ORLANDO – Game day for FC Cincinnati versus Orlando City dawned warm and sunny outside the city'sMajor League Soccer stadium in Parramore, a small, predominantly black neighborhood within walking distance of downtown Orlando.

By 9 a.m. on May 19 a vacant field two blocks away from the soccer stadium is filling with fans from other parts of Orlando, including its well-to-do suburbs. Kids kick soccer balls and tailgate parties spring up. A neighborhood man waves in fans, collecting $20 a carto park there. Fans put up tents, draping them in Orlando City’s signature purple flags, and begin emptying coolers full of food and beer.

Just outside the stadium, streets close and food trucks begin selling empanadas and submarine sandwiches. Music wafts through the neighborhood from a DJ booth. Sundaychurch services at Faith Deliverance Temple, which sits in the shadow of the 25,500-seat stadium, are underway despite the noisy celebration going on outside.

Major League Soccer's vision for the future of its clubs' stadiums was made clear during FC Cincinnati's expansion process: Inner-city neighborhoods transformed by the sport, its stadiums and the development that follows.

Whether Major League Soccer’s gamble pays off for the league or for communities with MLS teams remains to be seen. But in less than two years, Cincinnati will go all-in on theinitial bet when it opens a soccer stadium in the West End.

The parallels between Orlando and Cincinnati are striking. Just like Orlando’s MLS team, FC Cincinnati is building its stadium close to downtown in a poor, historically black neighborhood that’s suffered decades of neglect and is now undergoing gentrification.

FC Cincinnati is building a $250 million stadium that will seat 26,500 people. It’s set to open in 2021. The league wanted the stadium in the West End, or somewhere like it, because league officials believe their most successful stadiums are in the urban core, though they acknowledge that's not the case in every city.

As construction begins in Cincinnati's West End, there are fears that longtime residents will be forced out and gentrification will erase decades of the city’s black history.

So, is what’s happening in Parramore a glimpse into Cincinnati’s future?

"Things are slowly changing," said Walter Sotero, 52, an Orlando City fan who drove to Parramore from the Orlando suburbs to tailgate. "It's kind of a rough neighborhood, but there is no reason not to feel safe."

A West End lookalike

Parramore was built in the 1880s as a neighborhood for the black people who worked in the homes of wealthy, white Orlando residents.

Thomas Chatmon, executive director of the Florida city's downtown development board and redevelopment agency, has watched the transformation of Parramore. Up until 1965, he said, there were grocery stores, hair salons and clothing shops. But by the late 1960s, Parramore residents began looking for better schools and better neighborhoods.

Major highways plowed through the neighborhood and, by the 1970s, there were drugs and crime and few retail shops remaining. Crack cocaine took hold of the neighborhood in the 1980s, Chatmon said.

It was a forgotten part of the city.

Then Buddy Dyer, the city’s current mayor, campaigned in 2003 on turning Parramore into a mixed-income neighborhood of black professionals. That work had already started when talk of a Major League Soccer expansion team began.

In 2015, when Orlando was awarded an expansion soccer team, many here saw an opportunity to accelerate Parramore’s transformation. They thought the soccer stadium, and the fans it would draw, could spur growth in the neighborhood and bring in new businesses.

They were right about the fans. Between men and women's Major League Soccer games there are 29 homes games – the men's team alone last year averaged 23,000 fans per game. But two years later, it’s unclear what Parramore’s future will be. Other than a few new businesses near the stadium, soccer’s impact is hard to measure.

In the days before the Cincinnati-Orlando match, the neighborhood was quiet. A dozen or so people who are homeless milled about on sidewalks across the street from the stadium where a Christian organization provides daily meals. People whiled away hours on porches of homes that had seen better days, saying hello to longtime friends as they passed.

There are grassy plots of land between the homes where buildings have been razed by speculators preparing for future development. Yellow and red signs dot the neighborhood: “We buy properties,” they advertise. Dollar signs and the word “cash” appear next to a phone number.

Longtime residents say renters are being displaced. And there is new development unrelated to soccer, ValenciaCollege and the University of Central Florida are building a 15-acre, $100 million campus on the outskirts of Parramore. That should bring about 8,000 students to the area.

But this neighborhood is far from the gentrified Over-the-Rhine clone some fear is the West End's future. And most of those who remain in Parramore aren't complaining. They say more people come to the businesses there, the team hires residents to work in the stadium, and game-day means lawns full of cars willing to pay $20 to park.

Chatmon, from the community redevelopment agency, said the soccer stadium has not transformed the neighborhood, but has instead contributed to a transformation. In addition to Dyer’s promise, the city in 2006 announced a new arena for the Orlando Magic, the city’s National Basketball Association team, a new performing arts center and a planned expansion of the Citrus Bowl, totaling a half billion dollars in investments.

So when it came time to build a Major League Soccer stadium, Parramore seemed like a bookend fit to what was already there with leaders last year announcing an entertainment district with a luxury hotel, a new Orlando Magic headquarters, a residential tower, retail space and an open plaza between the two stadiums.

Magic CEO Alex Martins told the Orlando Weekly last September that the investment in the entertainment complex is part of the "revitalization of downtown Orlando and the Parramore neighborhood," which includes giving more than $1 million to the Parramore community. The DeVos family, which owns the Magic and includes Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos, has made revitalizing downtown and Parramore a priority since the day the Amway Center was first contemplated, he added.

Other entrepreneurs, said Chatmon, are capitalizing on the influx of fans to the area. There are new food vendors and people parking cars, he said.

