New Condos for Downtown Durham

[dmccall]

"Durham - Maverick Partners Realty Services, Inc. has been retained as exclusive sales agents for Mangum 506, a brand new condominium project planned for Downtown Durham."

http://triangle.dbusinessnews.com/shownews...ype_news=latest

Wow! 22 condos and 5,000 sq feet of retail. I guess you have to start somewhere. This is good for Durham, but reminds me how well Raleigh is doing with these things. Units will go in the 100K-200K range.

[krazeeboi]

Boy, it seems like Durham gets the least amount of love in the Triangle.

[orulz]

According to the article, the unveiling is today, so we should hear some more details about this pretty soon.

What strikes me most about this project is the price of the condos. Quite inexpensive! I wonder what sort of square footage we're talking about?

[NCMike1981]

I wish that all of these company's who recently bought buildings for investment only would get off their...butts...and either renovate them or sell them to a company who is willing to do more with them then just let them appreciate in value while deteriorating slowly....That seems to be a problem in downtown Durham, although it is ever so slowly changing...

[DanRNC]

This story gives Durham a little love.

Link

[urbanesq]

cool news. like downtown Raleigh, downtown Durham will be a totally differnt place in 5-10 years. I like that there is a private-sector effort to provide market rate affordable housing. It's the kind of variety we need in the overall triangle marketplace.

[DanRNC]

More love for downtown Durham. Private investment keeps pouring in luckily. I have to say the less that Durham government is involved the better.

Herald-Sun Story

[urbanvb]

According to a report in my Hampton Roads newspaper, Durham is the nineth hottest housing market in the US. I think these figures are off though b/c the avg price for a house here is at min of $200k and prob more like $220-$230k.

[dmccall]

If I'm not mistaken, it's all sprawl growth with big, nice houses pushing this median up. I don't think a ranch from the 60's in the middle of Durham has increased that much.

[yfreemark]

Here's the link for the project's site:

Mangum 506

And a Picture:

[DanRNC]

Mangum506 looks pretty funky-which is a nice change from red brick. Greg Hatem (Empire Properties) is also renovating some buildings downtown for residential lofts and a restaurant.

N&O Story

[NCMike1981]

I'm not too sure I like the purple and lime green myself but hey sounds like a good project...

[urbanesq]

if this were 15 stories taller it would be VERY New York. I'm not sure how I feel about the colors, but looks like a nice scale overall.

[Sharpless]

Thus looks like it's going to be a great development. I only wish housing like this existed when I first looking.

It's amazing how articles in the Raleigh paper always manage to insert some kind of crime or negative reference into any story dealing with Durham.

[urbanesq]

It's amazing how articles in the Raleigh paper always manage to insert some kind of crime or negative reference into any story dealing with Durham.

amazing, Sharpless, and it's a shame, but sadly it's also very true. It would be neat to whitewash the crime and extreme poverty situation in Durham, but would also be totally dishonest. We lived there for a couple of years (near East Campus), and loved our house but never felt safe-- we were victim to regular petty crimes, there were persistent, threatening activities like 11pm door-step solicitations, attempted break-ins, close-by drive-bys, and one of my wife's best friends was the victim of a horrible assault.

We love Durham and the real sense of community that lives there; we love the arts there, all the neat stuff to do, the cool people, the awesome architecture in the historic areas, and I really admire all the positive things that are happening there. But until the poverty situation is addressed so the crime situation can abate, we couldn't in good conscience continue to raise our kids in that environment.

[urbanvb]

Does Durham have the same program as the Wake county school sytem where as they place mix the poverty children with the more advantaged?

[NCMike1981]

I grew up living near the Guess Rd/Broad St intersection, down the street from Northgate Mall and Brogden Middle School and that area has definately changed over the years. It really saddens me too. I have actually managed to figure out a reason for my old neighborhoods change though. The houses in that area where pretty much built in the mid '40's to early '50's in the post WW2 boom. My grandparents bought a house in 1948 at Leon St and Broad St for something like $6,000. When I was a kid in the '80's my mom rented in several houses in this area, eventually moving to Palm Park Apartments by Brogden Middle School around '87. I basically grew up in this area knowing all of the people on my street (those in the homes, I didn't know every1 in Palm Park lol) and quite a few on the surrounding streets. In almost every single house on the street lived elderly people who had bought the houses brand new in the '40's or so, and had spent their life living there. Well one by one they died. Yes I became accustomed to death as a child b/c of this, and the area's demographics began to change. The elderly homeowers were replaced by renters, and the houses started to lose their neat appearances, neighbors stopped knowing each other, and they built that damn Costco/Kroger Shopping Center in the late '90's which added alot of traffic and noise to all of the surrounding 2 lane neighborhood streets. The same thing happened in Palm Park. We lived in an apartment across from the pool, and all of our neighbors were elderly for the most part, with a few families mixed in. Then the elderly started aging, moving out or dying, families moved away and the apartment complex started getting a reputation for crime. My mom moved us in '95 to Hillsborough, right before the start of my freshman year in HS. I really didn't want to move out to the "country" but I didn't have a say.

My grandparents died in '91 and '00, my grandmother lived there until months before her death, when my uncle moved into the house. Unfortunately the house has been broken into about 1/2 a dozen times and he has to chain up things outside, like his lawnmower and weedeater. Not too mention all of the traffic from that shopping center (which is way too big for that area IMO, thy should have built a more integrated shopping center with single family homes or maybe student apartments). I was talking to my mom a while back and she said that she wouldn't want my little sister (who is currently 3 1/2) growing up in that area b/c she doesn't think it's safe anymore. Yet I have so many wonderful memories of things that have come and gone, and growing up in the city. I'm sort of happy that I spent so many years living in an area where I could walk to so many things, like school, the convenience store, the mall (and the Harris Teeter that was there), several parks. It kind of saddens me that my little sister will never know what that's like, b/c my mom thinks it's better if she grows up living in suburbia. Oh well, maybe she's right, who am I to say.

Ok well this is an incredibly long posting. Thank you for listening, just thought I'd tell u guys about my perspective of growing up in Durham. There may be some bad things about the city but I believe there is also alot of good and it has tons of potential for any1 willing to look past the stereotypes.

[urbanesq]

There may be some bad things about the city but I believe there is also alot of good and it has tons of potential for any1 willing to look past the stereotypes.

absolutely. it's a great, authentic city with vast potential to be one of the leading cultural centers of the Southeast. hope my post earlier wasn't viewed as overly negative-- just in our experience we couldn't continue to raise our kids there. I should add that we didn't completely bail-- both my wife and I are involved in community efforts there to mitigate the causes of urban poverty (which, I think, is the root cause of 99.9% of Durham's issues).

Thanks for sharing your experience; it paints a picture in personal terms of what so many similar neighborhoods experience in cities all over the place.

[urbanesq]

Does Durham have the same program as the Wake county school sytem where as they place mix the poverty children with the more advantaged?

No. Durham's public school are in a shambles, due in no small part to the fact that the flight to the suburbs was accompanied by the establishment of a half-dozen private schools. The wealthy kids, for the most part, go to private schools while the poor kids stay in public schools.

There are, of course, pockets of incredible success, like the privately-funded Durham Scholars program. Although I think that shut down this year, but I could be wrong.