Housing <> Rail Trails | Belong Together

Durham's Rail Trail will be cool. Could have been better. Lacks housing.

I was playing tennis with Rory Dowling, a private-public partnership developer and a graduate of UNC’s planning and business schools, and we were gabbing about Atlanta’s Beltline, He said, “I hope Durham’s is going to be similar”, crossing his fingers. Sadly, I had to pour water on his vision. The Durham Rail Trail is not going to be similar.

The City of Durham unveiled a new Durham Rail Trail video on its YouTube channel on June 17, 2024. Like the proposed plan, the video is gold-plated.

The plan was produced by McAdams, one of North Carolina’s major civil engineering firms—responsible for many of the region’s big infrastructure projects.

The video shows what most of us already know (as this trail has been in planning for nearly a decade). The trail itself is relatively short. It runs from the downtown train station through West Village, loops through Pearl Mill Village, crosses Washington Street, and eventually turns east toward Old North Durham. One day, as the plan implies, it might circle around to Golden Belt, but that rail spur is still (lightly) active with a train or so a week serving a concrete mill.

The planned trail cuts through neighborhoods north of downtown.

It’s a beautiful plan—well-rendered, ambitious, and clearly expensive.

I don’t oppose the project. I’m glad to see it finally moving after years of delay. But I have to admit: the way this project has evolved runs counter to my values.

THE DELINQUENT CASE FOR INCREMENTALISM

As many of you know, I teach with the Incremental Development Alliance, and I believe cities grow best organically—through many small, steady steps rather than rare, massive, media-tailored ribbon-cuttings. Infrastructure, unfortunately, is almost always the latter kind. Governments tend to build in big, expensive bursts, while citizens tend to build smaller and smarter.

My fear with projects like this is that they skip the learning-as-you-go process. If we had simply cleared and paved the trail ten years ago, we’d have a decade of local life layered in by now: pop-up gardens, food stalls, maybe a café or two, and small homes along the edge. That would have been more Durham.

The McAdams plan is undeniably polished. I just worry it won’t feel like ours.
I hope I’m wrong. After all, the High Line in New York was a big, bold project—and yet it somehow captured its neighborhood’s spirit.

For what it’s worth, I’ve never believed The Durham Rail Trail is a transportation play. Though it is often pitched in public meetings as “transit”, the Rail Trail doesn’t connect major destinations; it winds through beautiful but relatively low-density neighborhoods. It’ll be an amenity, a very nice one at that, but it is not a commuter route, and I found it misleading when people pitched it as that.

WHERE’S THE BEEF / HOUSING?

What disappoints me most is that the city hasn’t pursued housing opportunities along the corridor—something I’ve been urging for years. Every time I’ve raised the issue in public forums, the conversation gets derailed by the usual reflexive slogans, all common nouns: gentrification, equity, affordability. In meeting after meeting, these words get thrown around as tools of obstruction, rarely (if ever) linked to specifics on how we actually do anything about those issues.

As a result, the corridor will mostly remain middle- to upper-end single-family housing, with a few working-class rentals, which will no doubt face accelerated knockdown pressure due to the lack of aggressive new housing construction in the area. It will be the latest death spiral of discourse in Durham- gentrification caused by people complaining about gentrification obstructing the very things that would lessen the existence of gentrification.

In Durham, we’ve inverted logic. And the inversion is leading to a worse city. How does it work? We’re told that adding housing displaces people, and that restricting housing somehow protects renters. Both claims are empirically false, but that’s the discourse we’re stuck in—and the broad acceptance of these inversions functionally means that no new housing will rise along this extraordinary corridor.

That’s a huge loss.

The Atlanta beltline has transformed the city, and it’s nowhere near done. via Planetizen.

To understand what could have been, just look at Atlanta’s BeltLine: it took the ass end of abandoned industrial buildings and turned them into some of the South’s best urban development. It’s created thousands of new homes, new life, and a clear civic identity. It funded massive parks with district stormwater treatment, which they could afford thanks to new tax revenue from the dense, greenway-oriented development. It’s so successful that they’re now planning to add rail transit to it (which I think is a bad idea, but that’s another story).

After advocating for bike routes, incremental housing, and city action, I don’t see much hope for greenway-oriented development (GOD) in Durham. For those interested in understanding the potential of GOD, check out the series done by Southern Urbanism fellow Sonia Birla.

I AM STILL DREAMING

I am still stuck imagining what could have been: The American Tobacco Trail lined with pocket neighborhoods. And what could be: The Roxboro Rail Trail hosting Copenhagen-style courtyard cohousing. And a holy grail: An East Coast Greenway with little hospitality villages every 50 miles or so, hosting through-cyclists on their way from Key West to Canada with curated local experiences along the way.

The East Coast Greenway will be amazing. Imagine how much more amazing it would be with hospitality villages all along it.

But I’ve come to accept that my city isn’t built to think this way. People like me can design, propose, even build these places—but we’ll always be marching uphill against the forever war on some common noun.

In this world, transit and housing are destined to be separated. And housing is bound to be reduced, expensive, and disconnected.

Still, Durham deserves better—and maybe, just maybe, this trail will prove me wrong.

Here’s to the hope.

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