Written By Ashley C. Hernandez, Assistant Professor, Dept. of City & Regional Planning at UNC-Chapel Hill in Collaboration with the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association
On a warm mid-morning in May, I turned off Eubanks Road onto Rogers Road, making my way to the Rogers-Eubanks neighborhood. The road winds past the edge of what was, until 2013, an eighty-acre unlined regional landfill, closed only after decades of organized resistance by the surrounding community who had lived in its shadow. Even now, the former site is vacant but reads as a marker of the racial injustice and uneven development that determines which communities absorb unwanted and toxic land uses. The land fill site continues to represent promises made and deferred across generations. Just past it, Purefoy Drive opens up, and the Rogers Road Community Center comes into view.
I was eager to sit down with Minister Robert Campbell and David Caldwell Jr., two longstanding resident-leaders and co-founders of the Rogers-Eubanks Neighborhood Association, known locally as RENA, which runs the center. In the days before our meeting, I pored over local and national newspaper coverage, UNC student theses, and government planning documents. All of it traced the same powerful arc, telling a story of the community’s dogged fight for environmental justice and basic municipal recognition stretching across more than fifty years. Yet, what those materials had largely left out was how the struggle has evolved over time, including what the community has built through it and what that inheritance means for its fight today. I wanted to bear witness to the community’s enduring struggle and understand what the conditions of displacement mean from their perspective, in 2026, in a rapidly expanding region where the forces of unequal change have shifted shape but not direction.
When I arrived, I was warmly welcomed and guided through the community center during one of its quieter morning moments, before the afternoon arrival of the children who attend RENA’s after-school programming. Walking its main hallway, the walls carry a history larger than the building that holds it, including photographs, news clippings, and civic awards, images of moments stretching from the neighborhood’s origins to the ceremonial landfill closure. Brightly lit rooms branch off on either side, furnished for intergenerational community activities, mutual aid efforts, after-school care, and a popular summer youth camp.
Completed in 2014, the RENA Community Center stands as one of several municipal commitments Orange County made to the neighborhood in exchange for the community’s agreement to host the landfill. Among the others were sidewalks, water and sewer connections, and a recreation area built above the land once filled. It is a sacred neighborhood anchor and place of pride, hard-fought and hard-won. Even so, it is a fraction of what was promised and what the neighborhood still needs. What they won is already straining at its walls, already in critical need of expansion and repair to ensure that it remains safe and functional for the community long into the future.
This need is characteristic of a decades-long pattern in which public institutions have offered just enough to say a promise was kept while withholding just enough to ensure the community would have to keep fighting for the rest. Minister Campbell and David Caldwell have watched that pattern play out for most of their lives. Between them, they carry the institutional memory of more than half a century of community organizing and a planning knowledge earned through the slow, unfinished work of making a neighborhood visible to the governments that have repeatedly chosen to look past it. “One door opens another door,” Mr. Caldwell told me, settling into the conversation. “It’s continuous.”
What the Fight for Environmental Justice Built
The Rogers-Eubanks neighborhood sits on land that was once part of the Alexander Hogan Plantation, and its residents have been navigating the afterlife of that history ever since. By the mid-twentieth century, it was a self-sufficient, largely autonomous community sustained by subsistence farming, Black-owned businesses, and a tight-knit web of extended families, some of whose names still mark the roads. What the community did not have were the municipal services that expanding suburban development was delivering to whiter, wealthier communities just down the road, such as paved streets, sidewalks, public water, sewer connections, and public transit. The neighborhood existed in a legal limbo that would come to define its relationship with government for generations. Its residents could vote for county commissioners, but, because the neighborhood fell outside the official boundaries of both Chapel Hill and Carrboro, neither town bore any legal obligation to provide it services.
Such conditions simultaneously produced infrastructural neglect and infrastructural burden. Beginning in the 1970s, Orange County began siting its unwanted infrastructure in the neighborhood. First was the landfill in 1972, then an expansion and recycling center in the 1980s, and then a proposed waste transfer station in 2007. Forty years of compounding burden was delivered to a community that had no vote in the governments making the decisions. However, what grew in response was among the most significant environmental justice movements in North Carolina’s history.
