Story and photos by Henry W. Thomas.
Tucked behind the businesses of Rosemary Street and forming a loop at the end of Henderson Street is Chapel Hill’s earliest planned development. The 13 residences sit atop a hill on a street called Cobb Terrace, many of them more than a century old.
Students who live in the nearby University Apartments walk past Cobb Terrace every day on their way to class, though for many, the neighborhood’s history is a hidden gem of the Franklin-Rosemary Historic District.
The collection of homes was developed by UNC Professor of Geology Collier Cobb back in 1915, after whom the development was named.
“He said, ‘We need some place for those poor, married professors to live so they can have some privacy.’” Melissa McCullough, a Cobb Terrace resident and Chapel Hill Town Council member, said.
Though the houses were originally designed to be affordable rental properties, many of the properties are estimated to have appreciated to more than triple their worth in the last couple of decades alone.
McCullough, along with her neighbors Katherine R. Polk and Iris Schwintzer, have lived on Cobb Terrace collectively for over 115 years.
Polk alone has spent over 50 years among three different houses on the street.
Part of Cobb’s plan for the development included leveling out plots of land for the homes and creating wall-supported tiers or “terraces” to incorporate the steep hills both to the north and east.
McCullough’s home was one of the first built, with records of her housing materials being purchased in August 1915.
A history of boarding houses
When McCullough first bought her home on the south-facing side of Cobb in 2010, it had been ripped down to the studs. The previous owner had plans to remodel, but boarded up the house during the market crash in 2008.
McCullough quickly took on the project with a few priorities in mind. First, she wanted to do it green. She hired the same architect for her house on Cobb Terrace that she had used for a previous home of hers in Durham, also built with green architecture.
Secondly, she wanted to provide additional housing. McCullough began to rent out the ADU, or accessory dwelling unit, she built in the basement of her historic home within months of moving into the house in 2011.
Additionally, McCullough found out that her home had a history of being used as a boarding house after a former resident approached her who had lived there with her mother and two sisters.
McCullough also said that her motivation toward providing an additional unit was due to the historic use of multi-family housing for working class Americans.
“I’m a big believer in more housing downtown,” McCullough said.
Before her election as a town council member, McCullough wrote in a 2023 article on her Substack webpage that her grandfather built multi-family dwellings in Kentucky, and her aunt used to live next to her grandmother in order to take care of her.
She wrote the article just months before the Chapel Hill Town Council voted in the Housing Choices for a Complete Community text amendment that would change zoning restrictions on multi-family housing.
In spite of Cobb Terrace’s own history with multi-family housing, McCullough said that building an ADU was illegal at the time that she moved into her home.
“It wasn’t at that point legal to have it if you weren’t grandfathered, if it wasn’t done earlier.”
However, Melissa chose to build an ADU in her basement anyway, following an okay given by her seller, telling her: “This is Chapel Hill.”
When Iris Schwintzer moved to Cobb Terrace in 1978, the apartment she lived in was an ADU.
She had returned to Chapel Hill after graduating from UNC in 1967 and moving abroad to teach English and Science in Ethiopia.
“I was in the Peace Corps for three years,” Schwintzer said. “But then I put on my backpack and went traveling, and I was gone almost 10.”
She lived in her basement apartment for over a decade before moving into her current home in 1990.
“I never thought about buying a house,” Schwintzer said. “I was perfectly happy renting.”
Schwintzer eventually bought her home after her landlord recommended that the former owner sell it to her. She moved all of her things from one end of the circle to the other with a wheelbarrow.
Librarian Road
Before Schwintzer bought her home, like McCullough’s, the house had a history of oscillating between being owner-occupied, rented and partially rented.
“The woman that I bought it from bought it in the ’50s, and she rented it out until she returned in the ’80s,” Schwintzer said. “And even then she rented the basement apartment.”
The development’s history as a collection of rental properties predates its use for multi-family housing. Cobb Terrace was originally designed to be affordable housing for young professors.
“At one point they called Cobb Terrace ‘Librarian Road’ because there [were] so many librarians living here,” Katherine Polk said about the home she bought from a librarian and wife of Sand Pebbles author, Richard McKenna.
In a 1932 edition of The Chapel Hill Weekly newspaper the so-called “residential colony” was lauded for its location five minutes from campus and the Chapel Hill Post Office.
The collection of homes included multiple mail-order kit homes or pattern-built houses made by the Aladdin Company as early as 1906. The house materials averaged at around $600-900. McCullough’s materials were originally bought at just under $1300, which is equivalent to about $40,000 in purchasing power today.
According to the Kithouses.org page for the Aladdin Company, the homes were popular among working and middle class Americans during the early twentieth century.
However, many of the homes on Cobb Terrace today have property values well above $1 million. Renting costs among students stretch toward the $1,000 mark due to the development’s proximity to campus.
Booming, for better or worse
The North Carolina Housing Finance Agency reports that while renters pay 21 percent more than they did in 2001, income has remained relatively the same, only increasing by 2 percent.
McCullough suggests that single family housing may be to blame for higher housing costs.
“The highest value areas were single-family only zoning, and it led to a lot of problems in terms of being able to provide housing,” McCullough said. “And it is the main reason that housing is so unaffordable everywhere. It’s because it’s eaten up all the land.”
According to the Journal of Housing & Community Development published by the National Association of Housing and Redevelopment Officials (NAHRO), about 75% of land in American cities is zoned to only permit single-family houses.
Though Schwintzer bought the home she currently lives in for $56,000, she was given tax estimates that her house is now worth over $400,000, more than 7 times the amount she paid.
Polk’s home was worth $110,000 when she bought it in 1990, and is now worth over $600,000 according to online real estate website estimates.
“So it’s been a good investment,” Polk said.
Special thanks to the residents of Cobb Terrace and Geoffrey Green for their contributions to this story!
