Verna Torain has lived in east Greensboro’s Cottage Grove neighborhood for more than 25 years.
When she first moved to the community, many residents worked in nearby factories. “Now everything’s closed down,” says the volunteer and community activist. “There’s no jobs.”
The economic toll has left its mark on Cottage Grove. Houses and apartments have fallen into disrepair. And it’s not just buildings suffering.
Job loss and substandard housing are two factors contributing to a host of other issues, including health problems.
Sills, an associate professor of sociology, is using statistical analysis and software to better understand these issues. He works closely with residents, plus nonprofit organizations, government agencies, foundations and health care providers, to design, test and implement solutions.
“I’m working on health one day; I’m working on educational outcomes on another,” he says. “I’m working on mortgage markets and fair housing. It looks like I’m all over the place, but what I’m doing is taking problems that come to me and applying the best research tool I have.”
With the support of a highly competitive Invest Health grant, Sills and his partners – both on campus and in the community – are currently examining the relationship between substandard housing and pediatric asthma in Greensboro.
Verna Torain has lived in east Greensboro’s Cottage Grove neighborhood for more than 25 years. When she first moved to the community, many residents worked in nearby factories.
“Now everything’s closed down,” she says. “There’s no jobs.”
Traditional manufacturing jobs that powered the Piedmont Triad’s economy for decades have mostly disappeared — automated away or shipped abroad.
The economic toll has left its mark on Cottage Grove. Houses and apartments have fallen into disrepair. And it’s not just buildings suffering.
Job loss and substandard housing are two factors contributing to a host of other issues, including health problems. These are the problems that Torain and other volunteers and activists work on each day.
Mapping problems, designing solutions
The connections among housing, sickness, and related problems are the primary focus of Dr. Stephen Sills’ Center for Housing and Community Studies at UNCG.
Sills, an associate professor of sociology, is using statistical analysis and software to better understand these issues. Then, he works closely with residents, plus nonprofit organizations, government agencies, foundations, and health care providers, to design, test, and implement solutions.
“I’m working on health one day; I’m working on educational outcomes on another,” he says. “I’m working on mortgage markets and fair housing. It looks like I’m all over the place, but what I’m doing is taking problems that come to me and applying the best research tool I have.”
Sills also taps other faculty — such as Dr. Keith Debbage, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Geography and the Bryan School of Business and Economics, and Dr. Ken Gruber at the UNCG Center for Youth, Family, and Community Partnerships — to bring additional expertise to center projects.
With the support of a highly competitive Invest Health grant, Sills and his partners are currently examining the relationship between substandard housing and pediatric asthma in Greensboro.
For the project, Sills combined multiple databases from the U.S. Census Bureau, the City of Greensboro, and Cone Health.
His center also created a new database.
In the summer of 2016, a dozen student researchers used software that pulls photographs from Google Maps’ streetview. The students spent untold hours sitting at computers and viewing images of tens of thousands of Greensboro properties.
For each one, they completed a 53-question survey based on the images — is the property residential or commercial? What’s the condition of the roof or siding? Are there potential code violations, such as grass being too high or junk cars in the yard?
With all that data, software could be used to map out substandard housing “hotspots.”
Those hotspots were cross-referenced with Census data and data from Cone Health’s Emergency Department on pediatric asthmas visits.
That brought Sills and his team to the Cottage Grove neighborhood.
Clockwise from left: CHCS’s Dr. Stephen Sills, Greensboro Housing Coalition’s Josie Williams, undergraduate researcher Francheska Elliott, former undergraduate researcher and current CHCS staff Phillip Sheldon, and community activists Sandra Williams and Verna Torain. [Photo by Mike Dickens]
Concentrated problems
Sills found the substandard housing hotspots correlated with communities with high levels of poverty, low levels of home ownership, and poor health outcomes.
Many of the properties are poorly maintained — either because their owners can’t afford to repair them or because they have little incentive to invest more capital in rental housing.
The result? A leaking roof creates high levels of moisture inside a home, spurring mold growth, which then exacerbates the asthma of children living there. Holes in a foundation allow insects and pests into a house; roach droppings, rodent waste, dust mites, and the like also worsen symptoms and trigger asthma attacks.
