Unity Park was Greenville's biggest price tag. Its cost might be Black neighborhoods, too.

GREENVILLE — Mayor Knox White’s path to the stage took him across land warped by exploitation.

In 1924, Greenville voters approved a bond to build a park here. It was supposed to be the only such place during segregation where Black children could play.

Instead, the city used the field to erect a shooting range for police officers. They dumped hundreds of broken-down vehicles here, oozing oil and gas into the Reedy River. They sold a chunk of the land to a minor league baseball team out of Baltimore.

White outlined this history when he stood at the podium on a sunny May 19 morning, his speech capping the opening celebration for Unity Park. It was the culmination of a 7-year, now-$80-million effort, the most ambitious and costly civic project in a generation.

White called it a promise redeemed to the historically Black neighborhood the 60-acre park now anchors.

It might be too late for that pledge to be fulfilled for many Black people from Greenville.

Others stand to prosper from Unity Park, from the city’s commercial and retail business development, land speculation, real estate deals and a shiny and profitable upper-class lifestyle vision for downtown.

The Greenville News partnered with Furman University to understand the dynamics of “progress” in our city. We found a stark pattern that split cleanly on racial lines, powered in part by steep wealth barriers.

From 2010-2020, roughly the same time developers started buying land in anticipation of the park, the Black population in the surrounding neighborhood of Southernside alone dropped by more than 25%.

The number of white residents jumped nearly 90%. In the mile radius surrounding Unity Park, almost half of the Black residents have left in the last three decades.

Read the full Furman University study: An exploration of historic and current population shifts in the city of Greenville and surrounding Greenville County

Four protesters stood on a platform not far from the stage as Mayor White spoke at the opening ceremony. One raised a sign that said, “No park in our name.”

As White talked about plans to donate city-owned land near the park to affordable housing, a protester yelled, “Lie! Lie!”

“They could have ended homelessness in Greenville,” a voice rang out. “Instead, they built a park.”

Lillian Brock Flemming, the first Black woman on Greenville City Council, addressed the criticism when she took the microphone that day in May.

“You will get over it,” she said, “because the park is here.”

Black Greenville being squeezed out

Our yearlong look at these forces changing Greenville shows that lower-income people are being squeezed out to accommodate economic growth.

Furman University examined population and income data produced by the U.S. Census Bureau along precise neighborhood boundaries. Their work, the first of its kind in Greenville, found that from 1960 to 1990, Black residents stayed in the city while the white population fled to the suburbs.

But in the last 30 years, the trends reversed.

A story of Black population loss unfolded across Greenville as the city invested millions of dollars to create jobs and attract new residents. The local government aimed to lure business owners with tax breaks to open shops downtown and in the orbiting historically Black neighborhoods, once the only places for Black-owned businesses in the Jim Crow era.

Using a mix of private and public dollars and the gift of city land, local leaders aimed to remake the city center as a bouquet of urban attractions with parks, hotels, shops, eateries, a performance arts center and a baseball stadium.  

It worked.

From the rubble of the collapsed textile industry, Greenville emerged as one of the fastest-growing cities in the country in the 2010s. The county transformed into a global business hub home to some 230 international firms, one of the highest rates of foreign investment per capita in the nation.

Property values and cost of living surged. Incomes rose across the city.

The new prosperity confronted the city with a thorny problem — one that snags communities across America that care about balancing the wants of the wealthy and the needs of the impoverished.

How could Greenville drive growth without abandoning the most vulnerable of its people? How could the city make room for new residents while holding space for those who have lived their lives here? How could opportunity belong to everyone?

The majority-white government of the city decided to dedicate tax dollars toward new developments for higher-income workers and away from services and civic projects for neighborhoods scarred by a long history of racism.

In the past 30 years, incomes for Black residents in historic Black communities stalled out, and the economic disparity between Black and white households only deepened. The median income for a Black household in Greenville is $27,397 a year, roughly one-third the amount of the white population.

The racial economic divide is wider here than in sister Southern cities like Winston-Salem, North Carolina; Chattanooga, Tennessee; and Birmingham, Alabama.

“We are one of the most difficult places in the country for a Black person to leave poverty,” said Greenville City Council member Ken Gibson, who is Black.

“We don’t have the type of diversity we need. We don't have the opportunities for young Black professionals that they need in order to move back. I've got two daughters, and neither one of them felt like the best future for them is in Greenville.”

City choices favor business, not working class

Jacquez Johnson worked as a cook at a restaurant attached to a $160-a-night hotel last spring. The high-end lodging, which opened in 2021, defines the city skyline about a mile from Unity Park.

