Storyline · 1973–1984
Chapel Hill's aldermen approved condominium projects in 1973, with Mayor Howard Lee breaking ties, and turned one down in 1974. From 1980, with rental housing short, the Town Council refused conversions of Graham Court and The Oaks, then approved The Oaks in 1981, and a judge ruled that the town could not stop a realty firm's conversions. Conversions spread in Carrboro and Chapel Hill through 1983.
Chapel Hill's Board of Aldermen let the developer of the Oxford apartments, then under construction, convert them from rentals to condominiums on January 15, 1973. On February 5 Mayor Howard Lee cast the deciding vote to rezone a 27-acre tract on Umstead Drive for a 196-unit condominium project, and on April 9 he broke a tie to approve the Village West condominiums near Umstead Park, which the Planning Board and the Recreation Department had opposed because of traffic near children at the park. On November 11, 1974, after a crowded hearing at which nearby residents said Comprehensive Ventures' plan for 225 condominiums beside the Laurel Hill subdivision and the Hunt Arboretum would overload roads and sewers, the aldermen overruled the Planning Board and denied the permit 4 to 2, with traffic at the Farrington Road intersection the deciding concern.
Conversions of existing apartments came before the Town Council in 1980. On February 11 it voted 7 to 1 against converting the 24 units of Graham Court Apartments on McCauley Street, many rented by UNC students, citing the town's tight rental market and the Comprehensive Plan's call for a mix of housing; only Jonathan Howes voted for it. The owners, Graham Court Associates of Charlotte, sued to challenge the town's authority to deny a permit on that ground. On March 10 the council let the developer of the Laurel Hill condominiums on Parker Road enlarge the project after four suits against the town, and approved the Esseola Townhouses as condominiums instead of rentals, which the developer said could not be financed at current interest rates. On October 13 it denied Brant Homes of Greensboro the permit change needed to sell the 124 units of The Oaks Apartments as condominiums, 5-3, against its staff and the Planning Board, which had proposed tenant protections; Mayor Joe Nassif argued that a town with no new apartment starts since 1974 could not afford to lose rental housing. The next day Carrboro's aldermen approved 57 new condominium units by Skye Loch Homes on Westview Drive.
In January 1981 Cedar Court in Carrboro began selling its apartments as condominiums as leases ran out, none of the first 21 to former renters, and the Daily Tar Heel reported that no new rental project had been proposed in Carrboro for months. On January 12 the Chapel Hill council approved The Oaks conversion 5 to 4 over the votes of Nassif, R.D. Smith, Joe Straley and Joe Herzenberg, but the apartments went back to rentals in August before any unit sold. On October 12 the council voted 7-1 to go to court to stop Chapel Hill Realty Company's sales at Brookside and University Gardens apartments until the company obtained permit changes, and to hear no more conversion requests until it had a policy, Jim Wallace dissenting that zoning governs use, not ownership. In December a Superior Court judge ruled that the town had no authority to regulate who owned property; all University Gardens units and about half of Brookside's were sold, mostly to investors, and many rents rose.
By March 1983 parents of UNC students had bought 20 units at the Old Well Apartments on Jones Ferry Road in Carrboro, and realtors put the area's vacancy rate at about 1 percent; 42 apartments at Hamlin Park in Chapel Hill had also been converted. Camelot Apartments on South Estes Drive announced its conversion in November. On January 23, 1984 the Chapel Hill council settled its litigation with the developer of Booker Creek Village, who had added ten units to an approved 21-unit condominium project, allowing 30 in all.
Every statement above comes from these dated entries in the chronology. Each links to its source.
People with a page of their own whom the dated events above name, those named most often first.
No indexed work is about this storyline itself yet. These are about the sites and people its dated events name, those named most often first, so they may discuss the storyline only in part. Follow a link to find a copy or view the material.
Howard N. Lee (born 1934) tells his own story, from a farm childhood in Lithonia, Georgia, through college, army service in Korea at Camp Casey and the move from Savannah that planted him in Chapel Hill, to his election as mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969 and his later run for Congress and years in the state legislature. Published by Cotton Patch Press of Chapel Hill in 2008, 199 pages with plates.
Edwin Caldwell, Jr. reviews a life in Chapel Hill politics in a three-hour Southern Oral History Program interview recorded March 2, 2001, by Oliver White. A skilled organizer, Caldwell worked in the campaign that made Howard Lee the town's first Black mayor in 1969, ran for office more than once without winning, and became a local political power. The conversation also covers race relations, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board and the Church of Reconciliation. Published online in 2006 in Documenting the American South.
Interview recorded June 21, 2000 with Rebecca Clark (1915-2009), a Black Chapel Hill resident, for the Southern Oral History Program at UNC. Clark, educated in Chapel Hill's segregated schools, describes working life under segregation and the economic discrimination she met in it. Topics also include Lincoln High School, school integration, and Howard Lee, elected mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969. Interview K-0536 in collection #4007.
Howard N. Lee's account of his own career, published in 2021 by the North Caroliniana Society with the society award given to him that year, together with tributes from Angela Lee, Valerie Foushee and others. Lee became mayor of Chapel Hill in 1969, the town's first Black mayor.