Josie Williams, the Cottage Grove project team coordinator for the Greensboro Housing Coalition, works closely with resident families, helping them improve their housing and their lives. She’s based in a house-turned-community-center in the neighborhood.
“I get to see firsthand the issues that are going on,” she says. She recalls one family with children ranging from 8 to 14 years old. When they moved into the neighborhood, “their asthma became severe because of the air quality.”
She’s also seen residents who leave their doors open when they can, or frequently go in and out of their homes because of the poor indoor air quality.
And although asthma is the specific condition that Sills’ team is tracking, it’s hardly the only challenge arising from substandard housing.
“For certain senior citizens, I noticed there were no bannisters on the stairs to their front doors,” says Sandra Williams, another resident and volunteer in Cottage Grove. One rainy day, she says, she saw an elderly man crawling up his front steps to get to his house, unable to navigate them safely without a rail. She helped him in.
One poorly maintained apartment complex in particular is a striking source of pediatric asthma cases. The data also tell Sills that problems in one apartment or one house often affect neighbors, so a single substandard home can impact a whole neighborhood.
“A lot of the problems concentrate at the same time in the same place,” Sills says. “We’re providing the data that then inform the policy. It informs decisions from the health care system. It informs community advocacy agencies on where to go.”
Josie Williams of the Greensboro Housing Coalition walks a group through the Cottage Grove neighborhood, pointing out issues that can lead to health problems. [Photo by Mike Dickens]
Community connections
One Tuesday morning in early January, almost a dozen people have gathered in the Center for Housing and Community Studies. Besides Sills and his staff and students, there are community volunteers, housing organization representatives, economic developers, a Cone Health staffer, and a representative of the Cone Health Foundation.
The goal of the meeting is to discuss next steps in the Invest Health project. Normally, this twice-monthly meeting takes place in Cottage Grove, but it snowed the previous weekend. Many neighborhood streets are still impassable.
Several topics are reviewed.
How can what the group has learned — from both Sills’ data and community partner and resident input — inform city plans for just-approved housing bond funds? How hard should the group pressure landlords in the area whose properties need improvements — and who among the group should take the lead on that? And much more.
“It’s really important for Cottage Grove, now that we’ve got their trust, that we deliver value,” Sills says to the group.
That sentiment is echoed by others. “They’ve been let down so many times that building trust is really hard,” says Beth McKee-Huger, referencing residents of the most rundown apartment complex. McKee-Huger is a volunteer and retired nonprofit executive who has worked on housing issues in Greensboro for almost 30 years. “They’ve been hurting for years.”
Among the top priorities are plans to create a minor repairs program. It would harness trained volunteers to make simple, inexpensive repairs to homes, such as fixing a leaking roof.
Those repairs, along with health education (“don’t clean with bleach — it can trigger an asthma attack”) and advice on eliminating mold and other triggers, can reduce asthma attacks that send children to the hospital, keep them out of school, and cause their parents to miss work.
Organizers also want those volunteers to become advocates for fair and healthy housing, UNCG’s Gruber reminds the group.
Between the data analysis that identifies “hot spots” and proven interventions, such as small repairs and health education, the group hopes to improve Cottage Grove and develop a model for other neighborhoods.
“We’re the design team,” says Mac Sims, president of the East Market Street Development Corp., an economic development group focused on east Greensboro. “You can take this model and apply it in any place in the community.”
Community activist Sandra Williams [Photo by Mike Dickens]
Beyond one neighborhood
Taking effective, proven ideas to other neighborhoods — and even other cities — is Sills’ bigger vision.
“We’ve done a proof-of-concept with Cottage Grove,” Sills says. “Can we translate that to Ole Asheboro? Can it translate to some of the neighborhoods in High Point that we’re working with?”
Eventually, Sills says, the work could create a model that could be applied across an entire city here or anywhere in the country.
And it’s not just poor, urban communities that Sills is focused on. For example, the center has researched the impact of opiate addiction on rural communities in western North Carolina and Georgia.
Sills has also studied discrimination in housing and mortgage applications, sending testers of different racial, gender, and sexual identity to apartment communities and analyzing banking data to see if they’re treated differently.