The hotel sits at the end of the tourist-packed main street, unrecognizable from years past. During Johnson's lifetime, the city widened the sidewalks, opened green spaces and rehabilitated storefronts.

When Johnson left his shifts at the hotel, he didn’t have anywhere to go. He slept on a coworker’s couch.

He and his mother, Tiniki, were experiencing homelessness. As he worked at the restaurant, his mother lay in a nursing home bed.

Her battle with COVID-19 took her from a hospital to a facility about a mile from Unity Park. Another fight for her survival consumed her mind.

Would she find a place to live before she died?

The city is becoming nearly unlivable for Black people who have spent generations toiling in the jobs that make it run and surviving discrimination that persisted long past the end of Jim Crow laws.

Greenville has no neighborhoods with an average rent within the limits of the median income of a Black family. That household can only afford about $685 a month in rent without assistance. The average rent in Greenville is about double that, according to industry source RentCafe.

Who can afford that?

Perhaps someone who works downtown in a white-collar job and jogs the Swamp Rabbit Trail that snakes through Unity Park. Paying $1,395 a month just for an apartment is in their price range.

There are Southernside homes on sale for $1 million. There are townhouses next to the park that rented for almost three times the average rent in Greenville.

There are no listings for rental properties with an affordable price tag in the mile surrounding Unity Park. That was not always the case.

“The city has basically spent ($70 million) to fast-track the gentrification of its own people in West Greenville,” said former Greenville City Council member David Sudduth in a written statement. “Everybody knows it, but not everyone will admit it.”

He said Unity Park’s redevelopment won’t fix any problems for the Black community.

Our takeaways:Key findings from The Cost of Unity, a series on the displacement of Black Greenville

Sudduth and another former Republican City Council member, Susan Reynolds, raised these same questions about the cost of the park and its potential to displace Black residents while serving on council.

They say Mayor White, a fellow Republican, recruited candidates to run against them in retaliation.

They both lost.

Asked if he tried to replace them because of their Unity Park criticisms, White said in an interview with The Greenville News, “No apologies.”

Promised housing help hasn’t started

The city did donate parcels of land on the edge of Unity Park to the Greenville Housing Fund, a nonprofit that spearheads the city’s affordable housing plan. The council also funded an affordable housing project near the park.

The donated land, valued at $8 million, will host 375 housing units deemed "affordable," according to plans. But the ground remains unbroken eight months after the crowd applauded Mayor White’s speech proclaiming its arrival.

Even if they break ground on that project tomorrow. Even if they build a thousand more units in the city and county by spring. Even if they fund 10,000 more in the next five years.

It won’t be enough.

The area needs roughly 20,000 more units of low-cost housing, according to a coalition of housing groups in the city and county. It’s already too late for many Black families in Greenville.

For four years, Quentoria Jones raised her children in Pleasant Valley, a part of a constellation of historically Black neighborhoods expanding a few miles south of Unity Park.

Her home in Pleasant Valley sat comfortably within walking distance of her children’s school, where Jones would also volunteer, as well as her job at the community center.

But a lengthy landlord dispute over unreasonable fees and unresolved plumbing issues rendered her home unlivable, she said. Jones tried to stay in Pleasant Valley, near the people she loves who love her back.

Her search radius expanded with each landlord’s rejection. Jones asked for just one chance.

Greenville needs thousands more chances.

Winners and losers

White, who has been mayor for 27 years, told The Greenville News that Unity Park and other large-scale projects subsidized with taxpayer money did not displace Black Greenville. Other supporters say Unity Park is not an agent of displacement because no one was living on the land.

However, urban planning experts said public investment projects like major parks adversely affect nearby residents with low incomes by rapidly raising property values and rents. The research traces this fallout in cities, big and small, across America.

Your support makes investigations like this possible. Subscribe to the Greenville News.

It’s such an issue that there is a name for this phenomenon: “Green gentrification.”

“There are always winners and losers,” said Paul Ong, a professor of urban planning at UCLA and director of the Center for Neighborhood Knowledge. “People who are socially vulnerable bear the brunt of those changes. People with an ability to pay reap the benefits.”

He isn’t at all surprised to see the winning and losing sides break down along racial lines. That is the history of America, Ong said.

For much of the 20th century, white Greenville mostly avoided buying homes in these areas, opting for investment outside of the city. Black Greenville was largely confined to living only in these spaces, bounded by racist laws and discriminatory real estate practices that denied Black residents purchasing power.

