and dividing it into little small narrow lots.

So they could put little small houses, or duplexes, or whatever, on those lots for the formerly enslaved people to live in.

And they would put as many lots as they could get on a piece of property.

And so, whereas in Mordecai or Oakwood you would have lots that were maybe half an acre or larger.

Southeast Raleigh in the Freedman's villages you might have 10 or 12 lots to an acre and they would be narrow.

So, the people might be able to afford to purchase the house after a period of time, but not always.

So, that's why a lot of that property remained rental.

And the other thing is, it was not just poor, formerly enslaved people.

It was poor white people who were also living in these same neighborhoods.

The neighborhoods were not segregated in the poor part of town, but white people as they began to make money could move out.

Black people were not allowed to move out.

So they stayed in these neighborhoods and the lands were plotted with the Register of Deeds in those tiny spaces.

- Carmen, how did the Black middle-class emerge from some of these neighborhoods?

- Raleigh's fortunate to have had Shaw Institute, which became Shaw University and Saint Augustine's University, that was a prep school when it started.

Both in the same town.

And that's unusual for historically Black colleges and universities.

And the Black middle-class grew up in between those two.

So you can drive the streets in between those two schools and see a difference in the size of the housing even the size of what's being built now, because the land was a little bit larger, the divides were not as small.

And generally, people who worked at the universities or at the colleges would live right close by.

And even the staff who worked, not just the administration, the teachers, but whoever the staff was that worked would live right around.

And so, you can tell when you look across the street from Shaw University.

And Shaw University is sitting on the side of a former plantation.

Across the street, you see the Frazier House.

Mr. Frazier, Charles Frazier, was a Black man who had his home built, he was the treasurer of Mechanics and Farmers Bank.

And the other interesting thing was that as a neighborhood was built, there was generally a church.

There was some type of learning facility for young people.

And coming right out of slavery, Black people recognized that education was the way to go.

And so, classes would be set up so the American Missionary Society, the American Baptist Society, all, they sent teachers to the South.

That was a mission.

It was a mission field.

That's why Henry Tupper came and built Shaw University.

It was his mission field and that's what he wanted to do.

And so they would make sure there was a school set up.

And when the schools were set up, children would go to school during the day.

And the adults would crowd, overcrowd the schools at night, because they knew that it was just as important for them to learn and be educated, as it was for their children, in order for them to have a better life.

- [Interviewer] You don't get this history in schools, but I think it would be valuable to know.

- It would be very valuable to know.

It'd be very valuable for, especially for young African-Americans now, to know that their families created something.

Because so often, they're still told, young people, Black people, are still told, like I was, when I was grown and working, that Black people didn't do anything.

You didn't create anything.

You didn't make anything.

And I knew that wasn't true.

But when you hear that, or you don't see, if you don't know, and you don't see the effect of what has occurred, it's just like it's invisible.

And this is invisible history.

And so it was important to bring it forward.

- Finally, I visited developer James Montague of F7 Development, another entrepreneur from humble beginnings with ambitious plans to give back through his projects in both Raleigh and Durham.

Monty, what phase of development are we in right now, and what's your vision for Montague Plaza?

- We're currently at the framing stage, which we're standing up the walls of the construction.

We did the foundation last week.

The roof trusses and the stuff will be put on starting Friday.

So this is, what we're trying to do is called a close in.

- Okay.

- And get it to the point where the weather won't affect us because we'll be working under roof.

- Gotcha, so what's gonna be in here?

What am I seeing?

- So, what you'll be seeing, and this is how I visualize projects.

You'll be seeing a restaurant on the front space.

You'll be seeing like salon, braid shop, barbershop.

You'll be seeing Einnaf Cosmetics, which is a distribution and manufacturer of cosmetics for women's products.

You'll be seeing a STEM center over here, Science, Technology, Engineering and Math, related to building trades and construction.

So we're trying to get the young folks into construction because trades are very important, especially with the growth of Raleigh right now.

So as you see, we're like right beside Southeast Raleigh High School.

So we're actually going to create a joint walkway between Montague Plaza and Southeast Raleigh High School and we're gonna call it the Path of Progress.

- I love that.

That's so exciting.

- Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

- So when you have the path of progress, - Yes.

- Coming through here, you obviously had a vision for doing something for this neighborhood.

What's it mean to you to actually be in this location in Raleigh doing this work?

