Eric Connor

econnor@greenvillenews.com

The Swamp Rabbit Trail has brought millions of dollars of investment and economic activity, from the re-imagined Travelers Rest downtown, through the heart of Greenville — and, even now, at the mere prospect of a trail expansion along Laurens Road toward the suburbs.

The success story is well-documented.

Hundreds of thousands of people each year flock to the nearly 20-mile trail, largely converted from abandoned railroad beds. Well-funded investment firms have poured millions into land buys along the path. Local entrepreneurs, looking to chart new territory for their creative visions, have carefully studied their demographic and worked to secure affordable leases.

But there remains an untold paradox.

What does the trail mean to the natives of Greenville’s urban communities who have not benefited from the economic prosperity? To those who for decades have struggled to rise above a legacy of racial and economic discrimination?

For some, the sight of the trail — and the rising property values it brings — can serve as a sign that it might be time to prepare to live somewhere else, wherever that might be.

It’s a local discussion of gentrification so far confined to neighborhood meetings, university academia and government forums comprised of well-meaning people who concern themselves with protecting those whose voices are less heard in communities like Southernside and Nicholtown.

The trail is but one piece of how economic investment can redefine communities — but it's an issue that stretches across the nation, around trails like Atlanta's BeltLine and Chicago's 606 that both re-purposed abandoned rail beds to literally pave the way for modern travel alternatives.

"The Swamp Rabbit Trail will transform neighborhoods," says Greenville City Councilwoman Amy Ryberg Doyle, a longtime advocate for spending tax money to expand the trail throughout the city and beyond. "People want to live on it. They want their businesses on it, their offices on it. We are contributing to that renewal. While it's great, it's a challenge to the neighbors who are there."

The discussion is one that has come to fore just as the demand to live in downtown Greenville begins to reach capacity and development spreads east and west, block by block, instead of the expansive flight to the suburbs in the mid-20th century that left the inner city a hollow shell.

The dilemma is clear.

The answers are not.

Charting new territory

​The formula works something like this: Trails are in demand, particularly by people with disposable income. Developers buy land to meet the demand of residents who want to live close to it and businesses see a particular demographic to serve, even if the opportunity lies in a traditionally depressed area.

Property values rise. Renters are the first to go as landlords see higher taxes, an opportunity to sell or to renovate, and the ability to bring in a tenant willing and able to pay more.

Those who have owned homes in the areas near the trail since before the revitalization find their income not keeping up with the higher taxes that come along with rising property values. Homeowners, their tax increases tied to property assessments every five years, are more cushioned against the economic pressure, but they often face daily solicitations to sell.

RELATED: Swamp Rabbit Trail helps Travelers Rest businesses boom

The next transformation along the trail, which is estimated to have a $7 million economic impact and has seen more than 500,000 users north of the city in a single year, is beginning to take form in two separate districts in the city — west of downtown in the Southernside and West Greenville communities, and in the area of Nicholtown and the commercial stretch of Laurens Road that runs along it.

The areas, traditionally minority and poor, have provided the next geographic opportunity to achieve a dream of living downtown with some measure of affordability.

The poorest section of the city — on the west side where an ongoing affordable housing study commissioned by the city shows the poverty rate between 40 to 58 percent — is where the pressure is building most acutely.

The city is planning to create a $12.9 million city park on the west side, bisected by the Swamp Rabbit Trail. The city strategically bought land around the trail and park and set it aside, when prices were low, to maintain some level of control in how the area develops.

Developers have invested millions in the area on a slew of luxury apartment and condo projects that are changing the skyline.

Already, developers are buying buildings and tearing them down for the land or renovating the old, salvageable vestiges of past industry, such as the re-development of abandoned warehouses along the Reedy River that are appealing to businesses geared toward the trail.

The city is currently creating a master park plan for the area near the KROC Center after spending $25.6 million to move its sprawling, aging public works campus.

The extension on the other end of downtown along Laurens Road is imminent, said Ty Houck, the Greenville County recreation department's director of greenways, natural and historic resources, the guiding agency behind the trail.

