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One block of Julian Street, stretching east from Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, tells the story of Ole Asheboro, the city’s oldest suburban neighborhood.

Decay. Rebirth. A stack of unfinished city plans. And hope that three decades of redevelopment and setbacks might bring something better to Ole Asheboro soon.

There’s the large brick home and neatly manicured lawn of Calvin and Delores Thacker, teenage sweethearts who spent most of their 47 years together under this roof.

They knew Ole Asheboro when the neighborhood soda shop was a short, safe walk down the road. Now, they prefer to come and go only in the daylight.

Next door lives a young family who saved their 1920s bungalow, with its stout white columns, from demolition.

They’re part of a new generation that has fallen in love with the unique architecture and affordable land.

But on Julian Street, pride and charming homesteads meet neglect and unfinished business.

The city has spent $26 million over three decades on redevelopment, and Ole Asheboro’s reawakening is still incomplete.

On the north side of Julian Street sits a boarded-up house with a “Condemned” sign tacked to the front door. The adjacent vacant lot attracts prostitutes and their clients.

Next to it is another empty patch of grass where the city bought a home in 1993 and demolished it. A Greensboro “No Trespassing” notice is the only sign of ownership.

It’s one of dozens of vacant plots of land bought with taxpayer money, sometimes decades ago, that have yet to attract new owners.

Despite what city officials and residents agree has been significant progress, the area has yet to draw major, unsubsidized private investment.

When Greensboro expanded out of the center city, it grew to the south first.

Queen Anne and Victorian homes, with their intricate woodwork and sweeping porches, and modest cottages and bungalows popped up along the artery that stretched southeastward from the railroad tracks.

This was Asheboro Street — home to judges, mayors, the city’s first churches, schools and a trolley line. Home to thriving neighborhood shops and merchants.

You know it as Martin Luther King Jr. Drive.

By the 1970s and ’80s, it was “pretty rough,” said Dan Curry, who has worked for the city on the redevelopment since 1980.

Around that time, some of the city’s poorest residents moved in as the government bulldozed nearby blighted African American neighborhoods.

Homes were carved into boarding houses. Two homeless shelters moved in.

Merchants couldn’t keep a grocery store in business — although some of the few remaining commercial establishments sold a fair amount of liquor.

In 1979, the city determined that two-thirds of the 1,000-plus homes needed repairs, and that 359 homes required major work or demolition.

To stop the deterioration — and to prevent mass demolition — the city adopted several redevelopment plans. A 1983 neighborhood plan estimated that it would take until the end of the decade to redevelop.

Three decades later, it’s still a work in progress.

Since work in Ole Asheboro began in the late 1970s, the city has spent an estimated $26 million in federal, state and local money on various projects.

• The city has purchased and demolished 150 residences.

• Hundreds of homes have been fixed up through grant and loan programs — at a cost of more than $9 million.

Those efforts have had a major, positive impact: A survey done last year found that 20 homes needed significant repairs, a reversal from the 1979 city survey.

• Martin Luther King Jr. Drive is now dotted with multicolored Victorians, some of the 13 historic homes restored by the city. A 14th restoration project will soon begin.

• More than 130 new homes have been built with some kind of city-provided subsidy, including the 36-home development The Village at Arlington Park and 62-home Asheboro Square.

• Commercial buildings that drew crime and vagrants were purchased by the city and knocked down. The homeless shelters were moved.

“Our primary strategy has been to bring in some signs of investment,” Curry said.

That would lure private investors, officials hoped.

Even with millions spent, much feels undone.

Drive into the neighborhood on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive and you’ll see open, grassy fields where thriving businesses once stood.

It’s part of the $5.3 million worth of land purchased by the city redevelopment commission as far back as the 1980s.

Today, six years after city leaders developed specific plans for the land, the parcels are still vacant — save for the “No Trespassing” signs.

The city sold one 5-acre plot to New Zion Missionary Baptist Church — for a fraction of the tax value — in January 2008. The church has yet to begin construction on a proposed mixed-used project.

