Now, many fear the neighborhood’s gains could be erased with the sale of Newman Machine Co. to an Ohio company that plans to build Colonial-style student apartments across 10.5 acres of land on the southern flank of the neighborhood.
Situated between the western edge of downtown and UNCG, College Hill has long been home to a large number of students and post-collegiate renters, but members of the College Hill Neighborhood Association view their community’s demographic makeup as a delicate ecosystem.
“The neighborhood itself probably has more students than owner-occupiers,” said Ron Walters, captain of the community watch for the neighborhood and a leader in the fight to block the student apartments. “At what point does it become a tipping point? The neighborhood has been able to grow and thrive as it is. With these student apartments, if that happens, that would be the tipping point. Then it would go back into slum.”
Edwards Companies plans to build about nine apartment buildings on a site that sweeps through a tract between Spring Garden Street and the Norfolk-Southern Railroad and straddles Fulton Street west of Freeman Mill Road. Steve Simonetti, vice president of land acquisition and development for the Edwards Communities Development Corp., said his company has agreed to limit buildings to one story in most areas adjacent to existing single-family owneroccupied houses, and then to gradually increase to two and three stories as the building moves away from neighboring residents. In only one instance, a wall facing the low-lying Fulton Street, would any of the buildings reach four stories, he said. Simonetti said the company has whittled the number of students it plans to house down to 725 to try to allay the concerns of opponents.
The request is scheduled to come before the Greensboro Rezoning Commission on Dec. 14.
The past of the 1970s to which the residents fear returning is richly described in a 2006 Greensboro Department of Housing & Community Development report: “The public image of the neighborhood was at an all-time low. Violent crimes were not uncommon, and the shopping district on Tate Street had become notorious as a regional center for the 1960s counter-culture movement.” The report continues by noting that homeless squatters occupied abandoned industrial property.
City leaders have recognized the value of the neighborhood, and have backed residents who wanted to pull College Hill back from the brink.
“College Hill is a neighborhood with a turn-of-the-century appearance, a pedestrian place with the amenities of convenience, architectural charm, human scale and a sense of character,” reads the College Hill Concept Plan, approved by the Greensboro City Council in 1978. “A residential pocket tucked in between downtown and UNCG, it retains a quiet sense of undiscovered potential. But the seeds of eventual loss are also there — a gradual erosion around the edges and their replacement with low-grade apartments and parking lots.”
Over the past three decades, about $14 million in public funds has been invested in the neighborhood, the city reports, resulting in the substantial rehabilitation of about 100 houses and the addition of 150 new housing units. Illustrating the return on the city’s investment, the Housing & Community Development Department reports that $1.8 million of combined federal Community Development Block Grant funds and voter-approved Neighborhood Renewal Bond bunds, matched by $500,000 in private funds, were poured into the rehabilitation of 27 substandard houses with a payoff of $5.5 million in tax value today.
The 2006 report anticipates the Edwards Companies’ interest in the land: “While College Hill has improved dramatically since the beginning of the Target Area program, current residents should take nothing for granted. College Hill is a small neighborhood located side-by-side with a large state university. A small but growing private college is located within the boundary of the neighborhood. There is bound to be pressure for change in the neighborhood from these two sources in the future. The restoration of historic homes has slowed noticeably in recent years and the level of homeownership is still quite low. It would be nave to consider the problems addressed in the Concept Plan as solved ‘once and for all.’ Rather they should be considered ‘under control.’” Students and post-collegiate renters have long been a significant part of the mix in College Hill. A block east of the Tate Street commercial strip, the intersection of Spring Garden and South Mendenhall streets accommodates a lively scene several nights a week. Young people throng College Hill Sundries, which occupies a late- 19 th century Italianate brick structure that has previously served as a grocery store and pharmacy. The student and hipster patrons line up in front of a hotdog stand that does late-night business and buy beer across the street at the University General Store, a building that once housed a fire station.
For many of the homeowners living near the intersection, the noise from College Hill Sundries is occasionally an annoyance, but at least they can talk directly to the bar’s local owners the next morning. In fact, College Hill Sundries has agreed to hold a benefit to raise money for the campaign to defeat the rezoning, said Melanie Bassett, an artist who lives adjacent to the Newman Machine property. In contrast, the residents fear that the Edwards Companies will be an unaccountable and unresponsive neighbor.
