Wow! This neighborhood looks like it belongs in another country!

For this video, I took Route 11 into rural Lenoir County in North Carolina. My goal would be to visit the absolute worst neighborhood in the entire state. I’ve never done that before typically, I visit the worst area in a city, but when I read a report about a neighborhood in the city of Kinston, I had to see it firsthand. The day was Saturday, December 19, 2020 at 1 in the afternoon.

A while back, the University of North Carolina’s Center for Urban Studies issued a report on the most distressed communities in the whole state. Two of them were in East Kinston, a smallish city of 20,000 people way out in the sticks, surrounded by forest and farmland. The report highlighted a part of town on Kinston’s east side, an area that has more poverty and blight than any other tract in the state.

Here it is.

Kinston ranks in the top five in this state for both crime and poverty. The bottom 99% of folks here make under $29,000 a year. Like many other smaller communities in eastern North Carolina, Kinston was a booming textile and tobacco hub. But factories shut down, and farmers moved to mechanization, meaning lots of folks were out of jobs. In the 1950s, this place was jamming, full of middle class families which shopped in higher end department stores. Other eastern North Carolina communities have kind of held it together. But Kinston is on another level. Buildings that have been crumbling for years remain the same. People are leaving, and there’s hardly anyone to replace them. Would you want to live here yourself?

A typical home in this hugely depressed neighborhood sells for about $30,000. There aren’t very many homes for sale in this part of town though. It would be hard to envision anyone outside of an investor buying one and renting it out. This is certainly not a good place to raise a family.

Kinston was founded in 1791, but most of its troubles have been in the last 60 years. Recurring floods, economic devastation, rampant gang violence. Its biggest claim to fame is that it turns out more NBA talent than any other small community in the country. For many people in this impoverished neighborhood, basketball is the only way they think they can make it in this world.

Now, the city of Kinston has applied for several planning grants to help improve this particular neighborhood. But, council hasn’t been able to get the funds needed to improve homes, build new affordable units, and tear down abandoned houses, which would give this part of town a muchneeded boost. They figure throwing money at the problem will solve the crime, and the drug use and the poverty. There have been quite a few NBA players raised in this very part of town men like Brandon Ingram and Jerry Stackhouse. NBA players from Kinston are worth hundreds of millions of dollars, but the community is left to rot. Where is their money? Where is their support? I mean the city can’t even get $50k to knock buildings down.

In many parts of this neighborhood, you’ll see large areas where homes used to exist, but are no longer here. You’ll see large stretches of blocks where homes are completely abandoned. Many of the homes that are occupied are in bad shape. Several housing projects serve as this neighborhood's center gathering point.

Here’s the rest of a neighborhood in East Kinston, the absolute worst place in the state of North Carolina.

#northcarolina #neighborhoods
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