RENA organized the community’s lived experience into a sustained, ground-level advocacy force, channeling the knowledge of a community that had been breathing the air, drinking the water, and living beside the landfill for decades. Alongside RENA, residents helped found the Coalition to End Environmental Racism (CEER), which expanded the struggle outward. Where RENA brought the neighborhood’s experience to bear directly on the institutions responsible for it, CEER built the broad county-wide voice, drawing in institutional partnerships, university resarchers, and technical experts, while connecting the local injustice to a statewide pattern of environmental racism. Minister Campbell and Mr. Caldwell describe both organizations as “bridge builders”, with RENA as the bridge between the community and its government, and CEER as the bridge between the neighborhood’s struggle and a national one.
The enduring fight is now well-known, reaching regional and national audiences through coverage in numerous publications, from WUNC to the New Yorker. While important, the media rarely examines the methodical and unglamorous civic infrastructure the community built in order to fight, as well as all the lessons that it has inherited in the struggle. To understand what the neighborhood has built and sustained, you must trace what it learned over the last several decades.
The community learned public health monitoring. Working with researchers from NC State, UNC, and Duke universities, residents were taught how to collect water samples from the wells surrounding the landfill, receiving training on how to bottle them, label them, transport them without compromising their integrity, and read the results. They received an air quality monitor from UNC that they affectionately called “the baby” for its sensitivity, diligently monitoring it for several weeks to document what was in the air. When Orange County officials were eventually pressured to send their own investigators, their findings officially confirmed what residents had already documented. The County found that fewer than half of all septic systems in the neighborhood were in compliance with multiple drinking water sources that tested positive for fecal bacteria and nine out of eleven wells that failed to meet health standards.
They learned local politics. The community discovered early on that meeting notices for county proceedings were being buried in the newspaper and inconsistantly scheduled at varying times, making it difficult for the community to plan and organize their participation. One resident took on a single task in response to watch the paper every day and report what she found. When officials began scheduling overlapping meetings in Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Orange County on the same days at the same times, the community showed up anyway, sometimes with 150 strong and sometimes splitting itself across three simultaneous proceedings to ensure no meeting went unwitnessed. When RENA was placed at the end of public meeting agendas, they stayed and when they were finally given the floor, they gave testimony. At one proceeding Minister Campbell turned to officials and asked whether the water they were making the neighborhood’s children drink was good enough for their own children. It is through these strategies that the community learned how to hold three separate governments – Orange County, Chapel Hill, and Carrboro – to commitments made across changing administrations and shifting legal jurisdictions.
They learned land use. Through sustained engagement with county planning processes, residents came to understand how zoning decisions, infrastructure siting, and municipal boundary lines had been used deliberately and repeatedly to concentrate environmental burden in communities least positioned to refuse it. The neighborhood had not ended up with forty years of unwanted infrastructure by accident, but rather because the systems that made those decisions had never been designed to account for the people living closest to them.
They learned the law. UNC Law faculty helped residents understand how to cite legal precedent, write formal letters to elected officials, and anticipate the procedural moves historically used to neutralize community opposition. In 2007, Reverend Campbell filed a formal inquiry with the EPA’s Office of Civil Rights under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, one of the first of its type filed by a community in the region. It was a formal request for an investigation into how Community Development Block Grant funds meant for environmental mitigation in and around the neighborhood were being managed and spent. The complaint was ultimately rejected on jurisdictional grounds, but it placed the neighborhood in a national network of environmental justice communities and brought its leaders to the White House Clean Energy Forum in 2009.
That same year, the Orange County Board of County Commissioners, who were then considering the expansion of the landfill, voted to remove the neighborhood from consideration for any future waste or landfill operations. They acknowledged in their own language the racial and social inequity that had defined the community’s relationship with county government for forty years. In 2013, the landfill closed, marking a victory that the community had earned through persistence and one procedural battle at a time.
