Race/Related: Unlocking the (Neon Green) Door to Gentrification

Architecture is often the first chapter in the story of neighborhood change. View in [Browser]( | Add nytdirect@nytimes.com to your address book. [The New York Times]( [The New York Times]( Saturday, May 4, 2019 [More Race/Related »]( [Unlocking the (Neon Green) Door to Gentrification]( By EMILY BADGER [Sheldon Moffett, left, and Prince King at Bragg Street Park in Raleigh, N.C. The surrounding historically African-American neighborhood of South Park now has many newly built and renovated homes. White homebuyers are getting nine in 10 of the new mortgages in the area.] Sheldon Moffett, left, and Prince King at Bragg Street Park in Raleigh, N.C. The surrounding historically African-American neighborhood of South Park now has many newly built and renovated homes. White homebuyers are getting nine in 10 of the new mortgages in the area. Logan R. Cyrus for The New York Times Octavia Rainey, a lifelong resident of Raleigh, N.C., and a fair housing advocate, was showing me around the neighborhoods just east of downtown when we pulled up in front of a newly built two-story, Craftsman-style home with white construction stickers still taped to the windows. The house was slate blue, with white trim and a front door painted neon green. Ms. Rainey, who is African-American, pointed out the door in particular — although it effectively announced itself. What, I asked, did it signal to her? “The colorful door means white homeownership,” she said. I heard similar sentiments from many longtime residents in historically black neighborhoods in central Raleigh. Communities there are undergoing rapid change, as higher-income white households attracted to Raleigh’s revived downtown have begun moving closer to it. These neighborhoods embody [a pattern that The Times found]( in census data and millions of mortgage records across the country: In many center-city neighborhoods that were once largely African-American, white home buyers are now getting a majority of the mortgages. In Raleigh, the first sign of demographic change for many residents wasn’t when they saw a white face on the street, but when they saw a house that they expected a white family would buy. The architecture was doing a lot of work signaling the arrival of gentrification. [New homes in the South Park neighborhood.] New homes in the South Park neighborhood. Logan Cyrus for The New York Times and Emily Badger/The New York Times Some of the new homes in Raleigh’s gentrifying South Park neighborhood look angular and modern, a stark contrast to the shotgun homes and side-gabled houses that date to the early 20th century and that have earned the area [a historic designation](. Other renovated properties were stripped down to their bones and rebuilt — taller, larger, more colorful, with fenced-in backyards. A few new homes rise high above the modest, single-story properties around them. Those houses, some longtime residents lament, feel so large that they evoke plantation homes, complete with second-story porches an overseer might use to keep an eye on the black residents nearby. It’s unlikely that real estate developers intend that connotation (these houses are positioned in real estate listings, rather, as [“modern farmhouses,”]( as [“like-new”]( homes with historic charm, or as embodying [“cutting-edge design”](. But conflicts over architecture mirror the larger debates in these neighborhoods: about the sensitivity of new residents to neighborhood history, about the power dynamics made visible when one home towers over its neighbor, about whether the ideal of diversity can survive in a hot housing market. “Be the first to live in this beautiful home!” the [real estate listings say](. “There are big plans for the neighborhood coming soon!” As if no one had big plans here before. [Jason Trzcinka moved to Raleigh from New York City. White residents are changing the community’s racial mix and altering the economics of the land beneath everyone.] Jason Trzcinka moved to Raleigh from New York City. White residents are changing the community’s racial mix and altering the economics of the land beneath everyone. Logan R. Cyrus for The New York Times In remarkably vivid ways, the architecture tells the story of what is happening in these neighborhoods, even if you don’t have the reams of census data on race and income, or the mortgage records and property transactions we relied on to report our story. When I first visited South Park, I needed none of that data to tell me that something very unusual was happening there. Rarely in American cities do you find shotgun homes next to modernist boxes next to vacant lots next to construction sites offering presales at half a million dollars. In that mix, there is so much tension, and something that feels unsustainable. [Read the story: “[The Neighborhood Is Mostly Black. The Home Buyers Are Mostly White]( Editor’s Picks We publish many articles that touch on race. Here are a few you shouldn’t miss. An Appraisal [John Singleton Did Justice to a Poetic Vision of African-American Life]( By A.O. 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