Live in Cameron Village

Cameron Village was a plan before it was a place. In 1947 Willie York took an option on the Smallwood tract, 160 acres of the old Cameron plantation between Cameron Park and the historically African American Oberlin community, hired the land planner Seward Mott, and won approval that August for what the National Register nomination calls North Carolina's first mixed-use development: a shopping center, garden apartments, offices and houses within walking distance of one another. The apartments came first, on a $2.5 million mortgage, then the largest ever recorded in Wake County. Most of the shopping center was finished by the end of 1949, and that December the house lots were platted on curving streets.

This guide covers the houses, not the shopping center. Its boundary is the Cameron Village Historic District, listed on the National Register in 2011: about seven blocks from Smallwood Drive north to Wade Avenue and from Daniels Street east to Woodburn Road, with 252 residents at the 2020 census. It holds 90 houses, nearly all ranches of 1950 to 1955, and the fifteen buildings of the Daniels Street Apartments, sold as condominiums in 1984. The nomination left out the shopping center and the apartments around it, which were platted separately, and James Place and Bryan Street, where houses had lost their integrity; the neighborhood association's registered area takes those two streets in and counts 311 residents. Cameron Park, to the south, is a separate Register district.

The covenants did the planning. Lots were platted 40 feet wide so that buyers had to combine two or more, and the deeds required 80 feet of frontage, 30-foot setbacks, 10-foot side yards, at least 1,200 square feet for a one-story house, an architectural committee's approval and no parking on the street. The streets were built wide and, except along the apartments on Daniels Street, without sidewalks. The result is deep lawns, houses centered on lots of 0.28 acres at the median, and carports joined by breezeways.

Listed is not protected. The City's own page calls Register listing mostly honorary and says design review, demolition included, is not required, and no local historic or conservation overlay covers these streets; 89 of the 90 houses are zoned R-6. Since the listing, 13 of the 90 houses have been built new, eight of them since 2020, at a median of 3,716 square feet of heated space against 1,889 for the houses of the early 1950s. The county now records the house at 710 Smedes Place, the largest lot, where the nomination placed Leif Valand's James Poyner House, as built in 2020.

What a buyer pays for is the lot. Wake County assesses the 90 houses at a median of $673,375 on the 2024 revaluation; on the 73 houses of 1950 to 1955, land is 80% of the assessed value. At 90.91 cents per $100 the median bill is about $6,122 a year, and Wake revalues on 1 January 2027 (citywide figures are on the Raleigh page). Eight sales recorded since January 2024 ran from $675,000 to $2,250,000, but the county does not mark which were market sales, so this guide gives no median. Across Smallwood Drive the shopping center, renamed the Village District in 2021 over the Cameron family's slaveholding, is building up: a seven-story hotel broke ground in 2023, and the corner facing the district has been zoned for seven stories since 2022.