A closer look at the current growth and movement in the city center and how its businesses and shops continue to foster a live-work-play lifestyle for employees and customers alike

By Anna-Rhesa Versola | Photography by John Michael Simpson

Durham continues its upward trajectory as it re-imagines how to bring residents and workers back into downtown office spaces, urban dwellings, retail bars and shops. According to the latest report produced by Downtown Durham Inc., there are over 4,700 residential addresses in the downtown area, including 877 affordable homes, with another 4,200 announced for future development. There are 265 (and counting) retail shops, bars and service-oriented businesses, including close to 50 new ones. The city center has about 4.6 million square feet of office space with nearly another million expected to be added in the next year. Average occupancy rates over the last three years hovered around 86%.

The city’s steady post-pandemic growth is a healthy sign of recovery. Durham is “right on the heels” of three other biotech hubs in Boston, Massachusetts, and San Francisco and San Diego, California, said Casey Angel, communications director for Longfellow Real Estate Partners, which specializes in spaces for wet labs and offices for innovative bio companies. As of last year, nearly 700,000 square feet of lab space was built in downtown districts like the Durham Innovation District, one of Longfellow’s properties along Morris Street. An additional 414,000 square feet of laboratory space is expected downtown, per the DDI report.

“To see [Research Triangle Park]…and all of the creatives and scientists and engineers and innovators who come out of our great universities, people are moving here,” Angel said. “There is a great quality of life here in the Triangle that I think a lot of people are recognizing. It’s inclusive. It’s exciting. It’s up and coming.”

Duke Clinical Research Institute, which was established in 1996, was one of the first Duke groups to move downtown after considering many other potential locations in 2006, according to Facility Services Director David Sielaty. “We wanted a landmark location close to restaurants and the heart of the city,” he said about their office at Durham Centre on Morgan Street. DCRI currently occupies 105,000 square feet across seven floors in the building. In pre-COVID-19 times, the company occupied more than 310,000 square feet at Durham ID’s 200 Morris development, which is now subleased by Google.

Sielaty said DCRI has about 1,000 faculty, staff and contractors, but the company allows both remote working and for people to come into the office – they mostly do so on Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. “We’ve become proficient at Zoom, Microsoft Teams and other virtual platforms,” Sielaty said. “We will have occasional larger meetings in our building as teams host and encourage in-person meetings monthly or quarterly.”

Office amenities include complimentary coffee, tea, filtered water, a massage chair station, pingpong and vending machines. DCRI’s landlord, Capital Associates, provides a lunch delivery option for building tenants.

“With the continued building and expansion of residential options downtown, both business tenants and new homeowners would benefit from more restaurants, grocery stores and other venues,” Sielaty said about ways to further improve occupancy rates downtown. “There is a wealth of history and culture in downtown Durham, and we look forward to developing and maintaining the unique diversity of this city.”

Clare Murray, who leads corporate development and operations at gene-editing company Life Edit Therapeutics, said the ElevateBio subsidiary rapidly outgrew its space in Morrisville. “Five of us started the company in October 2020,” Murray said. “That’s when Elevate made its investment in us. We’re close to 80 employees now.”

“Durham has been such a ride,” Murray said about the company’s move into its new space at Durham ID’s 300 Morris building in June 2022. “We were still small, and we thought at the time a single floor of 25,000 square feet was going to be way too much. Now, we have close to 70,000 square feet. And we’re already thinking, what are we going to do [next]?

“Every floor has labs on it,” Murray said. “I think the split is about 60% lab and 40% office. I would say 90% of our staff are in the lab, so we’ve got a lot of lab space. We have about eight people spread across that space right now, and we anticipate [the company] will grow close to 100 by the end of next year.”

Inside Life Edit, an open kitchenette with an island and banquette seating sits at the base of a large stairwell connecting two floors. “Everything spins out from there,” Murray said. “We’ve used those as congregation spaces, and we’re trying to structure it so that you go up and down the stairs, and interact with your colleagues who are on the sixth floor or down on the fifth floor. We’ve got kitchens in both areas in this open space. At lunchtime, you see everybody out there. At mid-morning break, people are grabbing snacks, grabbing coffee. It’s a great place to work, to engage in science and to get good work done, but to be a community.”

Murray said being downtown has its perks, like food trucks in Durham ID’s courtyard on the last Thursday of every month. Employees can walk to Durham Central Park or to various restaurants within minutes, including the Durham Food Hall on Foster Street, M Sushi on Holland Street or Bull McCabes on West Main Street.

