Live in Downtown Durham

Downtown Durham, on this page, is a planning line, not a neighborhood the City names: the Downtown tier of the City-County Development Tiers layer, less the parts of it that fall inside four other guides here (Cleveland-Holloway, Old North Durham, Southside / St. Teresa and Trinity Park), clipped to the current City limits. That leaves 584 acres. The City's Neighborhoods reference layer, which has no published date, author or definition, draws a smaller Downtown and separate Warehouse District, Central Park and American Tobacco features; this line takes them all in and claims nothing about where residents think downtown ends. At the 2020 census the line held 5,622 residents in 4,241 housing units.

Not all of those 5,622 are households. Two census blocks inside the line look like group quarters: 290 people on a block with one housing unit about 50 meters from the County's Detention Facility at 219 South Mangum Street, and 252 people on a block near East Main Street with two units that no layer read for this guide identifies. That is about 540 people, and it is part of why downtown shows only 1.33 residents per housing unit. The two census tracts holding most of the guide count 15.1% and 11.8% of residents in college or graduate school, with wide margins: the tracts' shares, not the guide's.

Almost everything here was built to make cigarettes. Washington Duke started packing bright leaf tobacco in a barn north of the depot after the war. The Bright Leaf district on Duke Street, about 34 acres of warehouses and factories from about 1878 to 1949, was mostly Liggett and Myers' plant until the company sold the first of it in 1998 for the West Village apartments. South of the railroad, the American Tobacco buildings run from 1874 to the 1950s; Capitol Broadcasting bought the mostly empty campus in 2001, after the City's ballpark had opened beside it in 1995, and the City-owned Performing Arts Center followed in 2008. Downtown Durham, Inc. says downtown had 160 residents in 1993.

Hayti is part of this line's history, and part of its ground. South of the Durham Freeway, the guide takes in the Hayti Heritage Center at 804 Fayetteville Street, the 1891 St. Joseph's AME church of the Black community that freedmen built on Durham's southern edge after the Civil War. A 1958 urban renewal and freeway project took down houses and businesses on about 200 acres of Hayti and cut it with the freeway, by Wikipedia; the church survived because Lyda Moore Merrick and her daughter founded a foundation to save it in 1975. Hayti has no line on any City layer read, and Southside / St. Teresa, the guide south of here, is not Hayti.

The bill has a third line inside the improvement district. Every parcel pays Durham County's 57.92 cents and the City's 43.71 per $100 for fiscal 2026-27, 101.63 in all, on the values the County set at market on 1 January 2025 and will keep until 2029. Inside the Downtown Business Improvement District, which covers 73.3% of the guide's area and held 3,932 of its residents, the City line is 50.71 cents and the total 108.63. Downtown Durham, Inc. has run the district since 2012 and spends the levy on its Ambassadors program, maintenance on top of what the City provides, and on marketing the district. On $400,000 that is $280 a year. Stormwater, $68.40 a year for a condominium, comes on the City's utility bill, and North Carolina has no homestead exemption for an ordinary buyer. Association dues were not read.