“I used to complain about the noise, but it turned out that it was my son playing,” joked Shirley Horth, who lives less than a block away from College Hill Sundries and within eyesight of the proposed student apartments. Horth’s son, Marcus, plays in the popular Greensboro jam band the Mantras.
“We certainly believe our project is something that can significantly benefit College Hill,” Simonetti said. “By offering students an alternative to the singlefamily rented units currently in College Hill, which are arguably 60 to 70 percent of the neighborhood, if they have an alternative, we think it will benefit the neighborhood because the students will come to our apartments and those houses that are single-family can be cleaned up and sold to owner-occupiers.
The Edwards Companies has picked up a powerful ally in Bill Burckley, a political consultant who helped Bill Knight win his recent mayoral election. Burckley moved into the neighborhood from Glenwood with his wife in 1983, and he soon became the president of the College Hill Neighborhood Association. He was elected to the first of two terms on city council in 1987.
Throughout his tenure with the neighborhood association, Burckley built political capital and acquired rental properties in College Hill. On Sunday afternoon, he sat on the porch of the Nathaniel HD Wilson House, a majestic residence built before the Civil War that Burckley bought in the mid-1980s. All told, Burckley said he and his wife have invested $1.5 million in the block of West Market Street between Mendenhall and Tate streets.
“My wife and I, as far as anyone living in the neighborhood, we have the biggest investment,” he said.
The Burckleys also own two residential properties that lie within a city block of the proposed apartments. They plan to invest $250,000 in one of the properties.
“I would be crazy to invest that kind of money if I didn’t think I was going to get it back,” Bill Burckley said.
He acknowledged that he is being compensated for his consulting services, but declined to say how much he is receiving.
“If I’m not going to fight the rezoning, you want me to assist — hell yeah,” he said with a laugh.
Burckley is urging the opponents to negotiate with the Edwards Companies, arguing that if the multi-family rezoning doesn’t go through, the property will likely wind up in the hands of the university, which might obtain institutional zoning with no minimum parking or setback requirements.
“I worked between the devil and the deep blue sea on this,” Burckley said. “If I had my druthers I would not have the Edwards Companies here. But you’ve got this 800-pound gorilla with UNCG.”
Mike Byers, UNCG’s associate vice chancellor for business affairs, said the state property office in Raleigh offered to pay Newman Machinery $3 million to acquire the property for the university in April. Newman Machinery turned down the offer, which was the state’s appraised value, and ended up entertaining a more lucrative offer from the Edwards Companies.
“If it were back on the market, we might make an offer,” Byers said. “It’s crazy for an institution that’s going to be here for centuries to not pay attention to something like that.
Byers said that if the university was to acquire the Newman Machinery property, it would probably demolish the buildings right away, but it could be years before any redevelopment took place. He said the tract would not accommodate enough beds to be a practical site for an on-campus dorm, but the university has “a desperate need” for administrative space and recreation fields.
Bassett and her fellow opponents view the prospect of UNCG taking over the property as a scare tactic, and they contend both the neighborhood and the city’s long-term investment would be better served with a smaller-scale, mixed-use development in the new urbanist style, along the lines of the award-winning Southside project, which was subsidized by $6.3 million in voter-approved bonds. An alternative development could also incorporate some of the Newman Machinery buildings, which were built in 1906, in much the same way that Revolution Mill has been adapted to office space, they say.
Preservation Greensboro has taken up the rezoning opponents’ cause, and Executive Director Benjamin Briggs argued on the nonprofit’s blog that Southside and Revolution Mill “typify the dynamic redevelopment potential of the Newman site as an economic asset that would continue redevelopment initiatives witnessed in College Hill over the past 30 years.”
Briggs said he has talked to a couple developers with experience in preservation projects that are potentially interested in the Newman Machinery property.
“This is a beautiful tract of land,” Bassett said. “It has a great view of downtown. I can’t see developers not wanting to buy it. It is College Hill.
College Hill residents Shirley Horth, Ann Curtis, Ron Walters and Melanie Bassett (l-r) oppose a plan by the Edwards Companies to build a student apartment complex at the Newman Machine Co. site. (photo by Jordan Green).
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