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Private investment takes hold in NE Wake Forest
by Johnny Whitfield, Wake Weekly Associate Editor
Make no mistake. Don Tidwell hopes to make a dollar.
But the six-year resident of Wake Forest is sinking his investment dollars in an unusual area. Tidwell has purchased five houses on North Taylor Street over the past year and a half. He has renovated three of them and has tenants in all of them. The other two were in such disrepair he let the fire department burn them down for training. Tidwell's investment is all the more unusual because it is in a low-income neighborhood with a reputation for high crime rates and a low quality of living. Earlier this year, parents who live elsewhere complained loudly when they learned their children would be assigned to Forest Pines Elementary, which located in a temporary campus on the DuBois Center property in northeast Wake Forest. Parents cited a dangerous crime rate among the reasons they did not want their children to attend classes in northeast Wake Forest. Now Tidwell has sold one of those vacant lots and hopes to build yet another house on a new lot he created through a zoning recombination. The Louisiana native came to Wake Forest at the request of his daughter who was having trouble building her own home in Holly Springs. When he saw the area, the quality of life convinced him to stay. The decision to invest in northeast Wake Forest comes with some risk, Tidwell admits, but he saw potential. "I saw this house (at 842 N. Taylor St.) on the Internet. When I first came to look at it, there was trash everywhere along the street. But I saw that a new subdivision (Flaherty Farms) was going up just a couple doors down," Tidwell said. A building contractor by trade, Tidwell bought the first house, then brought work crews out to start cleaning up. "It's amazing, but as we kept cleaning up more and more trash, less and less trash kept getting added to it," Tidwell said. The house was in bad shape and he had a lot of work to do, from new wiring and plumbing to tearing out an old lean-to built onto the side of the house. The home next door was occupied by about 12 people, Tidwell said, and neighbors on the other side had built their own privacy fence to separate themselves from their neighbors. Tidwell, concerned about his own investment, inquired of that property owner about his interest in selling. It turns out that owner owned four other houses in the immediate vicinity. The three houses Tidwell renovated are a mixture of new and old homes. The oldest was built in 1905. Exterior walls are made of wood, as if previous owners had built additions to the home over the years. "That's what they built with back then. They didn't have Sheetrock in 1905," Tidwell said. Each house came with its own unique set of challenges as Tidwell began to renovate them. But the construction challenges were among the easiest to overcome. "Apathy is the biggest problem. People have gotten used to their neighborhood looking like this," Tidwell said. That's not true for every resident along North Taylor Street, of course. "When you ride up and down this street, you see some houses that are kept very nicely and others that haven't been taken care of at all," Tidwell said. In order to protect his investment, Tidwell has been careful about whom he rents to. He does background checks on tenants before he lets them rent. His first house was rented before he finished renovating it. Kenneth Putnam, the painter Tidwell hired to paint the house's exterior, fell in love with the house right away. "I love this house. This has been the perfect situation for me," said Putnam. Tidwell's investment has not been a small one. He paid $190,000 for the five homes and says he has sunk another $150,000 in renovations. His three houses, which are all about 1,000 square feet, rent in the high 600s, which Tidwell figures will attract the right caliber of tenant. That kind of private investment is unusual in a part of town that has struggled to battle its reputation as a crime-infested, low-income neighborhood. Tidwell said the area's reputation wasn't a big factor in his decision to invest in the neighborhood. "I knew there was a risk, but I think if you instill a little pride in something, that is infectious. Other people will pick up on it and take it over," he said. Still, private investments in established neighborhoods don't usually happen without a nudge from the public sector. Wake Forest's downtown, for instance, is the beneficiary of a major public investment. Town leaders hope the public support will spur private investment to follow. Tidwell says government can play a role in raising the quality of life in northeast Wake Forest. "If the town would work to tear down some of the worst of these houses, it would do more to benefit this area than anything else they could do," Tidwell said. And in the meantime, Tidwell will keep putting his own money where his mouth is.
Last Updated On: October 6, 2005
Copyright 2005 The Wake Weekly