In Walltown, a historically black neighborhood, the changing demographics are evident. “It was almost exclusively African American up until the 1980s,” says Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove, a minister and organizer who has lived in Walltown for over a decade. The community was largely made up of those who worked service jobs at Duke University, doing things like cleaning and laundry for the school. “They referred to Duke as ‘the plantation,’” he says, chuckling. Now, the mix has changed, and most of his new neighbors, Wilson-Hartgrove tells me, are white. Walltown is prime real estate, bordering Duke’s east campus and sitting just a mile away from downtown. “To pay $800 or $900 down here is a significant savings for a grad student,” Wilson-Hartgrove says. “But the people who had been paying $300 a month are getting pushed out.”

Walking through the neighborhood, there are houses that are older and more rundown adjacent to others in the midst of massive renovations. Young black and Hispanic men walk and drive around, older black residents sit on their porches, and young white residents bike by. Tensions have risen, Wilson-Hartgrove says, as white neighbors have moved in and policing in the area has increased; the young black and Latino men say they’re being harassed and white residents say they don’t always feel safe. Then there’s the issue of whether or not the populations that have historically inhabited this neighborhood will be able to stay put.

Wilson-Hartgrove tells me about a man named Pervis who lived in the neighborhood for 30 years, renting an apartment and working as a janitor at the university. He paid about $275 a month in rent, Wilson-Hartgrove remembers, until his landlord asked him to vacate so that he could make renovations a few years ago. When the tenant asked if he’d be able to move back in afterward, he was told that he could, for the new price of $800 a month. After the upheaval of finding a new place, he died of a heart attack shortly after moving.

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For years, Durham’s low-cost housing and abandoned properties put some neighborhoods in the sights of those with enough cash to buy property, rehab it, and then sell it or rent it out. Kielhurn, a graduate of Duke who has lived in the Research Triangle since she was a kid, has amassed dozens properties in the past five years.

Kielhurn says that she got her start buying lots that were abandoned or dilapidated, and cheap. Sometimes they were foreclosures, but sometimes they were active rentals in horrible condition, she says. Landlords would keep the rent down, asking for, say, $400, but in return they refused responsibility for any upkeep or renovations. Often, desperate tenants felt like they had no means of forcing their landlord’s hand. In one home that she toured, Kielhurn says, the bathroom wasn’t structurally sound, so when the tenant stepped into the tub, it would sag a few inches. She gave up and went to a friend’s to shower. When the tenant finally started withholding rent because the bathroom wasn’t being repaired, her landlord started eviction proceedings.

Kielhurn says these stories of dilapidated, unsafe, unsanitary rentals are fairly common. And the poor condition of some of the housing stock in poorer neighborhoods is what allows her, and other buyers, to grab up properties for such low prices. She’s bought many of her properties for under $50,000 and spends the bulk of her funds on renovations. When she rents them out again, she charges what she feels is a fair price for all the work she’s put in, and for the fact that she’ll be more attentive than previous landlords. So prices escalate to $800, $900, or $1,200 a month.