A New Model for Town-Gown Engagement

By Meagan M. Ehlenz, AICP

Since the 1990s, urban universities have increasingly become anchor institutions within their neighborhoods. Many adopt a "shared value" approach, which lauds the goal of "mutually beneficial" university-community investments.

However, universities' approaches to neighborhood revitalization often emphasize development and physical upgrading, while sustained investment in community development is rare. Thus, their efforts are often associated with gentrification pressures and lack mitigation strategies.

One case offers a notable counterpoint: a 20-year partnership between Duke University and 12 adjacent Durham, North Carolina, neighborhoods. While Duke's motivations reflect those of many universities, its anchor institution approach is deeply situated in community engagement and neighborhood investment via nonprofit partnerships.

In a recent Journal of the American Planning Association article, I explored what makes Duke's anchor model unique and gleaned insights into how major institutions can recast their roles in communities. Duke's approach also reveals a powerful role for intermediaries like planners to connect institutional resources with neighborhood priorities.

More than 100 residents from six neighborhoods gathered to create a new vision for the West Chapel Hill Street Commercial Corridor in 2007. Photo courtesy Duke University Office of Durham and Community Affairs.

But first, some background

Duke has been a part of Durham since 1892. Throughout the 20th century, Duke recognized that its future was tied to Durham's and sought to support the city's political and economic interests. But Duke's location — nestled within 7,200 acres of forestland — also meant university leaders could champion Durham's civic interests while maintaining physical and political distance from its neighborhoods.

This hands-off approach created tension. Despite Duke's declarations of a shared Duke-Durham fate, its ambivalence and inaction, especially toward Durham's Black population, generated ill will with surrounding neighborhoods.

In the 1990s, new problems arose: As the city's tobacco and textile economy went up in smoke, Duke's academic star was rising. Prospective students drove past vacant, boarded-up homes on campus visits. Disinvestment represented a community concern and threatened the university's interests.

Duke was compelled to respond. But unlike many of its elite university peers, Duke's leadership recognized a top-down approach would not be viable. Instead, Duke's anchor model engaged nonprofit partners and community development strategies to cultivate improvement for its neighbors.

The process began with neighborhood meetings. Duke hired Sandy Ogburn and Bill Bell, former elected officials with deep community ties, to facilitate a neighborhood planning process on its behalf, lending credibility and establishing community trust.

For about a year, Ogburn and Bell's team listened to community leaders and residents about each neighborhood's concerns. Initially, complaints and deep skepticism from long-ignored neighbors overwhelmed the process. But this venting seeded new progress: Duke and its community produced a neighborhood-by-neighborhood priority matrix to guide its efforts for the next decade.

Duke also established the Duke-Durham Neighborhood Partnership (DDNP) and tasked it with tackling those priorities. For 25 years, DDNP has been the central hub for Duke's neighborhood-focused efforts. Their work has developed clear communication lines, changing perceptions of Duke from standoffish (at best) to engaged partner.

Duke's anchor model seeks to change the narrative from "look at what Duke did" to "can you imagine what's happened in Durham?"

DDNP's bricks-and-mortar housing initiatives and partnerships are particularly notable. Since 1994, DDNP has partnered with nonprofit housing and lending organizations to support the creation of affordable housing and homeownership opportunities. To date, Duke's commitments include more than $22 million in revolving loans and deposits, as well as 400-plus units of affordable housing.

While gentrification is now pressing in Durham, DDNP's approach has created durable affordability for some of its lowest-income neighborhoods. Through bottom-up transformation strategies, including investments in affordable housing, education, public health, and community amenities, DDNP's efforts created benefits for long-time residents. These early investments have continued to provide a buffer in hot markets.

Three philosophies for success

Duke's anchor model resonates with Arnstein's Ladder of Participation, underscoring how institutions can restructure neighborhood investments around engagement. The Duke-Durham case offers insights into the ways institutions impact communities and how their work intersects with planning practice.

DDNP's work rests on three philosophies that offer key lessons to planners about the importance of partnerships and mutually beneficial outcomes.

PHILOSOPHY 1: EMPOWERMENT

The first philosophy emphasizes an empowerment-based approach that elevates local knowledge and places the institution in a supporting role. Duke passed the baton to well-respected community leaders to (re)build its relationship with neighborhoods before creating its strategy on neighborhood-established priorities. This approach helped residents move beyond the lower rungs of nonparticipation, or tokenism, and into the realm of partnership. As a rule, DDNP intentionally tried to stay behind the community's objectives rather than saying "look what Duke did."

This resulted in a multi-neighborhood strategy that recognized not all neighborhoods held the same beliefs or priorities. One-to-one engagement gave each neighborhood a voice, building stronger relationships and responding to divergent priorities. This also gave DDNP the ability to focus on the target neighborhoods and make them DDNP's "passionate yes" priorities rather than spreading themselves too thin across the region.

PHILOSOPHY 2: QUIET PARTNERSHIP

The second philosophy emphasizes Duke's choice to eschew credit in favor of partnership. DDNP dubs this a "quiet partnership" model, which, as hinted at earlier, seeks to change the narrative from "look at what Duke did" to "can you imagine what's happened in Durham?"

Rooted in pragmatism, Duke recognized the liability of branding its neighborhood efforts: "While it would be really nice to have the photo ops and all the rest of it . . . the residents needed to be in charge of their programming. [Our] role was to provide the resources, expertise, and other kinds of things that they needed." This gave ownership of the planning process to the neighborhoods and positioned the institution as a tool.

The quiet partnership model maximized Duke's resources — in this case, financial resources, including substantial support from The Duke Endowment and student/employee manpower — and minimized its weaknesses. Here, DDNP partnered with affordable housing and community development professionals, relying on their neighborhood revitalization expertise. As a supporting partner, Duke functions as a hub, rather than a driver, for neighborhood transformation.

Here, DDNP illustrates the opportunity for planners to facilitate connections between large institutions (like universities) and local communities. These partnerships enable planners to apply their expertise in community engagement and development while engaging significant anchors within neighborhoods.

PHILOSOPHY 3: EVOLUTION

Duke's model uses a reflexive approach, anticipating neighborhood priorities and partnerships will evolve over time. DDNP refers to its funds as "mobile capital," embracing these changes and creating pliable initiatives to best suit community needs.

This approach has increased Duke's responsiveness, calibrating its resources to emergent issues. As one distressed neighborhood transformed, for instance, DDNP realized "there wasn't a lot more work to do, where the math worked to buy houses, renovate them and make them affordable to first-time buyers." And the need was less, so they redirected resources elsewhere.

They have also taken an iterative approach to planning, changing strategies until they find one that works. Duke's first-time homeownership program is a good example: The administration initially invested in affordable housing units to solve the problem, but subsequently realized that creditworthiness was the real barrier and changed course.

DDNP extends the concept of a "living document" into implementation. It presents an opportunity to continually evaluate the efficacy of planning policies alongside the local community, as well as a model for adapting one neighborhood's strategies to suit the needs of another neighborhood over time. For Duke, that has meant, for instance, addressing disinvestment with affordable housing rehabilitation and evolving into a gentrification mitigation strategy some years later.

Bigger picture

Duke's approach to revitalization in Durham illustrates the opportunities for large institutions to align their interests and talents with neighborhood priorities. The case highlights the importance of coupling resources with planning intermediaries — from planners to community developers and organizers — to create meaningful planning processes and implementation strategies that reflect neighborhood priorities.

Meagan Ehlenz is an assistant professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning at Arizona State University and author of "Can You Imagine What's Happened in Durham?" (August 2020), originally published in JAPA.