Through it all, the community worked to hold and build community. Long before the community center was constructed, there were meetings held in a local church, which opened its doors to RENA and to residents gathering to organize and plan what came next. “It was just a matter of learning their game,” Mr. Caldwell tole me. “And that’s evolving. If you know how the policies are made, you will see how they’re constantly changing. Just watch who they benefit.” The community center that stands on Purefoy Drive today is the material form of the refusal to be ignored, displaced, and worn down into silence. It also stands as the inheritance of a set of capacities built over fifty years of struggle, including the ability to monitor, document, and present evidence, to navigate and monitor bureaucratic process, and to build coalitions across academic, legal, and federal institutions while remaining rooted in the neighborhood. None of this, Minister Campbell and Mr. Caldwell are clear, would have been possible without “learning the system” and “learning to play the game.” But, the game, they will also tell you, continues to this day.
The Infrastructure Paradox
Those capacities outlined above did not dissolve when the landfill closed but instead became the inherited tools and community infrastructure that Minister Campbell and Mr. Caldwell carry into every fight that has followed, and that they are now working to pass to the next generation. Since the landfill closed, the fight has continued. The concessions acquired through decades of organizing arrived incomplete, delayed, or conditioned in ways that ensured the community would have to keep returning to the table. As Mr. Caldwell described, “Each win opened another door in the struggle.” Today, the pattern that has defined the neighborhood’s relationship with its governing institutions has found new terrain for struggle.
Water and sewer service tells the story most plainly. Water and sewer service tells the story most plainly. For decades, residents have relied on private wells and septic systems. County investigators have found those same systems to be overwhelmingly out of compliance. The extension of municipal lines was among the foundational commitments made in exchange for the community’s agreement to host the landfill. What arrived was partial.
When Habitat for Humanity received government funding to install water infrastructure, the agreement stipulated that lines could only be connected to new dwellings, not to existing homes. The pipe was laid directly through the Caldwell family’s yard. It passed between Mr. Caldwell’s mother’s house and his brother’s, with no authorization to connect either one. As of 2026, many residents remain unconnected. The main line is nearby. Connecting to it requires running pipe across driveways that stretch 300, 400, and sometimes 500 feet. At three dollars a foot, the hookup cost alone can be out of reach for many longtime residents. The infrastructure is available, but access to it is not, and neither is the will to provide it.
The community center tells a parallel story. Completed in 2014 on land donated by Habitat for Humanity, the building was designed by an international architecture firm that donated its services and initially proposed a facility valued at close to three million dollars. The original design included all of the identified community needs, including a large classroom and workshop space for youth educational programs and training in solar engineering, a Red Cross community emergency center, a full commercial kitchen, and room to grow its community programming. What was ultimately built cost between $1.3 and $1.5 million, and even with that reduced budget, decisions were made that residents saw as a deliberate undercutting of their needs and vision. The foundation cracked early on, teaching equipment was cut, and the commercial kitchen was denied and replaced with a warming kitchen suited only for reheating pre-cooked food.
For a decade, RENA has continued to run its programming in and around these constraints, growing its after-school enrollment, launching a summer camp that at its height has served sixty children for six weeks at an affordable rate for local families, building a food bank, a youth employment program, and a community-events calendar that fills the building year-round. The demand has consistently outpaced the space. RENA has been pushing for a building addition almost since the day it opened, and in recent months appeared to be close, with county commitments reaching three million dollars. Then a new commissioner signaled broad budget cuts across the board, and the commitment was tabled. The summer camp is now capped at thirty-five to forty children out of necessity, leaving a waiting list of children in need of supervised summer activities.
The neighborhood faces a parallel fight over the future of the Green Tract. The Green Tract is roughly 164 acres of publicly owned land adjacent to the neighborhood and jointly held by Chapel Hill, Carrboro, and Orange County. Today, it is considered the most significant undeveloped land in the region. For decades, the community watched as institutions used the tract and its surrounding infrastructure strategically, extending sewer lines to nearby housing developments and waste facilities while leaving disconnected families waiting for their connections. This began to establish a precedent in which public land and public infrastructure could be activated for others while the neighborhood continued to be ignored.