The Furman University study found that as more wealthy white families moved into historically Black neighborhoods, their new interest increased property values beyond what the existing Black population could afford.

Five weeks after Unity Park opened, Veretta Lindsay, a community advocate, walked toward the curb near the 111 South Leach Street complex, her arms heavy with what the tenants had to leave behind. In just four more days, the residents had to vacate their apartments to make way for a new townhouse development a mile from Unity Park.

Lindsay, a member of the Sterling Neighborhood Association, paused by the pile near the curb. A ripped box spring and bubblegum pink stuffed bunny. A box of flour, a jar of peanut better, a self-help book titled “Hustle Believe Receive” — all left behind. The city’s sanitation workers would remove the traces of life here.

Two cyclists, coming from the high-six-figure townhomes built about four years ago up the block, stopped at the corner and turned toward her. Lindsay said she saw disgust twist their faces.

“We were here first!” she shouted.

Leach Street cuts through the historically Black neighborhood called Sterling, once home to the first public Black high school in Greenville and the alma mater of civil rights icon the Rev. Jesse Jackson. Sterling High School stood so close to where Unity Park is today that the football and track teams competed there.

Median household income by race for Census Tract 5, which most closely aligns with the Green Avenue, Greater Sullivan, and Sterling neighborhoods, 2000 - 2019. Data for white households is unavailable for 2020-2021, so data for those years is not shown.

Greenville Housing Futures Inc., a private nonprofit affordable-housing developer, opened 111 Leach Street Place about three decades ago. In December 2021, a local custom home builder purchased the 1-acre site with five single-story duplexes for $1.6 million. It's slated to be transformed into a 17-unit townhouse community.

Residents said they were initially given until August to move out. A piece of paper would change that. Yvonne Cornwall, then-61, spotted it on the ground in front of her apartment.

It was a notice informing her that she had to pack up her apartment of three years by the end of June.

It was not enough time for her to find a new place of her own.

On June 28, Cornwall, with the help of family and neighbors, hauled her mattress, headboard and TV stand into a portable storage unit.

Cornwall headed to Simpsonville, where she would live with her daughter about 15 miles south of the city and her job behind the deli counter at a Publix.

She would sleep on a cot in her granddaughter’s room that night.

‘A cautionary tale’

About six years before Cornwall was forced to leave Greenville, the city hired an urban consulting firm that concluded more low-income housing was needed.

The Greenville Housing Fund, one of the largest affordable housing nonprofits in the area, launched in 2018.

City Council decided to determine annually how much to give to the fund. Since Unity Park planning launched in 2016, the city dedicated $10.4 million to the Greenville Housing Fund. Greenville commits less money per capita for affordable housing compared to peer cities such as Charleston and Asheville and Durham, North Carolina, according to Greenville Housing Fund data.

Michael Anderson, the head of the Housing Trust Fund Project, said most cities with housing trust funds guarantee money goes to affordable housing with voter-approved bonds, developer fees and other dedicated funding sources.

“When I do public speaking around the country, I use Greenville as a cautionary tale,” Anderson said.

“Greenville says we got $70 million for a park and (a couple) million for affordable housing. That’s a moral statement. What does it say about you? This is about political will. If you make choices like that, you should end up where Greenville is.”

The majority of the money for Unity Park, $49 million, came from the hospitality tax fund, which South Carolina state law dictates can only be used for tourism-related activities and improvements.

Around $13 million came from private donations, and $5 million came from the city’s stormwater fund.

The stormwater fund went toward widening and restoring the polluted Reedy River to prevent the new park from flooding — and relocating the public works facility so the city could build Unity Park.

Gaye Sprague was the only City Council member to vote against using the money to finance the relocation. She argued the move shouldn’t be the city's top priority compared to other needed stormwater projects, including much-needed improvements in historically Black neighborhoods such as Nicholtown.

Median household income by race for Census Tract 43, which most closely aligns with the Nicholtown neighborhood, 2010- 2021.

The neighborhood about three miles east of Unity Park was once a plantation. After the Civil War, the formerly enslaved founded Nicholtown, and Black people built a vibrant community there by the mid-20th century.

Sarah Reese’s longtime home, a tidy, two-story with a pristine yard, welcomes the cars that venture into Nicholtown from a bustling roadway. She sat in front of her television on April 27, just weeks before Unity Park opened. A newscaster announced BMW Manufacturing, headquartered near Greenville, pledged $1.25 million to the park, the project's largest donation.