“When I’m looking at housing and health, I’m in the same neighborhoods where I know there is racial steering that goes on,” he says. “I know that I’ve sent a white female tester to this neighborhood in a previous project, and the property management company said, ‘You might not want to live in that neighborhood.’”
“It’s a fair housing issue at the same time that it’s a substandard housing issue; it’s a health issue; and it’s an economic opportunity issue. They’re really all intricately connected.”
Sills’ research pinpoints and measures how those issues cluster together, and how tackling one can affect the rest of them. That’s what Sills cares about most.
With any report that comes out of the center, he’s looking for policies changed, community funding generated, and numbers of lives impacted. Ultimately, Sills says, “It’s ‘What’s the impact on the community?’”
Greensboro is one of 50 U.S. cities selected to participate in the Invest Health initiative. The funding from the Reinvestment Fund and Robert Wood Johnson Foundation supports the development of new strategies to help low-income communities thrive, with a particular focus on health.
An Asset Based Community Development Planning Report
Lake Hiwassee
In 2016, The Hinton Rural Life Center in Hayesville, NC, in partnership with a number of community organizations, engaged in a project known as the “Partnering for Change” initiative. The Hinton Center contracted with the Center for Housing and Community Studies (CHCS) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro to: 1. provide technical assistance to the project; 2. analyze geographic, economic, and demographic data on the region and its inhabitants; 3. conduct focus groups, a multi-modal resident and client survey, and interviews with “key informants” to identify strengths and issues; 4. gather and compile a database of community assets; 5. produce an online GIS map of community assets; and 6. conduct a Community Action Planning session to review findings and brainstorm solutions.
Poor Mental Health in Last 30 Days
Over the course of 10 months (March 2016 to January 2017) the Hinton Center, The Center for Housing and Community Studies, and community partners examined the quality of life in Clay, Cherokee, and Towns counties. Eleven focus groups, 573 surveys, and 26 interviews were conducted assessing satisfaction in community members’ lives regarding physical health, family, education, employment, finances, environment, and more. Contributions were submitted by clients, service providers, community leaders, and citizens to the Community Asset Map in order to identify resources currently available for enhancing the quality of life and to expose gaps in service systems. The mission of the project was to identify, collect, and share this data and to build relationships and networks that will enhance collaboration.
Community Action Plan
The project is intended to establish an inter-agency collaborative and Community Action Plan (CAP) for the three counties. Ultimately, the goal is to improve the quality of life for all residents by enhancing opportunities for economic development and by finding ways to solve community concerns. Through a series of workshops with the “Partnering for Change” executive committee, the initiative developed a vision of the future that would address the issues impacting the community and result eventually in a “Thriving community with opportunities and choices for a better quality of life for all.” The Community Action Planning (CAP) process resulted in a set of recommendations and ‘next steps ’aligned with achieving this vision.
GEOSPATIAL ANALYSIS AS A TOOL FOR TARGETED REDEVELOPMENT
Posted on January 30, 2017
IDENTIFYING OPPORTUNITIES:
Vacant and abandoned properties are often indicative of economic distress and disinvestment in a neighborhood. Their existence presents a complex set of problems for the surrounding community, including increased crime rates, greater incidences of asthma, and decreased property values. Additionally, the presence of vacant spaces increases the likelihood of long-term, cyclic disinvestment and deterioration. Thus, revitalization efforts may be most effective when deployed in areas with high concentrations of vacant spaces. The city of High Point, North Carolina, has experienced notable decline as manufacturing has been globalized and competing furniture trade events have opened in Las Vegas and New York. The Core City area has been especially hard hit as residential areas (many historic mill villages) were linked to manufacturing.
The area has been the subject of numerous revitalization plans since the 1960s; yet, housing and neighborhood conditions continue to deteriorate. The area is overwhelmed by substandard housing, high vacancy rates, empty lots, and affiliated low property values, high poverty rates, low homeownership rates, and high crime rates. As one-third of the total population of High Point lives in this core city area, this rate of vacancy and abandonment negatively impacts a significant portion of High Point residents. Researchers working with the Center for Housing and Community Studies (CHCS) at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro remotely gathered over 15,000 parcel-level assessments as part of a housing market segmentation study of this area. We developed an external assessment tool that employed new GIS applications developed by Loveland Technologies to conduct assessments in nine census tracts.