In 2016, in partnership with the Marian Cheek Jackson Center, RENA produced a comprehensive community-first planning document articulating detailed, place-specific visions for how any development should proceed with community demands for the conservation of the majority of the land, new infrastructure connections to existing residents, the prioritization of affordable housing and community-serving amenities, and assurance that the neighborhood would be, in Mr. Caldwell’s words, “a part of and not victim of” whatever development came next.
Nearly a decade later, the process remains ongoing with fiscal analyses underway and Requests for Proposals for development planning circulating. Paid community engagement consultants have held meetings in which facilitators arrived without having visited the site, unfamiliar with where the neighborhood sat in relationship to the land they were supposedly planning. Flyers sent to residents failed to include translations for the neighborhood’s many non-English-speaking families. RENA has been monitoring this process, participating at every turn as it has for fifty years.
Meanwhile, the surrounding region continues to grow toward the neighborhood without extending the services that growth demands. The rural buffer zone that once defined the neighborhood’s relationship to the neighboring towns has been redrawn as development pressures have mounted. This strikes Minister Campbell as odd – “If you move the city toward the rural buffer zone, you’ve got to bring the services.” It seems that there is also encroachment at the level of individual parcels. Houses belonging to longtime residents who have passed away or moved are changing hands in ways the community doesn’t always see coming. Mr. Caldwell shared that six properties have transferred to new owners in recent years without every appearing on the open market and giving neighbors a chance to respond. “We would like the chance to keep it in the neighborhood,” he said, “and all of a sudden it’s somebody new, and we never saw the for sale sign.”
The forces of displacement in the neighborhood accumulate quietly with an aging population, a community center building that can’t secure the resources to expand, a water line that passes through your yard while bypassing your home, and a county that continues to grow around you without growing with you. It is as, Minister Campbell put it, the same pattern of uneven development “dressed in different clothes.”
Conclusion
When Minister Campbell and Mr. Caldwell share their story, they do not speak of stumbling blocks. “Every brick you put on that foundation,” Caldwell told me, “They knock two of them out.” And yet, neither man reads that as defeat. When Mr. Caldwell ran for county sheriff in 2014, after serving a 22-year career in the sheriff’s office, he lost. He did not read it as a setback, but instead as a step – “We’re getting to where we need to be one step at a time.” That patience is strategic, unyielding, and grounded in a long view of what change requires. It is something both men credit in part to their military service. Through that experience, they learned, as men of color navigating hostile institutions, how to take criticism, solve problems, accomplish a mission, and transform anger into fuel for the work rather than paralysis.
There is no doubt that the Roger-Eubanks neighborhood represents community struggle and victory in the fight for environmental justice. But much more than this, it represents a rich organizing tradition measured in the decades and slow, cumulative work of advancing self-determination and justice a little further with every generation. To participate in that tradition is to practice the wisdom inherited from elders, to stay vigilant and build bridges across every forum available, and to serve the children of the community so that they may be, as Minister Campbell shared, “the neighborhood’s champions.” This is, as both men have demonstrated through their work and lives, to steward a burden that is also an inheritance.
This tradition carries with it a clarifying lesson that Minister Campbell and Caldwell offered without hesitation. The goal of the struggle has never only been for the neighborhood. “We don’t want them to take the unwanted development out of here and put it in other communities,” Minister Campbell told me. They have always understood the fight as part of something much larger and rooted in a refusal of both what has been done to the community and the logic that makes sacrifice zones possible anywhere. For them, displacing structural neglect onto other neighborhoods is not a victory. It is a continuation of the problem by other means. What RENA and CEER built over fifty years, and what Minister Campbell and Mr. Caldwell are now working to pass to the next generation of leaders is a broader vision that sees justice as the work to transform, dismantle, and end structural racism.