Reese, a Grammy award-winning opera singer, returned to her hometown of Greenville after traveling the world to perform. She’s wowed concert halls in major cities up and down the East Coast. It was all part of her groundbreaking effort to ensure her golden years glowed with peace and stability.

The Unity Park donation news hit home that April evening.

Her mind flipped to the image of rainwater pouring into her basement. And it rains, on average, 163 days a year in Greenville.

Her neighborhood of Nicholtown didn’t receive the major stormwater improvements the city knew it needed. And the residential and business boom surrounding her home is only heightening her horror. These new developments, evidence of gentrification, cover dirt with pavement, encouraging the rainwater that once settled and sat to rush toward Reese’s exhausted water pump.

“How wonderful," Reese thought as the screen glowed with the Unity Park news in her living room. "But the problem is, we're drowning over here. And nobody seems to care."

The park and more promises

Mayor White said that the city worked with developers and other partners to stabilize areas around Unity Park where housing had fallen into disrepair and residents pleaded for relief from crime and blight.

Lillian Brock Flemming, a City Council member who lives near Unity Park, is one of the park’s staunchest political supporters.

She shared the stage with Mayor White during the opening day ceremony.

She comes from a family of Southernside champions. Her mother, the late Lila Mae Brock, dedicated her life to eradicating poverty in the neighborhood. She advocated for the city to open the community center. She founded Brockwood, affordable housing for seniors, which her daughter and son-in-law now run next to Unity Park.

A statue in Unity Park honors Brock. Generations of Black Greenville campaigned for this park.

In 1939, advocates marched to city hall. They penned letters to the editor and collected signatures for a petition. E.B. Holloway, the first Black letter carrier in Greenville, led these efforts in the 1930s. His painted portrait gazes upon the park today, under the words, “a promise fulfilled.”

For Flemming, Unity Park is a triumph, hard-fought and overdue.

People who criticize Unity Park don’t understand the extent of blight and crime that plagued the neighborhood in the past, she said.

“Who in the world doesn’t want to improve something?” she said.

And gentrification, she said, is “happening everywhere.”

Flemming’s house, located just over a quarter mile from the park, was valued a decade ago at roughly $500,000, according to Zillow estimates. Now, its estimated market value is $927,000.

In the shadow of the park

Developers are building an eight-story high-rise called The Delano, with residential units, commercial space and a rooftop restaurant near Unity Park. It will include affordable housing options, but the effort is too late for people like Sharon Logan.

Logan lived up the hill, just a short walk from where a sign announced The Delano was coming soon. Since 2018, she’d made a one-bedroom apartment in Brockwood Senior Housing her home. Buoyed by federal subsidies, it was one of the few remaining low-cost apartments near downtown.

Logan moved to Brockwood with her partner of 22 years, Jerry. The couple lived on federal disability and other government benefits. At Brockwood, that was all they needed.

But on a Monday in May, Logan sat alone in this living room. In 2021, Jerry suffered multiple strokes and battled COVID-19. He requires care in a nursing home.

Because Jerry, 67, no longer lives in the apartment, Brockwood management filed for eviction against Logan. Federal rules say at least one tenant must be at least 62 years old. Logan is three years too young.

Her rent doubles to $799. The landlord determined that with her husband in a nursing home, she no longer qualifies for the lower government-subsidized rate.

She’s done the cruel calculations countless times, but no matter what she does the result is the same: Each first of the month, she is hundreds of dollars short. And she doesn’t have the money to move out.

With the gentrifying force of Unity Park now looming, Logan's neighborhood is primed to get more expensive in the coming months and years.

Her friends and family lift her up, offering her whatever they have, no matter how small. Logan is fighting the eviction. She holds tightly to the hope that her Jerry will, one day, come home.

Four days after Unity Park opens, a Bible sits open on the small table in her living room. “In the end, God has the final word,” Logan says. “I just don’t believe God wants me to be homeless.”

The first of the month is eight days away.

She pulls down the shade on the small window that faces the road leading toward the park.

Cars and the lives they carry, ones beyond Logan’s reach, pass her by.

This is part of the Greenville News’ “The Cost of Unity” series, investigating unrecognized harm from revitalization efforts, including 2022's Unity Park, that are making historically Black neighborhoods unaffordable for the people who used to call them home. Our year of reporting — with research help from partner Furman University — showed the staggering loss of Black residents from a city with one of the highest racial economic disparities in the Southeast.

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: Powerful forces slighted Black Greenville for white, business progress