The 4.5-mile extension from Cleveland Park to the Verdae development and CU-ICAR — dubbed the Greenlink Greenway — will mostly follow an abandoned rail line and should be completed by early 2018, Houck said.

The county is currently trying to price the cost of bridging the trail across busy Laurens Road, Haywood Road and Verdae Boulevard, Houck said.

The city of Greenville devoted $2.5 million in January 2015 to pay for the bridge effort after holding the money aside in hopes that the Greenville Country Club would allow a one-mile stretch of the trail along the edge of its golf course, which would have connected the trail continuously from Marietta to Lake Conestee Nature Park where it instead now ends abruptly at South Pleasantburg Drive.

The city had to move on after the country club said it had to focus on the extensive renovation of its clubhouse. Those talks haven't resumed, Doyle said.

Apartments and businesses already are locating along the Laurens Road path in anticipation. The Nicholtown community, one of Greenville's signature black communities in the midst of a revival, would then sit in the middle of two extensions of the trail.

Cracks in the wall of Nicholtown

A spur of the trail runs through Cleveland Park to its dead end at the country club. By virtue of its path, the section of the trail has marked a dividing line between Nicholtown — which the city's housing study shows as part of an area with a poverty rate as high as 40 percent— and the affluent Cleveland Park neighborhoods.

There are more dead ends than streets that connect the two disparate communities.

For decades, a continuous, patchwork wall erected by homeowners on the Cleveland Park side of Nicholtown Road marks the dividing line between socio-economic classes. A portion of the wall on the Nicholtown side is painted with messages that refer to the plight of the poor and demand that the wall be torn down.

Today, Nicholtown is facing intense gentrification pressure as the small cottage homes that during segregation once housed a number of Greenville's brightest black leaders are being bought and renovated or torn down, said City Councilwoman Jil LIttlejohn, who lives in the community.

For instance, a stone's throw from the wall, one newly renovated home of less than 1,000 square feet is listed for just under $169,000. In October 2014, property records show the home sold for $85,000.

PHOTOS: History of the Swamp Rabbit Trail

The rush for real estate in Nicholtown has prompted the city to host a public workshop at noon Thursday at the neighborhood's community center to inform residents on resources and options available to them when someone offers to buy their home (another is scheduled in the Pleasant Valley community on Tuesday evening at 6:30 p.m.).

The trail's Sliding Rock Creek spur, completed in 2011, runs just steps from some homes in Nicholtown, but a number of those homes have yet to become desirable to an affluent demographic.

The community regularly speaks out on concerns of gentrification, though members haven't quite reached a point of outright opposition to the Swamp Rabbit Trail, Littlejohn said.

At worst, she said, the stance is a mix of skepticism and ambivalence.

"When people are trying to find out if they have a safe, affordable place to live, they could care less if they have a trail to run or walk on," Littlejohn said. "While it's really fun and exciting, and hopefully it will bring a lot of benefit, there is a certain set of people who may live close to the trail who will never even know or acknowledge its existence."

In June, the city voted to enter into a development agreement with the developers of the District West luxury apartments under construction on Westfield Street across from the KROC Center.

The 5-1 vote committed up to $265,000 in tax money to the developer for public improvements that include creating new spurs to the Swamp Rabbit Trail that passes nearby. The developer pointed out that the trail would be an amenity accessible to the public.

Littlejohn cast the dissenting vote, citing the developer's lack of provisions for affordable housing, which she said outweighs the need for an amenity that will appeal to upscale tastes.

"We need to make sure all our priorities are spread across the board," she said.

Swamp Rabbit Trail helps Travelers Rest businesses boom

'Easing us out'

Mary Duckett remembers when the train used to run up and down the Swamp Rabbit Railroad, through her neighborhood west of downtown Greenville, where the legacy of systemic segregation is still evident just in the number of dead-end streets.

Like other obsolete rail lines across the country, the line was abandoned and converted into a multi-use trail that since 2009 has been a key piece of the puzzle that has landed the Greenville area on countless national Top 10 lists.

