By Ray Gronberg
gronberg@heraldsun.com; 419-6648
DURHAM -- The Healthy Start Academy and its real estate agent have lined up a buyer who's willing to move two Jackson Street houses that the charter school's leader has threatened to demolish.
The buyer, Helena Cragg of Synergy Enterprises, has inner-city housing rehab projects to her credit and intends to move the 1920s bungalows to lots off Roxboro Street between Seaman and Lynch streets.
Synergy Enterprises will file next week for the permits necessary to move the houses, Cragg and Healthy Start agent Kim Griffin said.
Cragg added that she's also signaled that she's willing to meet with residents of the Morehead Hill neighborhood who've fought Healthy Start's push to remove the houses.
"We can't undo all the tension that happened between the neighborhood and Healthy Start," Cragg said. "We can only speak up from our perspective."
She added that her goal is "saving the houses" from the bulldozer.
Neighborhood leaders in Morehead Hill have relayed Cragg's offer to residents there. At least one signaled via e-mail that he's not exactly rolling out the welcome mat.
"If she thinks she's doing us a favor and hopes for our favor in return to 'avoid a tense situation,' she is mistaken," Parker Street resident Will Elliott send in a posting a neighborhood leader forwarded to city officials. "The situation is already tense and isn't going to get better with the removal of the homes."
But a City Council member who's backed the neighborhood, Eugene Brown, said Wednesday that what Cragg is offering is superior to the alternative.
"This is better than simply tearing them down," Brown said, after making it clear he's still unhappy with how Healthy Start's leaders have handled the situation.
Morehead Hill residents have opposed tearing down or removing the homes because their neighborhood is a historic district listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
They also fear the school intends long-term to buy up other homes in the neighborhood to secure expansion space for their facility.
Executive Director Liz Morey has indicated she intends to convert the Jackson Street lots the bungalows now occupy into a playground for Healthy Start's students.
After waiting out a cooling-off period ordered by Durham's Historic Preservation Commission, school officials in December secured a permit from the city that allows them to demolish the homes.
But they held off on immediately calling in the bulldozers. One of the Morehead Hill residents Cragg has spoken to, Gretchen Engel of Shepherd Street, told neighbors the would-be buyer opened talks with Morey and Griffin in September.
Cragg's Durham rehab experience includes projects in the Cleveland-Holloway area, another historic neighborhood near downtown that's seen a pick-up in investment and owner-occupancy in the past two or three years.
The two-time Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate is credited with helping in 2008 to save a house on Ottawa Avenue in Cleveland-Holloway that had been quite literally minutes away from being bulldozed.
Cragg said that to move the Jackson Street bungalows, workers would have to remove their roofs and "certain sections" of them, truck them through the city, and reassemble them on the new site.
She estimated that work could begin "in a month or two," assuming permits for the move come through.
Cragg also indicated that she wouldn't be surprised by reactions like Elliott's.
"I imagine there are people questioning our motivation," she said. "I know our perspective is that we're just trying to have something positive come from it. I know I can't possibly make everybody happy."