Neighborhood leaders say various problems, —from design changes to city issues to possible funding difficulties — have caused the delay.

The Rev. William Wright did not return multiple phone calls.

The city tried, with limited success, to sell about two dozen empty single-family lots to developers.

Only nonprofit Self-Help stepped forward. Of the seven handsome, three-bedroom bungalows it built in the past two years, three have been purchased and two others are under contract.

It’s been so long since the redevelopment project began, some things have gotten better and then gotten worse again.

Take the city-built Dorothy Brown Park, named for a longtime advocate. The stretch of grass with a winding walk down the middle is a thriving neighborhood hangout. But it’s not what people in the community had intended.

On most days, you can find men lounging under the park’s few trees. Neighbors say you can buy almost anything there — hot TVs, drugs, women.

“History shows you that’s what happens,” said Carl Brower Jr., a neighborhood association board member. “When you start cleaning up, it just moved from one neighborhood to another. You are continually working, trying to solve that.”

And some of the houses fixed up in the early stages of redevelopment have deteriorated again.

“They don’t look as good as they did 20 years ago,” said Robert Barkley, the longtime director of the city redevelopment commission, who retired in 1992.

So why has the transformation taken so long to complete?

Recent projects, city leaders say, have fallen victim to the troubled housing and financial markets.

Others lay some blame on city leaders. “It’s a symptom or an example of trying to do a number of redevelopment areas without doing one really well,” said Bob Mays, a member of the city’s redevelopment commission.

But changing a neighborhood takes more than plans. It’s takes many residents with a sense of ownership and commitment. It requires social and economic changes that can be difficult to tackle with well-meaning city plans.

City leaders, in official documents, chalked the lengthy redevelopment up to the goals being “elusive” and to a lack of “clear direction and neighborhood consensus.”

And some residents agree.

“Some of it also has to fall back on the neighborhood leadership at the time not following through or being cohesive,” Brower said.

Unlike other redevelopment areas, Ole Asheboro hasn’t drawn new upper-class home- owners. Even today, low-cost rental housing dominates.

“For this neighborhood to come back up, people are going to have to move here who want something of value,” said resident Calvin Thacker.

Neighbors have stressed the need for homeowner education, especially as projects draw first-time home buyers.

Residents have pushed for economic development that they say will lift up the community by providing jobs and wealth.

Despite tough opposition to the project, the neighborhood association advocated for a proposed downtown hotel. The group will get 5 percent of the revenue.

When that project goes up it will show folks in the neighborhood, and the young men hanging at the corners, what can be done with hard work and an education, said Barbara Akins, president of the Ole Asheboro Neighborhood Association.

“It’s gives them something to look at and say, 'We did it,’ ” Akins said.

Neighborhood leaders also have been working with city officials to set up a community development corporation that will allow them to take on some unfinished business.

That might mean using federal stimulus money to rehabilitate and sell run-down homes.

And potential profits from the Nettie Coad Apartments or the new hotel could provide money for other projects, like building new homes on those vacant lots.

Those aren’t the only signs of light in Ole Asheboro.

On a recent Monday, about a dozen neighbors, a smattering of children and guests, and some city officials crowded around two long tables at New Zion’s community building, what was once the neighborhood’s firehouse.

A project leader from the developer TND Partners in Raleigh reported progress on a plan to redevelop three acres of city-owned land on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive into a mixed-use project.

Company leaders say they will give designs to the city and neighborhood advisory groups this month. They hope to take advantage of special financing to get the project done.

If that happens, it will be the first major development in the neighborhood in years.

Neighbors said they would like to see locally owned, minority businesses set up shop when the development is complete — another way to bring back that sense of community in Ole Asheboro.

“I know if we keep cleaning it up, it will be beautiful,” Akins said.

Contact Amanda Lehmert at 373-7075 or amanda.lehmert@news-record.com