This is the first of a two-part series on how one of the state’s most economically disadvantaged communities is trying to change its fortunes.
Seeds of hope are taking root in East Kinston, one of North Carolina’s poorest zip codes.
Kinston Teens, a youth-led nonprofit organization founded in 2014, has launched an ambitious plan to resurrect a community wracked by crime, generational poverty, sparse public investment and nearly decades-old natural disasters from which it has yet to fully recover.
Chris Suggs (Courtesy photo)Chris Suggs, 25, an East Kinston native and city councilman, founded the nonprofit when he was 14. He said he was driven to do so by gun violence involving youth and gangs that had Kinston residents living in fear of being caught in the crossfire.
The gun violence sparked conversations and outrage among adults, but no one talked to the youth most affected by it, Suggs said. He was a ninth grader at Kinston High School at the time.
“All throughout the year [2014], we were having these issues of gun violence involving young people,” Suggs said, “our peers in school either shooting someone or getting shot.”
A report released around that time by the UNC Center for Civil Rights, The State of Exclusion: Lenoir County, N.C.: An In-depth Analysis of the Legacy of Segregated Communities, was eye-opening, Suggs said.
“The data showed us that the East Kinston neighborhood where so many of our volunteers and the young people impacted by gun violence lived had been ranked the No. 1 most economically distressed census tract in the entire state of North Carolina,” he said.
Three years after he launched Kinston Teens, Suggs, who graduated high school a year early, headed west to UNC Chapel Hill where he earned a political science degree. He served as senior class president and also started a nonprofit on campus.
Despite being advised by his parents and other relatives to move on from Kinston and make a better life elsewhere, Suggs returned home shortly after graduating from UNC Chapel Hill in 2021, and was elected to the Kinston City Council, hoping to make a difference. At the time, Suggs was the youngest elected official in the state.
“I was born and raised in the most economically distressed neighborhood in our state, and then spent four years in Orange County, one of the wealthiest zip codes in North Carolina,” Suggs said. “I got to see the glaring disparity in what’s possible when you have a city and county government in Chapel Hill and Orange County that will lead the way, that put those catalytic public investments into housing and affordability and additional assets in food and public health.”
Suggs, who’s been a vocal critic of the lack of public investment in East Kinston, did not seek reelection, and his term on the city council will end next month. He believes his time is better spent focusing on the neighborhood he believes has been overlooked.
“We [Kinston Teens] have been leading this work as an organization for 11 years, but particularly with a focus on East Kinston for almost seven years now,” Suggs said, “and there still hasn’t been a significant investment in either attention or money from local government officials here in Kinston.”
To avoid conflicts of interest, Suggs said, he’s been reluctant to ask for funding or support from colleagues, but expects that to change after he leaves the city council. His organization runs on grants and private donations.
Betting on the future
At the center of the fledgling renewal in East Kinston is the old abandoned and decaying Lewis School, which the nonprofit recently purchased for just under $17,000.
Chris Suggs in the foreground with East Kinston residents and volunteers shortly after purchasing the Lewis School. (Photo: Chris Suggs)Suggs said there are no plans yet for the aging school building, but future uses could include housing, office space and community meeting space..
“We’ve started having some conversations about the possibilities for using the space,” Suggs said. “The classrooms, I think, are perfect sizes to be potentially reimagined as apartment homes and there’s such a need for housing and affordable housing here in Kinston.”
It’s not the first empty building he’s bought. When he was 17, Suggs used $850 in donations to buy an abandoned house that he transformed into the East Kinston Neighborhood Hub. It now provides community members with emergency resources, digital access, food support and civic programming. He’s also bought and refurbished a former church across the street from that house that serves as meeting space and is used for other activities such as game night.
Buying the school, Suggs explained, was a strategic move that gives the neighborhood a say in what happens in East Kinston.
Chris Suggs bought this house at age 17 for the Kinston Teens program. (Photo: Greg Childress)“We don’t want our property swallowed up by gentrification or outside investments,” Suggs said. “We want people right here in the neighborhood, in the local community, to be able to have our hands on those properties to stop displacement,” Suggs said, “and to make sure any development that happens in East Kinston works for us and not against us.”
While the community is “open and receptive” to talking to potential investors and developers, they must be willing to work with the community, Suggs said.
“When the opportunity presents itself for us to develop housing or an outside investor to come in and want to develop housing, we could say these are the terms and conditions that our neighborhood wants to see met,” Suggs said. “This is the percentage of housing, for example, that we want to be below the median income level for people who are families with young kids or for ill members of our community or people struggling to get back onto their feet.”
Preston Harris (Photo: Lenoir County)Lenoir County Commissioner Preston Harris, a retired educator who taught at Lewis School in the 1990s, said Suggs could use the building to house Kinston Teens’ current initiatives and to provide housing.
“Two of our existing schools from the past have been transformed into senior apartments, and the other one is pretty much a section eight [apartment complex],” Harris explained, making it clear that he was speaking as a private citizen. “So those are possibilities.”
Harris said Kinston Teens is eligible for county grant opportunities to help fund improvement initiatives in East Kinston, although the nonprofit would have to compete with others for funding.
“We know that he’s [Suggs] doing great work with Kinston Teens,” Harris said. “They currently have renovated a couple of houses in that immediate community that have been dilapidated and some places that have been abandoned. We do see some private people coming into those houses and doing some work with them and getting them to the point where people want to move back into that area.”
Kinston is one of the poorest cities in the state. According to the U.S. Census data, 28.9% of the population live below the poverty line, which is more than double the 12.5% who live below the poverty line across the state, and the 12.4% who do nationally.
In 2023, Kinston’s median household income was $35,250, while North Carolina’s was approximately $70,800. That means Kinston’s median household income is about half of the state median.
Chris Suggs (left) chats with Theon Hardy (right) and volunteers on the back porch of Kinston Teens’ Neighborhood Hub. (Photo: Kinston Teens)Theon Hardy, 89, a retired educator has lived in East Kinston all but about five years of her life, while she taught school in Henderson, N.C., after graduating from Johnson C. Smith University in Charlotte in 1958.
Hardy said she was determined not to return home after graduating, but eventually did to care for aging parents. She still lives in the family home her father bought in the 1940s. She is proud of the single-story cottage-style home with its manicured yard that immediately stands out in a community where there is much blight.
Hardy remembers when the streets of East Kinston were unpaved and when her family lived across the street from the city’s first Black policeman.
“I was going to get married and move out of the neighborhood and all, but I stayed here and kept making repairs to the roof and windows, and added on the den and stuff like that,” Hardy said. “So, why move, you know, unless I could find somebody to come and take me away, and that never happened.”
Hardy is excited about the current effort to revitalize East Kinston.
“Anybody my age that has seen teens gravitate to the good and not so good sometimes, I just feel proud to see somebody who shares interests in them and helps them to appreciate the neighborhood that they live in,” Hardy said. “It brings a smile and my jaws are rather tired, not from talking but from smiling.”
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