This story originally published online at The 9th Street Journal.
“What happens when community members, city officials and goats come together?”
This isn’t the start of a riddle or punchy joke. It’s a question asked by Mayor Leonardo Williams to a gathering on June 19. That’s when community members and city officials gathered behind the Scrap Exchange to witness the city’s first reveal of a “paper street.”
Paper streets are plots of land that are officially designated as roads and streets, but are undeveloped and unmaintained. These streets appear on paper, including maps and official city planning documents, but are virtually undetectable in real life.
Because these plots are often a result of unexecuted urban planning, ownership is frequently disputed between private land owners and government agencies. The spaces often remain in limbo, and the result is frequent loitering, littering and misuse of the property.
Now, city officials are working to turn these plots into third spaces, and they’re using goats to do it.
Andrew Holland, director of the city’s Office of Performance and Innovation, said the project grew out of conversations with the city’s code enforcement division.
“They said they tend to see a lot of litter, a lot of overgrown vegetation on these paper streets. And when I heard that, my ears perked up, and I was like, ‘Oh, what are paper streets?’”
There are approximately 700 such streets scattered throughout Durham, amounting to about 400 acres of unused land. As they looked further into the properties, Holland’s team, in collaboration with the city Parks and Recreation, Transportation, Neighborhood Improvement Services- Code Enforcement Division, and General Services departments and the City-County Planning Department, recognized potential to harness.
To gauge the possibilities of these forgotten plots, Holland initiated a collaboration with N.C. State University’s College of Design, where he is currently completing his doctorate.
Credit: Photo by Gabriella Rivadeneira — The 9th Street Journal
After multiple site visits, studio workshops and meetings with city officials, students presented renderings of ways the land might be used. One student designed a park with overhead sculptures inspired by Durham’s Hayti district, while another created a walkway blueprint that ties Durham’s musical history with the sounds of nature.
But before any improvements can be made, the land must first be cleared.
On June 18, Stephen Paul, operator of Goats On The Go Raleigh-Durham, deployed 32 hungry goats to clear a section of Burke Street, a patch of overgrown shrubbery located behind the Scrap Exchange. Their job? Simply to eat.
The waist-high hedges and amalgamation of vegetation make the paper street blend into the surrounding forestry. But it also makes a great goat snack.
Paul’s atypical gardeners, Bernie and Pastrami, two extra-friendly goats, continuously nudged for pets while Paul explained the benefits of gardening with goats.
“If you go in here and weed whack, seeds go flying everywhere, and it’s spreading. Makes it worse,” he said. “Goats, generally, when they eat seeds and they poop it out, the seed is actually destroyed in their rumen, so they’re not spreading the seeds, which is a really cool thing.”
No thicket too thick, goats go where people can’t, navigating steep and often risky terrain. Herbicides and power tools are hazardous to handle and leave pollutants in their wake. The only thing goats leave behind is fertilizer. Plus, they are partial to invasive species and problem vegetation.
For instance, the highly invasive species kudzu threatens native ecosystems and suffocates other plants. But to goats, it’s a high-protein dinner.
“The flowering parts of the kudzu have thousands of seeds in each flower, so that’s why it spreads so quickly. But goats and kudzu are a match made in heaven,” Paul said.
The day after the initial clearing, with heaps of the brush already gone, local residents and government representatives celebrated the official launch of the paper streets project with food trucks, face paint, and of course, goats.
Bernie and Pastrami, apparently crowd pleasers, stole the show. Attendees of all ages gathered around the fence, and children’s parents lifted them up to see over the brush, snapping and making smooching sounds to try and get the goats’ attention. But really, it was the other way around. The goats had people captured.
Goats are “a great way for people to get oriented with the paper street… and a great way for them to get a better visual of the space, and what this paper street can be repurposed into,” Holland said.
The strategy proved effective for Durham resident Cole Horton, who stumbled upon the event while shopping at the Scrap Exchange.
“I think the goats are a great way to clear this lot, using animals instead of heavy machinery. I’d love to use it for something else, and I think it’s great that [city officials] are all out here,” Horton said.
Lined up to see the goats peppered through part of Burke Street, community members were quite literally at the forefront of the project — exactly as Holland intended.
“We wanted the community to be at the forefront, and not the city, to help redesign and repurpose this paper street,” he said.
A few yards away, locals crowded around the Neighborhood Improvement Services tent to give their input on what should become of the Burke Street property. After running out of formal surveys, community members cast their votes by placing blue post-its all over the station table. “Playground,” “community garden” and “picnic tables” were among the most popular ideas.
The Burke Street project is a pilot, selected due to its proximity to Lakewood Shopping Center, the Scrap Exchange and El Centro Hispano, locations familiar to most locals.
Once Burke Street is finished, the city will conduct “evaluations and see what worked well and what didn’t, so that way when we look at other paper streets, we can use this as a model, as a testing,” said Holland.
Community design workshops and N.C. State College of Design charrettes to engage resident participation are anticipated in early fall. Holland suggests keeping an eye out for posts on the Scrap Exchange website.
The project is an outgrowth of the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative, a collaborative effort between Harvard University and Bloomberg Philanthropies aimed at strengthening city leadership.
Mayor Williams and Holland are part of a cohort of more than 40 mayors and city officials on the initiative’s innovation track. Last summer, the pair attended training courses in New York with Bloomberg officials and Harvard professors.
Each mayor was responsible for identifying one issue to work on through this particular program.
Paper streets seemed to be the clear choice for Mayor Williams and the City of Durham.
“I thought, ‘Well we have … acres of land that are unmaintained, undeveloped. And we should be able to better connect people … ,’” said Mayor Williams. “We’re doing it in a very sustainable way with goat-scaping, and bringing the community together.”
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