Live in Watts-Hillandale

Watts-Hillandale, on this page, is the area the City of Durham's Neighborhoods layer calls Watts Hospital-Hillandale: 781 acres between Broad Street and US 15-501, from Englewood Avenue and Hillsborough Road north to Interstate 85. That layer is a reference map the City keeps for its own work orders, with no published date, author or definition of a neighborhood, clipped here to the City limits: a working label, not an association's territory, and this guide claims nothing about where residents think the neighborhood ends. The 2020 census counted 2,441 residents in 1,119 housing units inside it.

Two institutions made it, and a deed clause divided it. George W. Watts moved his hospital out to 27 wooded acres at the north end of Broad Street in 1909, and his son-in-law John Sprunt Hill built Durham's first country clubhouse at the far end of Club Boulevard in 1912, by the Hillandale Golf Course and the City's waterworks. The trolley ran out Club Boulevard between them, and in 1913 two companies cut the farmland into lots. The National Register nomination records that Club Acres' deeds set a $2,500 minimum, a forty-foot setback and a ban on Black owners or occupants, while Hill's Englewood, with smaller lots to the south, carried no restrictive covenants. By the 1940s it was built out. Watts Hospital closed in 1976, and the North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics took over its campus.

The historic district here is a local one, and it has rules. On the City-County planning layers, 660 of the residents live inside the City's Watts-Hillandale local historic district, adopted in 2003, and the same 660 inside the National Register district of 2001. Inside the local district, exterior changes need a certificate of appropriateness from the City's Historic Preservation Commission. What the district's guidelines require, how long review takes and what it costs were not read for this guide: ask the City's preservation staff before you offer on a house you mean to change. The Register listing alone restricts nothing a private owner does with private money, and the other three quarters of the guide's residents are outside both lines.

Ellerbe Creek begins here, and the neighborhood's own center is in its floodway. The state's Ellerbe Creek watershed plan says the creek starts its run through the Hillandale Golf Course and this neighborhood, and records it flooding Durham in Floyd in 1999 and again in 2002. On the City's flood layer 15.07% of the guide's area is in FEMA's special flood hazard area, 6.51% of it floodway, and FEMA's map puts the reference point, OpenStreetMap's place node by Indian Trail Park, in the floodway itself. That point is not a house, and only 73 residents of 2020 lived on blocks in zone AE, but no one should take the center of this neighborhood for dry ground: look up the exact address on FEMA's map before you offer.

The bill is the plain City and County rate. Durham County's 57.92 cents and the City's 43.71 make 101.63 cents per $100 for fiscal 2027, on values reset to market as of 1 January 2025, and the historic district adds no levy. The County mails bills in August, due 1 September. No sale price is published for the neighborhood; Zillow's $467,307 for August 2026 is the whole 27705 ZIP, condominiums included. GoDurham's routes 1, 6 and 11 run inside the line, every 30 minutes at weekday midday and fare-free through June 2027. The census tract counts 2.6% of its people in college.