The remote external assessment tool was used to record the number and condition of parcels indicating if they were occupied, vacant, abandoned, and the condition of structures on the properties. This data was matched with current data from the City of High Point (condemned buildings, crime data, public services data, etc.), and information on community economic, demographic, and social conditions. ArcGIS was used to produce maps showing the Core City overlaid with geospatial data from a variety of national (such as the American Housing Survey) and local jurisdictional sources (such as tax records and crime data). This data was used to then create a geospatial market segmentation index. Market segmentation is a process of analysis that divides an area by natural geographic bounds as well as by demographic, social, economic, political, and cultural divisions. This information allowed for neighborhoods to be ranked as stable markets, functioning markets, constrained markets, weak markets, or extremely weak markets. The study areas in the Core City are some of the most segregated and impoverished neighborhoods in High Point.
Highlights from the study:
More than half (59%) of units are renter occupied; neighborhoods with the lowest rates of owner‐occupancy are concentrated in the center of the Core City.
Taxes are delinquent on 7.6%.of parcels.
Of the total parcels surveyed nearly one‐in-five lots was vacant.
In the Core City of High Point, 1,425.42 acres total were vacant; the combined tax value of these vacant lots is currently $99,448,500 (excluding publicly owned and non‐taxed land).
Out of total structures surveyed (n=12,323), 29.1% (3,586) were reported as showing signs of deterioration or damage: 21.7% (2,674) were rated as fair, and 5.2 % (643) were rated as poor.
The analysis was used to match revitalization efforts to neighborhood conditions and provided the City of High Point with a roadmap to redevelopment. This technique may be readily applied to other towns and cities. For example, we are currently conducting a parcel-level census of more than 86,000 parcels in Greensboro, NC. To view the full report and findings please see: http://tinyurl.com/CHCS-HighPointStudy
If you would be interested in discussing projects for your area. Please contact Dr. Stephen Sills, Director – UNCG Center for Housing and Community Studies at (336) 944-6145 or [email protected].
Addressing pediatric asthma in Greensboro
Posted on January 26, 2017
GSO named one of 50 Invest Health Cities by Reinvestment Fund and Robert Wood Johnson Foundations
On May 19, 2016, UNCG Research and Engagement covered the selection of Greensboro for a new Invest Health initiative:
Greensboro is one of 50 cities selected to take part in a new, national community health focused initiative. As part of the program, Greensboro will address the city’s pediatric asthma rate, which disproportionately affects low-income children.
Invest Health, a collaboration of the Reinvestment Fund and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, aims to transform how leaders from mid-size American cities work together to help low-income communities thrive, with specific attention to community features that drive health, such as access to safe and affordable housing.
A team representing the City of Greensboro, Cone Health, East Market Street Development Corporation, Greensboro Housing Coalition and The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) applied for grant funding to improve the availability of safe, affordable housing for families living with asthma.
The team’s proposal was selected from 180 proposals representing 170 different cities across the nation. Over the next 18 months, Greensboro’s Invest Health team will receive a $60,000 grant, take part in a vibrant learning community and have access to highly skilled faculty advisors and coaches who will guide their efforts toward improved health.
“Greensboro’s asthma rate is influenced by higher than average poverty and uninsured rates,” explained Dr. Stephen Sills, director of the UNCG Center for Housing and Community Studies.
More than 19,000, or 29.3 percent, of children in Greensboro live in households below the poverty level, and a majority of those homes are not safe for children with asthma.
“These families have few options in terms of affordable and healthy housing, which consigns over 6,000 children with asthma to live in places that make them sick,” Sills said. “Strong evidence has linked plumbing or roof leaks, inadequate ventilation, faulty or inoperative exhaust systems, unclean floors and other surfaces, presence of rodents or cockroaches and building structure issues to subsequent asthma incidence and morbidity.”
The Habitat for Humanity Club participated in a build event Saturday, January 21st assisting in prepping roof trusses for installation and setup of safety equipment and scaffolds.
