But in truth even a short visit reveals many Northsides.

There are homes with neatly trimmed lawns and flowers. Homes with decaying foundations and patched-over roofs. One-story brick houses and sprawling apartment houses.

Sometimes all on the same street.

The historically black neighborhood's slide into the rental market has been going on for decades, spurred by UNC's not building enough campus housing.

New town protections barring duplexes and McMansions, coupled with an eight-home initiative on display this afternoon, are designed to change things.

"It's happening," said Delores Bailey, the director of Empowerment Inc.

The community-building organization has partnered with the Orange Community Housing and Land Trust and Habit for Humanity of Orange County to bring home ownership back to the neighborhood.

"I really have the sense we are going to make a difference," Bailey said.

With workers getting the new Craftsman cottage at 603 Nunn St. ready last week, it was easy to share Bailey's hope.

The house sits in a bend in the road, shaded by maples and a towering magnolia, across from another Land Trust house and near Empowerment houses at 229 and 231 Graham St. that also will be on display today.

But the project was no sure thing.

When construction manager Ann Griffin told her boss, Land Trust director Robert Dowling, she wanted to buy properties to build on, he told her she'd never find anything they could afford in Chapel Hill.

Indeed, Griffin says she looked up a tiny gray duplex last week in the Register of Deeds office. Just 650 square feet on each side. $180,000.

But Griffin, who'd spent her career building labs for UNC's medical school, kept looking. She said the Northside neighborhood needed help.

"It's not that I'm opposed to students," she said. "I worked for the university my entire life.

"It's just the quantity. That happened very quickly. There was a lot of pressure on people to sell, and what that does is change the character of the neighborhood."

It wasn't just students, of course.

Northside has developed another rep in recent years. A new police substation on Sykes Street should help. Returning families should help even more. Families unwilling to let drug dealers do business outside their freshly painted front porches.

And if folks like Bailey and Griffin needed any evidence they're making a difference, it came from a man painting one of those porches a couple of weeks ago.

The man was putting a fresh coat of white paint on his mother's porch, next door to one of the new Land Trust homes, when Griffin stopped by.

"Yup," he said. "I'm having to keep up with the neighborhood now."