Philip Hansell, founder and co-owner of Hansell Painting, has been in business in Durham for 23 years. His first paint shop was on Hood Street where Ponysaurus Brewing Co. now stands. When his growing business needed more space, it relocated to UDI Industrial Park in south Durham, but Hansell said he missed the conveniences of a downtown location. Since 2022, he and his staff have been happier in their current office inside a historic brick building on Mangum Street, where they occupy 9,750 square feet of renovated space. Hansell also has four other storefronts available for rent in the building.

“Things we love about being downtown are the restaurants, the short walk to the historic post office, the old and new buildings, and getting to know people and business owners in our neighborhood,” Hansell said. “I think it’s important to have a diverse mix of businesses downtown; not everything needs to be a bar or restaurant.”

But that doesn’t necessarily mean he’s adverse to all the good eats that are just steps from his office door.

“We love walking to lunch, whether it’s just me and my brother [co-owner, Michael Hansell] or the whole management team,” Hansell said. The company has a third co-owner (Louis “Lou” Gray), two full-time office staff, two estimators, two supervisors and about 50 painters.

“We really enjoy going to Geer Street Garden, which is about a 10-minute walk, but we also like going to Dashi, M Kokko, Pizzeria Toro and Luna Rotisserie, to name a few. Our office has an atrium with a grill so we have started having quarterly get-togethers at the shop for all of our employees, which is always a good time. It’s a lot of fun and gives everyone a chance to see each other since we are never all painting the same house.”

Philip Hansell said he’s excited about the growth in downtown, especially the development of the Durham Rail Trail, a 1.8-mile corridor of inactive railroad track that’s being reclaimed for walking and biking. It begins near Avondale Drive and Trinity Avenue and ends two blocks from the American Tobacco Campus and Durham Bulls Athletic Park at the northern end of the American Tobacco Trail.

“I think it will be a great attraction that will draw people from other areas to come and explore what downtown has to offer,” Philip said. “I would really like to see Durham incentivising investors to not demolish the historic buildings. They are part of Durham’s charm, and every time one goes down, a piece of [the city’s] history is gone.”

Angelica Kim, who co-founded the Durham Vintage Collective, also wanted to set up shop downtown, but didn’t think it would be affordable. Then, one of her customers told Angelica that she owned a building on Parrish Street, Durham’s historic Black Wall Street. “It was completely a surprise, a really amazing location,” Kim said of the 1,500-square-foot space formerly occupied by Empower Dance Studio.

“It all happened so quickly,” Kim said. She had sold her items independently as Vintage Moon and Company for some time, and had the idea to reach out to three other women she’d spoken with at other pop-up markets – Kameko O. of My Thrift Fix, Chelsea Polson of Disco Designs Vintage and Alison Matney of Bull City Vintage. She set up a group chat, and the women came up with a plan. “It grew from there,” Kim said. The storefront opened on July 29. “We didn’t expect to find a space so soon,” Kim said. “[Now], I’m always peeking in other windows that don’t yet have any occupancy. We’re right next to Simons Says Dip This, and there’s two [vacant] retail spaces right next door to them.”

Durham Vintage Collective is now one of close to 60 retail shops located downtown and part of the 29% of the 265 total merchants that are woman-owned or woman co-owned. In an effort to attract other businesses, DDI President and CEO Nicole J. Thompson says it partners with a local entrepreneurship incubator echo to identify woman- and minority-owned retailers ready to launch small storefronts and hosts them in a 300-square-foot pop-up retail space to test the market. “We hope to see many of the businesses that start at 307 W. Main St. locate downtown permanently,” Thompson said. To keep track of what’s in the space, follow @307WMain on Instagram.

For Kim’s part, she said that she and her fellow owners have enjoyed their new experience as a collective in the urban scene. “We get all kinds of people,” Kim said. “I think, personally, my favorite is after the dinner rush downtown, then we get a lot of people in the store, because we’re open till 9 p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. We did that purposefully because we noticed that, even when we were setting up the store [and] we’d be in here late hours, people would be peeking in the windows.”

She said the storefront is open on Mondays, too, to allow people, especially those who work in the service industry, to shop on their day off.

“We’re bringing in new stuff every single day,” Kim said. “The shop’s always changing, always something new. We’re hoping to be booming during the holiday season [with] everyone buying gifts. We’ve also talked with the owner of our building about putting on markets in the park that is right next door to us, just to liven up the street a little bit more.”

More room for lively retail spaces is on the way, as developers will add 100,000 square feet of retail space already under construction and an additional 165,000 square feet slated for future building.