The work that Habitat does for these communities helps to create trusting relationships between Greensboro communities and UNCG. The projects are not only beneficial to families, but also to the student volunteers. Members of UNCG Habitat Club are able to improve leadership abilities, attain cultural competence and enhance their capacity for skill building.
Come and join us on every 1st and 3rd Wednesday of the month at 5pm for our general body meeting in MRHA 2711
The CHCS sponsors the UNCG Habitat for Humanity Club. Learn more about this club here.
News and Record: How deep is our ‘food insecurity’? More data would help
Posted on January 18, 2017
On May 29, 2016, UNCG Associate Professor Marianne LeGreco penned a column for the News and Record about food security:
“Since September 2015, I’ve been working with the Guilford Food Council and the Greensboro Community Food Task Force to enact a strategy to collect some better data about our local food system in Greensboro and Guilford County — including links to food security and hunger. We just completed the first step, which is a food resource asset map. The map brings together all of the data that’s already out there, including “Amy’s Little Blue Book” and “Little Green Book,” as well as plot points for convenience stores, grocery stores, summer meal sites and other resources.
“You can access the map at http://guilfordfoodcouncil.com. I invite you to take a look at the map and tell us what you think. You can also submit ideas for additional resources we should include, as well as update any information. If you’d like to get involved with the food council, you can also find a link to our application.
“The map is only the first step. We’ve also received funding from UNC-Greensboro to work with the Center for Housing and Community Studies to design and pilot test a survey tool, which we can use to get some more meaningful, valid and reliable data about how food works within our communities — especially from the voices who aren’t regularly represented in the conversation.”
“Stephen Sills, the lead researcher of the UNCG study and director of the Center for Housing and Community Studies, likens rental housing to an extractive resource industry, even going so far as to compare it to the “mountain-top removal” method of coal mining where the tops of mountains in Appalachia are literally blown off.
Even though the vast majority of landlords in the High Point ghetto live nearby, Sills said, “You’re still extracting wealth from one side of town to the other, largely from low-income black people to high-income whites. I still see this as a social justice issue. If I’m a landlord, I’ve bought low-income housing because it’s a good investment and I can still extract the dollars from rent payments but I’m not going to invest very much as long as there’s a tax advantage. They get to write off the wear and tear as it’s rented. As soon as it reaches the highest level of depreciation, there’s incentive to sell. Then the next owner comes in and the cycles repeats. They buy the house and put lipstick on it — paint it, fix the windows, do some cosmetic things so they can rent it out.”
News & Record: Grab a hammer, because we have work to do
Posted on January 18, 2017
On February 26, 2016, Susan Ladd covered the Greensboro Housing Coalition’s 2016 Housing Summit for the News and Record:
“More than 50 percent of renters are overburdened, meaning they pay more than 30 percent of their income for housing.
“It’s a big problem to tackle, but we have many of the tools we need to figure out where we should concentrate our efforts.
“Not surprisingly, if you overlay maps showing owner-occupied housing versus rentals, poverty rates, food deserts, abandoned and vacant housing, it shows a clear concentration of disadvantaged neighborhoods in east and south Greensboro.
“But as Stephen Sills noted in his presentation on Wednesday, if you drill deeper, you can find pockets of opportunity within these disadvantaged areas.
“Sills leads the UNC-Greensboro Center for Housing and Community Studies, which is developing a home assessment tool that could be used to do a census of all housing stock in Greensboro.”
![Clockwise from left: CHCS’s Dr. Stephen Sills, Greensboro Housing Coalition’s Josie Williams, undergraduate researcher Francheska Elliott, former undergraduate researcher and current CHCS staff Phillip Sheldon, and community activists Sandra Williams and Verna Torain. [Photo by Mike Dickens]](https://research.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/promo-580x309.jpg)
![Josie Williams of the Greensboro Housing Coalition walks a group through the Cottage Grove neighborhood, pointing out issues that can lead to health problems. [Photo by Mike Dickens]](https://research.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/34590654581_5db0bb5dd9_o-580x309.jpg)
![Community activist Sandra Williams [Photo by Mike Dickens]](https://research.uncg.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/05/34681228186_3e210baf13_k-580x309.jpg)
