Live in Southside and St. Teresa

Southside and St. Teresa, on this page, is the area the City of Durham's own Neighborhoods layer calls Southside / St. Teresa: 154 acres on the hill south of the Durham Freeway, between South Roxboro Street and Blackwell Street, with South Street, Fargo Street and Scout Drive running through it. The layer is a reference map the City keeps for its own work orders, with no published date, author or definition, clipped here to the city limits; it is not an association's line. It held 1,291 residents in 581 housing units at the 2020 census.

It is not Hayti. Wikipedia places the neighborhood between Hayti and the Forest Hills Historic District, and records it as a historically African American working-class neighborhood called The Bottom, later the St. Theresa community after St. Teresa of Ávila Catholic Church, a Black congregation on Fargo Street. The spelling is unsettled: the City's layer writes St. Teresa, Open Durham and Wikipedia also write St. Theresa, and the City's own Southside pages refused this guide's requests, so the guide keeps the layer's form. Hayti has no line on any City layer read, and its heritage center sits inside the Downtown Durham guide.

The deciding fact is the rebuilding. The City tried and failed to redevelop the neighborhood in the 1980s and 1990s, bought out around forty owners, and then chose McCormack Baron Salazar. A planning process for the 120-acre Southside Project Area ran from late 2009 into the summer of 2010. The Lofts at Southside followed: a $21 million first phase of 132 apartments, 80 of them affordable, and a second of 85 begun in June 2016. For sale there were 48 Bungalows at Southside, most reserved for moderate-income buyers. In May 2025 Rep. Valerie Foushee asked Congress for $3,000,000 toward the last two phases, 100 more affordable units that would bring the project to 317. A buyer here is choosing a new or renovated house beside a large mixed-income rental community, with more still to come.

No historic district, no flood map, one tax rate. Nothing in the guide is in a local or National Register historic district or a Neighborhood Protection Overlay. Every 2020 resident lived on a block in flood zone X, and FEMA gives zone X at the point; check the address itself. The bill is the plain city rate: Durham County's 57.92 cents per $100 plus the City's 43.71, 101.63 in all for fiscal 2027, on values the County reset to market on 1 January 2025 and will not reset again until 2029. A sliver of the north edge, 0.8% of the area and no 2020 resident, falls inside the Downtown Business Improvement District, where the City line is 7 cents higher. Stormwater comes on the City utility bill. North Carolina has no homestead exemption for an ordinary buyer. No sale price is published for the neighborhood; Zillow's model puts the whole 27707 ZIP, condominiums included, at $406,475 in August 2026, down 3.1% on the year.

Day to day, it is close to almost everything. GoDurham serves ten stops inside the line, on routes 5, 7 and 8, fare-free through June 2027. Hillside Park and its pool are a short walk, the American Tobacco Trail runs through the guide, and the ballpark and the American Tobacco Campus are about a kilometer north across the freeway. There is no supermarket inside the line; Compare Foods on University Drive is the nearest. North Carolina Central's campus is about 800 meters away. The census tract that holds 870 of the residents counts 11.8% of its people in college or graduate school, with wide margins.