- It means a tremendous amount to me, simply because I'm from this area and I actually grew up like two blocks away on this side.

If you go down the street right here, it's called Southgate Drive.

I grew up a block from Southgate Drive.

So literally being in the community that I grew up in, was born and raised, and be able to give back, and to sow seeds of greatness into the youth, it means everything to me.

- [Deborah] Wow.

What would you say your mission is at F7?

- My mission is to create affordable housing, as well as opportunities in commercial and retail development.

And to primarily show people in the community that they can do things great in their communities.

All they have to do is find a problem and figure out a way to solve the problem for the community.

We're doing projects in Dunn, we're doing stuff in Rocky Mount, we're doing things in Durham now.

We built an apartment complex in Gulfport, Mississippi.

We actually did a hospital project in Osogbo, Nigeria.

We did a hospital project there in 2008.

So we've done projects pretty much all over the place.

- [Deborah] That's amazing.

It's just really amazing.

What would you say is your biggest project to date?

- The biggest project that I've done?

Or the biggest projects on the board?

Well, lemme say the biggest project that we've done is probably this project, which is Elders Peak.

We built this back in 2004.

This was a $4.8 million construction build project.

We took it from the ground up.

- It's worth about $10 million today, but the biggest project that we have on the board is Legacy Place, which is up the street.

We're talking about maybe billion-dollar project right here in Southeast Raleigh.

We've partnered with Word of God Church, Pastor Mitch Summerfield, and we're gonna do something different with the church.

We're building a whole little community there, mixed use, mixed income development.

We're going through the rezoning process now.

So that's a major project.

Another big project is in Durham.

We're doing the Fayette Place project in partnership with Gilbane and Greystone.

Those are my partners along with the Durham Housing Authority.

So we'll be doing a mixed use, mixed income development there with an innovation center on 20 acres about a block from downtown in Durham.

- [Deborah] As you probably know, Southeast Raleigh is one of many communities, neighborhoods that's gentrifying.

- Yes.

- Are you part of that Gentrification?

- Not part of the gentrification.

I wanna look at how we're doing things as rejuvenation.

Gentrification has a ugly kinda like idea behind it.

Some people hear "gentrification " and say it's bad because in some places, it is bad.

I mean, if you're looking around like downtown, those whole communities are gone, like literally gone.

They are really streets that you go on downtown Raleigh and nobody that was there 20 years ago is living there now.

That's not the way it's supposed to be done.

Why can't we figure out a way to include and then endow the people that have been there with opportunities to stay and pass things on to their generations, their kids and their grandkids to be able to build equity in those houses?

That's not what we did in Raleigh.

And I don't like the way it was done, so when you talk about gentrification, I'm not a gentrifier.

I wanna be a person that comes and creates opportunities, and I want people that were born and raised here to be able to stay here and not be taxed out or not be code enforced out.

That's not fair.

- [Deborah] What message would you like your work to send to young people who may be in the position that you were, you know, growing up on Southgate?

- Well, I would want them to have faith, but I would want them to walk in their faith and not just say they believe they can do something.

You actually have to take steps to do those things because I believe that faith without works is dead.

So you can talk all you want, you can have all these grand plans, but if you don't understand how to animate those plans and initiate those plans and stick with them to the end, they won't make any difference.

And you wanna make a difference.

You don't wanna waste your time.

Life is too short to not only waste anybody else's time, but it's too short for you to waste your own time.

So what I would want them to do is figure out a way not to waste their time.

Life is a lot shorter than you think it is.

I remember when I was 14 years old and 12 years old in Southgate jumping the creek, playing with crayfish, you know, not worrying about a thing, and here I am today 52 years old.

It was like [snaps fingers] like this.

So I would tell them not to waste their time and also be careful of who you hang around because you are the five people that you hang around.

So make sure you make good company, and make sure that you don't hang around people that are not going in a direction that you wanna go for your life.

- For more on the work of the guests featured in today's program, please visit us online at pbsnc.org.

This has been a special edition of "Black Issues Forum" in the community.

I'm Deborah Holt Noel.

Thanks for watching.

[upbeat music] ♪ ♪ - [Announcer] "Black Issues Forum" is a production of PBS North Carolina with support from the Z. Smith Reynolds Foundation.

Quality public television is made possible through the financial contributions of viewers like you who invite you to join them in supporting PBS NC.