By Megan V. Williams & Peter Biello
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/whqr/local-whqr-634945.mp3
Wilmington, NC – It's evening and kids are racing their scooters and bikes under the spreading arms of oak trees on Wilmington's North 5th Avenue. Around them, relatives chat on the porches of little cottages and bungalows. Each is a piece of Wilmington's historic heritage, but each is also a repair project waiting to happen, as a woman named Pam observes.
"You have to put a little bit more love into it, the older house, you know."
In this low-income neighborhood, those repairs often don't get made. Instead, paint curls off of wood siding and metal roofs slowly bloom with rust.
Historic homes are one of Wilmington's attractions but Lillie Grey, head of the city's Community Development division, says they're also something of a Catch-22.
"When we look at the cost to maintain it and we look at the people who are least likely to be able to afford it, is where the [historic] districts tend to be, in some of the older neighborhoods. It is a challenge."
Wilmington, like many cities, has a program to help its poorer homeowners fix up their houses by issuing low-interest loans and then managing the construction process. Each year the city gets money from the federal government to fund the homeowner rehabilitation program, but that cash requires officials take historic preservation into account. That can mean anything from repairing a metal roof instead of replacing it with shingles to installing wood-composite siding instead of vinyl.
According to Kaye Graybeale, who oversees planning for the city, the idea is that federal money shouldn't destroy something the federal government wants to protect.
"A project might require the demolition of a historic structure, or the rehabilitation of a historic structure. So this is a check and balance to make sure that's done properly so as not to destroy any significant historic resources."
On Wilmington's south side, workers pound rafters into place in the skeleton of a small house. The city is managing this project to replace a historic cottage destroyed in a fire. Outside, the contractor huddles with city housing rehab tech Gene Langley, confused about exactly what kind of shingles the project requires.
"You say you already picked those up?"
"Oh yeah."
"Let me go back and make sure, let me look over the historic preservation, what they said to do on there. If it has to be three-tab, it has to be three-tab."
"I'm going to need to know cause they're going to deliver those shingles today and we're going to put them on tomorrow.."
Back in his truck, Langley says that those shingles, and many of the other materials that keep historic districts looking historic, often cost more up front and sometimes require extra maintenance in the long run.
We deal with houses, but we also deal with people and one of the things that we would prefer to do is be able to do a property that the homeowner doesn't have to put out a lot of money in order to go ahead and maintain it. Because the problem in is usually deferred maintenance anyway.
Things like historically approved shingles may add more to the cost of a renovation, but in Wilmington, that burden doesn't fall on low-income homeowners.
Years ago, the City Council set aside $300,000 to cover whatever extra historic preservation adds to the cost of a rehabilitation job. Those grants take the burden off homeowners, but there's only $25,000 left in the fund. When it runs out, the city's Lillie Grey says it'll be up to Council members whether they want to provide any more.
"If the city decided to say, we're not going to fund this any more, then we'd have to find other ways to fund it... which is limited. So we would either do less units or have to tell somebody no, we just can't afford to do the house."
"The goal of the historic preservation commission isn't to put people in poorhouse."
Maggie O'Connor is the city's Historic Preservation Planner, the one who determines what the city needs to do to keep houses it renovates looking historic. She says preservationists work with homeowners to keep the costs low, but that in the end, each project has something greater at stake.
"Because every time you lose a house, or lose a little piece of the house, you start losing the district. And you start losing your history."
In the end, the struggle for balance between preservation and renovation is a world away from Caroline Smokes. The city just finished work on her small house, fixing everything from her roof, to the historic wrap-around porch.
She's just eager to get back home.
"Yes, yes, I can't wait."
"Are you looking forward to sitting out on this porch again?"
"Yes. Put me two rocking chairs on that side and sit there with a nice plant and just relax."
*****
At the end of Factory Road off Pender County's stretch of Highway 17 in Hampstead, Lea's Waterfront Mobile Home Park sits on prime real estate near the Intracoastal Waterway.
Factory Road curves along the coast through a neighborhood of well-kept mobile homes and manicured lawns. The whole park seems to be peaceful and quiet which makes me wonder why there are so many empty lots behind the first row of houses.
But knocking on doors doesn't produce a lot of answers.
Hi. I just have a couple of questions. I'm with the public radio station in Wilmington. And we think this mobile home community is really interesting. We'd like to get residents to tell us what it's like to live here Do you not want to participate? OK, thank you sir.
This man's neighbor doesn't want to talk to me either. Finally, one man standing on his porch agrees to give me a description of his life.
Really the best time of the day is during the morning to see the sunrise come up and in the evening to see the sun set. Aside from that you can see the fish jumping out of the water, if that delights you.
But then the man says he doesn't want to talk anymore on record. Now I'm thinking: If this place is as peaceful as it seems, why aren't these people talking about it?
From a trailer farther down the road, a woman steps onto her porch.
Twenty-nine year old Roxie Ballard spends afternoons working out on an exercise machine facing the water. She lives here with her father. She says last year the Lea family almost sold this park, and residents are scared that any media attention will attract developers.
If you'll notice back here there are rows just missing. This whole place was full. And they were trying to sell our land, so everyone started leaving.
Ballard says she and her father were faced with a choice: sell the trailer for at least $10,000, or wait and risk being told to move their trailer off the land, which would cost them at least $5,000.
We were like, until they ask us to move, we are not moving, because this is our little heaven.
She says it would be a shame to lose such a warm community.
Everybody knows everybody and we have cookouts and everyone comes and joins. And you know we'll have pig pickins' and everybody in the whole trailer park will come. So it's very close knit.
So close knit, she says, that the owners of the trailer park actually live nearby. She points to a brick house on the other side of a small cove.
That's their house. That brick house is their mama's. And the one back there is their son's. He's a pharmacist. And then over here is the uncles and their two sons.
As Roxie's road curves along the coastline, the gray asphalt turns to flat black tar. That's Lea's Lane. The Leas live in massive brick homes off these paved streets.
In front of one of these homes, a man stands underneath a pergola draped with grape vines. Seeing a reporter with a microphone, he shouts a reminder: these streets are private.