Norman Gustaveson's papers cover 1948 to 2010 and belong to the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 5500. The papers document his work as a university employee and Chapel Hill activist, including the Speaker Ban Law and academic freedom in North Carolina, the Campus Y, student political activity, the Orange County Board of Commissioners, and the Triangle Land Conservancy.
Joseph W. Straley, born 1914, taught at the University of North Carolina, and his papers, about 600 items in a linear foot and a half spanning 1936 to 2002, are in the Southern Historical Collection at UNC, collection 5252. Diaries and other primary material cover academic freedom and the Speaker Ban Law, civil rights work and segregation, the Community Church of Chapel Hill, Charles Miles Jones and Howard Lee.
Jonathan Howes, a former mayor of Chapel Hill who served in Governor Hunt's cabinet and later worked in the UNC chancellor's office on urban planning, gave this illustrated talk on the past and future of the Chapel Hill campus. Cassette, 1998.
Robert C. Kenzer's study of kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, the decades before and after the Civil War, tracing family ties and neighborhood networks through the county's records. Published by the University of Tennessee Press in 1987, 251 pages with illustrations, maps, portraits and a bibliography. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods and social conditions in the county in the nineteenth century.
Reviewed in Choice Reviews Online (1988), Journal of American History (1988), The American Historical Review (1989), The Journal of Southern History (1989), Civil War history (1989), Journal of Social History (1989).
Jean Bolduc's collection of oral history interviews with Black residents of Durham and Orange counties, published by The History Press in 2016, 125 pages with photographs and portraits. The narrators are the poet Jaki Shelton Green, civil rights lawyer Floyd McKissick, Walter Jackson, Nate Davis, Brenda Stephens, Diane Wright, Jackie Wagstaff and Michelle Johnson, and a closing chapter deals with the Ku Klux Klan. The interviews document Black life and race relations in the two counties across the twentieth century.
Emily Eidenier Pearce's history of Rogers Road, the historically African American neighborhood on the edge of Chapel Hill and Carrboro, and of what happened to it after Orange County opened its landfill next door in 1972. Drawing on interviews with residents, the book records the neighborhood's origins, family life, churches and customs, and then the environmental and social burdens of decades beside the landfill. Privately issued in 2009, 298 pages with illustrations, maps and portraits.
Neighborhood history of the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek area of Chapel Hill, published by the Chapel Hill Historical Society in 2020. The project started in June 2014 when neighbors were asked over the community email list to share memories of life there, and replies came from current residents and from former residents raised there who had since scattered across the country. 268 pages with illustrations, color maps and portraits.
Jean Bolduc's 2016 collection of interviews with African American residents of Durham and Orange counties, presented as short biographies. The subjects are Floyd McKissick (1922-1991), the first African American admitted to UNC's law school, Walter Jackson, Brenda Stephens, Nate Davis, poet Jaki Shelton Green, Jackie Wagstaff, Diane Wright and Michelle Johnson, with a closing chapter on the Ku Klux Klan. 125 pages with illustrations.
Robert E. Seymour, a Baptist pastor in Chapel Hill associated with Olin T. Binkley Memorial Baptist Church, looks back on segregation and race relations in the South from the pulpit. A clergyman's memoir covering church history in the town, Baptists in North Carolina and the segregation of African Americans. Published by Chapel Hill Press in 2011, 204 pages.
Evan P. Bennett returns to the photographs Marion Post Wolcott made in 1939 in Cedar Grove, a Black farming neighborhood in northern Orange County that she documented for the federal resettlement program. Published in 2025 by the Historical Research Office in Raleigh, pages 384 to 406, with illustrations and portraits. Topics include rural African Americans in the Cedar Grove township and photographers in the state.
Sara Regan Lachenman's 2005 thesis on how the people living in Carrboro's company built housing altered it to suit themselves. It takes up domestic architecture, working class housing and the social side of the textile industry in the town, with 158 pages of text and illustrations.
Maxine Freeland's biography of James John Freeland (1918-1999), a Hillsborough man of the twentieth century, compiled in 1999.
Robert C. Kenzer's study of family, kinship and neighborhood in Orange County between 1849 and 1881, covering the county's households from the late antebellum years through the Civil War and Reconstruction. Completed in 1982 in 248 leaves with maps. Topics include kinship, neighborhoods, race relations and social conditions in the county during the nineteenth century.
Public relations material on the Orange County Commission for Women, 1989 to 1992, from the files of the North Carolina Council on the Status of Women, 26 images, with Judith M. Messenheimer named as creator. Issues include child care, teenage pregnancy, abortion, older women, low-income housing, taxation, AFDC, and women's education and employment.
NC Digital Collections record courtesy of the North Carolina Department of Natural and Cultural Resources.
Material on the Kings Mill and Morgan Creek neighborhood of Chapel Hill, 2003 to 2019, gathered from residents and the neighborhood association while The Copperline Chronicles (Chapel Hill Historical Society, 2020) was being prepared. Three boxes, collection CHHS.017.
Each dated event above names its source, the place to start. For finding more on an event across newspapers, records and histories, see the research guide Follow an event across several accounts. Ask at the North Carolina Room of the Orange County Public Library for help with local sources.
Friends of the Orange County Public Library. “Condominium conversions in Chapel Hill and Carrboro, 1973–1984.” Orange County Indexed, https://focplnc.org/orange-county-books/storylines/condominium-conversions-storyline-1973/. Accessed October 22, 2026.
