Unlocking Untapped Urban Land

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Leonardo Williams
Mayor | Durham, NC

Unlocking Untapped Urban Land

Idea Category: 2025 Ideas Challenge, Building & Development, Improving Quality of Life

2025 Ideas Challenge Entry

Across many U.S. cities, “paper streets” remain an overlooked challenge. These are streets recorded on official maps but never formally built or accepted for public use. In Durham, North Carolina alone, there are more than 700 paper streets—over 400 acres of land—often overgrown, unused, or mired in legal uncertainty about ownership and maintenance.

Paper streets exist in a legal gray area. Some were platted decades ago but never developed, leaving residents and city departments unsure of responsibility. Yet these spaces also represent opportunities: they could become pedestrian paths, green spaces, or community gathering areas—if managed with a clear and coordinated framework.

Through the Bloomberg Harvard Innovation Track, Durham convened staff from planning, legal, transportation, innovation, and community engagement to study the issue. Together, they discovered that paper streets often exist in a legal gray area: they may have been platted decades ago but never built, and responsibility for them is unclear, creating confusion for both residents and city departments. At the same time, these spaces offer untapped potential.

In many neighborhoods, they could serve as pedestrian paths, green buffers, or community gathering spaces, if only we had a clearer framework for understanding how to activate them.

The initiative created foundational tools—including the Paper Street Study Web Map Dashboard—to improve internal coordination and lay the groundwork for policy solutions. It emphasizes community-driven design, transparency, and practical approaches to maximize limited public resources.

Impact or how it will be measured:

Impact is being measured both through improved coordination and resident engagement. Internally, the dashboard has already helped break down silos, providing a shared view of vacant land and allowing the City to prioritize which parcels to address. Externally, Durham has piloted new community engagement approaches to reimagine how paper streets can be reused. One event in the Lakewood neighborhood brought more than 150 residents together to repurpose a paper street next to a local nonprofit reuse center. The site was cleared using goats, drawing interest while making the space usable, and design stations allowed residents to share ideas for the site’s reuse.

Building on these pilots, the City is working with NC State University’s College of Design and local creatives to host charrettes and design-build sessions so neighborhoods can directly shape how paper streets are reimagined. This is particularly important in underserved areas, where better connections to schools, parks, grocery stores, and other amenities support Durham’s larger goal of becoming a “15-minute city.” By combining data-driven prioritization with resident-led design, the City is laying a framework that makes better use of land while promoting equity and neighborhood vitality.

This effort demonstrates how even small, overlooked parcels can play a major role in urban innovation. Durham’s work shows that with coordination, legal clarity, and genuine community partnership, cities can transform long-ignored spaces into assets that strengthen connectivity, restore neighborhood vibrancy, and provide new opportunities for residents.