Who gets to be 'revitalized' in Greenville? How and why Furman studied racial displacement

As the new year rolls in, the time has come to reflect on Greenville’s four decades of “revitalization.”

The city’s promotional story goes something like this: With the opening of the Hyatt in 1982, and later the Peace Center, a New Urbanist vision of Main Street began to rise from the ashes of our former textile-based economy.

In the years that followed, new amenities would invite people to live, work, and play downtown. By calming traffic, widening sidewalks, and unveiling greenspaces, the city would entice the return of retail and residential development.

By 2020, the city’s total population would finally rebound to its high-water mark of more than a half-century ago: an amazing success story.

But there is another version of this story that deserves telling.

Revitalization for whom?

Greenville’s progress has come at a price. Housing has become unaffordable. Neighborhoods are gentrifying.

These are facts:

• The number of Black residents in the city has dropped every year for the past 40 years.

• Racial economic inequality within the city is among the worst in the Southeast.

• And Greenville’s historic Black neighborhoods have been hit the hardest.

These are the findings of a yearlong research project conducted by me and a team of researchers at Furman University. Our report, Racial Displacement in Greenville, SC, has been featured in the pages of this newspaper. We invite readers to explore our report’s charts, download its graphs, and interact with its dynamic maps online.

Our research team hopes this work will start a new discussion about how all residents of Greenville can benefit from our community’s “revitalization.”

Following the data

A short drive through neighborhoods like Southernside and Nicholtown is enough for most people to recognize the demographic and economic changes taking place there. However, subjective opinions aren’t evidence. Research requires fact-finding; that means using data, and lots of it.

The data compiled by our research team come from three sources: the decennial census, the American Community Survey (administered by the Census Bureau), and thousands of archival property documents painstakingly scanned from hundreds of Greenville County deed books.

These sources are all publicly available. In fact, much of this data is used by the city for its own initiatives; the recently approved GVL 2040 Comprehensive Plan cites census data in 25 of its charts and figures. The city also employs experts in Geographical Information Systems software who could easily replicate our team’s precise population calculations in targeted neighborhoods. If these technical experts want to consult with us for future research, we are happy to help.

However, in the months leading up to the publication of our report, city representatives questioned our data. Rather than initiate a data-driven dialogue, they engaged a public relations firm, originally hired to raise money for the completion of Greenville’s new Unity Park, to challenge our methodology and findings.

A representative of the firm asserted that our claims did not “align” with his numbers. However, once we obtained a copy of his information, it turned out that his figures were wrong. The reason: His colleagues at the firm did not analyze the census data for themselves. Instead, they relied on a downloaded report from a third-party subscription service that specifically warns against using its online tool at the granular level of exact neighborhood boundaries.

I can’t speak to others’ motivations regarding data validity and reliability, but the structural problems of gentrification and displacement will not be solved with a PR campaign.

What the Furman team found

Our report on Greenville’s “revitalization” begins by investigating the historical origins of the city’s current racial geography.

Greenville’s neighborhoods today are still shaped by the legacy of racist real-estate practices of the past. Our project documents one devious strategy in particular: racially restrictive covenants. These covenants, written into property deeds going back to the early 1900s, forbade the sale of homes to non-white buyers. Although unenforceable today, these historical artifacts serve as evidence that the initial residential segregation of Greenville was intentional and methodical.

Fast forward to the 1960s. As civil rights victories at lunch counters and public libraries signaled the end of legalized segregation, white households began leaving the city center. This nationwide phenomenon, known as “white flight,” was enabled by publicly funded highway and infrastructure projects that paved the way for suburban living with its bigger homes and larger lawns. The City of Greenville’s total population began to drop and would continue to decline for the next 40 years.

Left behind were pockets of segregated and concentrated poverty, many in Greenville’s historically Black neighborhoods like Sterling, West Greenville, and Haynie-Sirrine, to name a few.

These Black neighborhoods, although located within just a few miles of Main Street, were either ignored or carved up by roadway construction like Church Street, Academy Street, and Pete Hollis Boulevard. Increasingly uninhabitable, the housing stock deteriorated. Dilapidation and blight led to demolitions. There were few takers for these vacant lots in the ‘80s and ‘90s, but by the early 2000s, they became prime prospects for real-estate speculation.

By 2010, as the Great Recession waned, and after three decades of reinvestment along Main Street, the city saw explosive growth among new white residents. According to Census population data, between 2010 and 2020 alone, there was a 27% increase in the white population. Yet, during this same time, the Black population continued its steady and continual decline.

As Greenville repopulated, white households’ demand for housing near Main Street soon radiated out into neighborhoods they once avoided. This sparked an increase in property values. Gentrification ensued.

Over the past 30 years, Greenville's historic Black neighborhoods have seen a 53% decline in the number of Black residents. During that same time, the white population in those same neighborhoods has nearly doubled.

Many Black professionals who could afford to live in the city voluntarily moved away during this time span. But our data show most displaced Black residents, especially in historically Black neighborhoods, were priced out.

It’s not complicated: When you add rising housing costs to steep racial economic inequality, you get racial displacement.

Why it matters

According to the most recent American Community Survey economic data, the median white household in Greenville makes 2.8 times more income than the median Black household, and the Black poverty rate (34.4%) in the city is nearly five times that of the white poverty rate. Given these numbers, it’s easy to see who wins and who loses when it comes to housing.

In fact, when you combine these two indicators of racial economic inequality, Greenville’s numbers are far worse than our fellow Southeastern cities like Winston-Salem, Chattanooga, Knoxville, and Birmingham.

Today, the city is finally investing in communities it once abandoned. It is following the same template of 40 years ago: calming traffic, widening sidewalks, and unveiling greenspaces. Unfortunately, the consequence of this new investment — this promise redeemed — will be a further increase in rents, meaning more homes will be out of reach for the majority of Greenville’s Black population.

Efforts are being made to offer more housing at reduced rates, yet they are not enough to change our current demographic trajectory. Even subsidizing new units aimed at people earning 80% — or even 60% — of the overall area median income will fall short. Those rents will still be well above what the median Black family can afford.

Our current strategy to increase “affordable housing” will not slow racial displacement in the city.

This may not be the story of Greenville’s “revitalization” that we read in promotional materials, but it is one that is backed up by facts and data. And the one we need to talk about.

Greenville has made bold decisions in the past. Reinvesting in Main Street 40 years ago was a leap of faith. But we forged ahead. As a city, we have shown that we can take on long-term projects measured not in days, but decades.

We offer our report as a framework to assess the impact of future development to calculate how equally its benefits are enjoyed by all members of our community. There is a path. It will not be easy, but by staying true to the data, we can find our way.

Ken Kolb is professor and chair of the Sociology Department at Furman University. He is the author of the 2022 book about food justice in Greenville, "Retail Inequality: Reframing the Food Desert Debate," published by the University of California Press.

This article originally appeared on Greenville News: How and why Furman University studied Greenville's racial displacement