Just about every day, Duckett said, she receives solicitations to sell the home she has lived in for 30 years on Pinckney Street on the outer edge of the Southernside community where she is head of its neighborhood association. The trail runs through the heart of the community and a half mile from her house.

"If they don't come by, they're calling me on the phone or sending me something in the mail," Duckett said. "Thank God, I became a homeowner. I told them I'm not going no place until the Lord is ready for me."

She bought her home for $27,000 in 1986. Homes one block away are now selling for more than $500,000.

Across the street from Duckett, the Frazee Center, a youth-mentoring and after-school program, is moving and selling its property because the children it serves no longer live within walking range.

Homes in the community are being sold at auction — or solicitations have been accepted — and renovations or complete tear-downs for the land begin. It's the same story in other communities that the city has deemed "special emphasis neighborhoods" in need of revitalization.

However, Duckett said the redevelopment along the trail is largely of the kind that doesn't appeal to the longtime residents, who for years have been pleading for a full-service grocery store in area currently deemed a "food desert."

Instead, the trail has brought entrepreneurial interests familiar along other urban trails: Crossfit gyms, bicycle shops, organic grocers, breweries and others that, because of their hyper-local production scale, cost more.

"You bet your bottom dollar the trail is big for the affluent," she says. "They are still easing us out, one by one, because we're getting priced out."

Even now, Monroe Street, for years a dead end after the government split the neighborhood with the Pete Hollis gateway, is being reconnected.

The state is spending $1.3 million to construct a pedestrian bridge to replace a deteriorated vehicle bridge that it tore down. The project follows a federal civil rights lawsuit filed on behalf of the community, which said the bridge had been vital to its residents who depend on walking.

"It's like finally when revitalization comes around, and it's time to improve stuff, it appeals to the tastes of people who have just moved in in the past two or three years," says Ken Kolb, a Furman University sociology professor who has done extensive research on gentrification and the food desert issue on the west side.

The research Kolb has put into the area shows a sharp divide in wealth and opportunity.

In Southernside and West Greenville combined, 43 percent of the nearly 3,000 residents were below the poverty line in 2014, compared to 12.2 percent in the entire county and 16.7 percent within the city limits.

The 13 percent unemployment rate in the two communities combined was more than double than the rate in the county and city. Almost two-thirds of the communities' population are black compared to the similar percentage of whites in the city and county.

The boutique businesses popping up along the trail are simply unaffordable, Kolb said.

"People who live in neighborhoods see the retail amenities that are located within them as indicators of what it means to be in this place," he said. "People who live in Southernside or West Greenville don't necessarily want to go to a crepe shop."

With Travelers Rest as model, Golden Strip eyes future along Swamp Rabbit Trail

Efforts to integrate

The economic reality along the trail doesn't necessarily provide clarity on what to do.

Is the alternative not to have a popular, transformative trail that connects the region with alternate transportation opportunities and spurs new investment in areas long excluded from the fruits of prosperity?

And, if a business doesn't quite fit with an established community's tastes, should it not try to find a home there?

The trail on the west side is a mix of sleek cyclists exercising and members of the community moving back and forth between work and home — or as Doyle says, "there's $5,000 bikes and $50 bikes."

And, Duckett said, while the existing community hasn't quite caught on to the new brewery in Hampton Station, the owner has invited her for conversation in an effort to connect. There are even some residents who have tried their hand at the Crossfit gym next door, she said.

The closest to an answer is recognizing that there is newfound opportunity and making every effort to balance profit with a greater good, say community leaders, residents, a number of businesses pioneering the trail — and, yes, some developers who stand to make money.

"I believe that is a very important issue that must be addressed at a public and private level," said Drew Parker, founder of the Greenville-based Parker Group development firm. The firm is in the process of renovating a row of old warehouses along the trail across from Swamp Rabbit Crossfit at the border of the proposed park.