Shaving heads, saving souls

Back in Parramore, on the Saturday morning before game day, J Henry’s Barber Shop, just across the street from the stadium, is bustling. Five barbers staffstations with a steady stream of walk-in clients.

"There was uncertainty at first," said J. Henry, wrapped in a leather apron for a morning of work. "Now, it's the best thing that ever happened. The neighborhood has changed tremendously for the better.”

Henry is 54 and started cutting hair at the shop in 1991. He took it over in 1994. Men's haircuts are $15; boys and seniors' $12. Prices went up this year.

"The neighborhood is getting revitalized," Henry said. "Some say it's good. Some say it's bad. It's a little bittersweet."

A lot has changed in the neighborhood since the stadium was announced, but Faith Deliverance Temple was a holdout when the city came calling to build a soccer stadium on the church's property. The church's mission is ministry to area people who are homeless and addicted. The city offered $4 million for the property, but the church wanted $15 million.

The fight was on. The city filed an eminent domain petition and lost. So the church sits, alongside the stadium, open for services on game days.

Light streams into the airy sanctuary. Just a dozen or so worshippers dot the pews. Thumping music from the DJ outside the stadium reverberates inside the church.

"We're still here," said Jonathan Williams, a church minister and son of the founder. The church has been in Parramore since the late '70s. They didn't move because they didn't want to, Williams said.

But things are different since Orlando City soccer came to town.

"We don't have as much opportunity because we're hampered by games," Williams said. "There are less members. We can't minister the way we used to."

But the church is trying to make the best of it. As services end, the music director, John Donaldson, ducks into a restroom to change out of his buttoned-down shirt and dress pants and into shorts and a T-shirt.

Then he heads outside to the church parking lot, where he’ll charge fans $20 apiece to park.

Rising rents and razed property

At the end of May anyone looking to buy a house in Parramore would have found slim pickings. Among what was for sale, a 600-square-foot, aquamarine bungalow that was built in 1946.

The front porch is crumbling and a back window is boarded over. A decade ago, the owner bought it for $17,000. The listing price is now $64,900. And that's "as is."

It’s a seven-minute drive from the soccer stadium.

In March, the Orlando Sentinel found home values soaring in traditionally low-income neighborhoods like Parramore and two others nearby. In the past five years, prices have doubled in Parramore, the newspaper reported.

Gloria Gibson, a real estate agent in the area, said she works in predominately black neighborhoods around Orlando, but not Parramore. There simply hasn’t been anything to sell there, she said.

Mattie Thornton has lived in Parramore her whole life, these days renting a first-floor, one-bedroom apartment in a cement-block building where doors don't shut properly, windows don't have screens and rain seeps in.

Thornton moved in to the apartment in 2016 after disease led to her leg being amputated, forcing her to find a first-floor unit that would easily accommodate her wheelchair. Then she paid $695 a month, a little more than half the amount of government assistance she receives each month.

That was just after Orlando was awarded a soccer franchise and it was clear Parramore was the team's and city's choice for a stadium.

The next year, in 2016, Thornton's rent climbed by $50, then another $100 in 2017. This month her rent will go up to $895 a month, a 29 percent increase.

"I spoke to a lot of neighbors who say their rent is being hiked up," Thornton said. "My son said it's since they put the soccer bowl there. In the next 10 years this is all going to be different.”

Chatmon said that not everything happening in Parramore is visible.

“What you can’t see driving down the street is a considerable amount of speculation," he said. When you get improvements like a stadium, speculators will come in and see if they can get in on the action.”

It will lead to bringing goods and services the neighborhood needs, he said, but also, “the value of property going up. It’s the dreaded G-word: Gentrification. It’s something we’re worried about and justifiably so. We’re trying to do the right thing, be fair, but also bring about housing opportunities that are affordable for people who live there.”

Jobs, the magic elixir

The people who remain in Parramore hope they can stay. This is home, where they've built their lives and families and where they’re comfortable. If the neighborhood – their neighborhood – benefits of the revitalization, they want in.

Carol Gibbs' small home sits across the street from the stadium. As tailgaters arrive, the 74-year-old woman sits on her front porch. Her cat, Lucy, is unfazed, curled up nearby on the window air conditioning unit.

"In the 'hood we call this Front Street," Gibbs' said. "You see people you know walking by. I wouldn't be comfortable moving out where I can't look out the window and say 'There goes Mary walking by.' "

Like Thornton, Gibbs' rent has gone up to $725 a month. Her rent and the rent of people she knows used to be $450 or $500.

"A lot of people moved," she said. "The people who moved in are not like the people who moved out."

There are "beau coup white people" moving in, unable to afford Orlando rents that are $1,300 or $1,400, Gibbs said. They see Parramore as affordable and close enough to downtown.

When soccer fans come, she said, they're "happy people doing happy things."

They sometimes ask her over for a beer and hamburger.

And there are some who work in the stadium, walking to work where there was none before.

Eric Siplin Sr. is a chef at the stadium, manning a grill of hot dogs and hamburgers.

He's 50, lived in Parramore all his life and now walks to work at the stadium two blocks away.

Before the stadium was built, Siplin worked at Red Lobster earning minimum wage. But when the stadium opened he jumped at the chance to work there at $12 an hour, with raises since then, he said.

Neighborhood people, he said, work in security, do janitorial work or are cooks like he is.

"This is better, a bigger venue," he said. "I like it."