The warehouses — to be known as The Commons, which will house businesses such as The Community Tap, Due South Coffee and Bacon Bros. Public House — can only be renovated to a certain point because of laws governing development in a floodplain. However, Parker said the effort is worth the unorthodox effort.

"As a developer, many people may view me as part of the problem," Parker said. "However, that couldn't be farther from the truth. My goal in any development is to create something that the neighborhood will be proud of."

For example, Parker said, the non-profit Feed & Seed project will be located in The Commons and will provide fresh produce, meats and pre-prepared meals "to the lower income neighborhoods that typically would not have access to this type of food. Anyone from any walk of life can come to The Commons and find locally grown produce at an affordable price."

The theme is similar among businesses planning to locate and interact with the existing community along the newest stretches of the trail.

The longtime site of the old Feed and Seed business at the corner of East Washington Street and Laurens Road (not connected to the non-profit venture on the west side) is being renovated as the future home of Willy Taco.

A group of investors has devoted significant resources to transforming the old site into an engaging, community-oriented destination, said Richard Heatly, one of the investors.

The restaurant is poised to have a prime spot close to the trail extension.

"If the trail comes right there beside Willy Taco, we're going to do some really creative things to maximize accessibility and tie into our project," said Heatly, who lives in Atlanta and uses the BeltLine multi-use trail that was converted from old rail lines.

The investors in Willy Taco want to integrate into the community, he said.

They plan to open first of the year.

"That's a piece of history we didn't want to get rid of," Heatly said. "We want to jump into Greenville and become another piece to a grand, beautiful puzzle. We want to cater to everyone."

Across the street, downtown's Centre Stage theater is planning to renovate East Park Baptist Church on Ebaugh Avenue and use it for a second location, "Off Centre." The location is near where East Washington meets Laurens Road and the first leg of the trail expansion begins.

In making the case for necessary rezoning, the theater referenced the trail as part of a "transit-oriented" area.

The positioning on the trail creates an opportunity for Off Centre to be a part of a connector that unites the city, said Glenda Manwaring, Centre Stage's executive director.

"We plan on embracing the Swamp Rabbit Trail, creating adjacent outdoor-friendly spaces and engaging trail lovers of all walks of life," Manwaring said. "Hopefully, we'll have an opportunity to introduce the theater to many people who may never have been to performing arts spaces before."

Next stages

The county is awaiting the final cost to bridge the trail across Laurens, Haywood and Verdae, which could involve going under, over or around the roads, Houck said. An existing rail bridge will be used to cross Woodruff Road.

The costs are expected to fall in line with the trail extension's original overall price tag, he said, which the city upon its funding pledge for bridges estimated at $6.3 million.

The extension will begin in Cleveland Park and cross Laurens at a place not yet determined, Houck said. The length of the trail from Willy Taco to North Pleasantburg Drive will depend on securing easements from private property owners. The rest of the extension will follow the old rail line.

It's been a year and a half since the city devoted its share of money, but Houck said the process is on track.

"Maybe there's an expectation this would happen faster, but it's a procedural thing you can't speed up," he said.

The city must devote money to expanding the trail into neighborhoods across the city while awaiting the expansion, Doyle said.

"We want it done in 2018," she said. "We're going to do whatever we can to help move the process along. In the meantime, the city can and should focus on some neighborhood connectors."

The expansions don't have to just focus on the economic development benefit it brings to a community, Doyle said. The city brought the Sliding Rock Creek spur to connect with Nicholtown without expectation of business activity. What Nicholtown might be ambivalent to other communities are begging for, she said.

"They're at a huge advantage having this great linear connector to Cleveland Park," Doyle said. "But they're seeing the challenges of having this great trail — which is everybody wants to come and live in Nicholtown."

Once the trail's path to CU-ICAR is complete, the focus turns to expansion into the Golden Strip, where a series of individual municipal governments — Mauldin, Simpsonville, Fountain Inn — would like to see the benefits of the trail come their way.

Altogether, millions of dollars have already been put into planning.

A whole new set of challenges, namely working together, lies ahead.

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