Heartwood neighborhood homeowners, city officials and the East Gainesville community are coming together on Nov. 17 for the inaugural Heartwood Neighborhood Block Party. From 1 p.m. to 4 p.m., families will be able to enjoy games, music and food while three Heartwood homes open their doors to the public for tours.
Realtor Craig Wilburn, who heads up Team Dynamo with Keller Williams, said the gathering aims to celebrate the building of the mixed-income neighborhood while also recognizing the cultural reconciliation and growth Heartwood represents.
“Heartwood is a neighborhood of unity,” said Wilburn, who also serves as board chair of the Greater Gainesville Chamber of Commerce. “We have people of various ethnicities and cultures and backgrounds and economic levels all living in the same neighborhood together as one people. I think that’s what is being celebrated.”
Talks of building Heartwood began in 2007 after the city of Gainesville purchased the Kennedy Homes property at 1717 SE Eighth Avenue in Gainesville.
Kennedy Homes was a subsidized apartment complex built in 1968 during a time when the U.S. census classified one-fifth of Gainesville housing conditions as “dilapidated or deteriorating.”
The city’s minimum housing code requiring homes to have indoor plumbing and heating passed in 1964, making Kennedy Homes one of the first affordable housing complexes built under the new code.
The historically Black apartments operated until 2003 when unchecked vermin, plumbing and fire damage ultimately shut it down. After the city cleared the property, city leaders tasked what is now known as the Gainesville Community Reinvestment Area (GCRA) with redeveloping the site.
Wilburn said he was already helping the GCRA buy and sell other properties around the community when ideas for Heartwood started buzzing. Developers debated making the neighborhood into another affordable housing community. But with 20 years of real estate experience, Wilburn said he pushed back on that “really, really, really, really hard.”
“Gainesville needs affordable housing, don’t get me wrong,” he said. “But East Gainesville didn’t need any more low-income housing. You keep putting low-income on low-income [housing] and you just keep stacking it on top of each other, which is what they did in the beginning.”
When the recommendation came along to build an economically equitable neighborhood with a majority of market rate homes and a smaller portion reserved for lower incomes, Wilburn jumped on board. But not everyone else in the community did.
“The first challenge we had was just getting the community to even buy into it,” he said. “When you grow up in a segregated area, over time, you just think that this is what it’s supposed to be. So the thought of integrating people into your community that don’t look like you or have higher incomes or whatever it is, it’s threatening.”
A 2021 zoning study found that race in Gainesville is a key factor determining where people live and the value of their homes. Whites and Asians were the only races living above the city’s median household income, with Blacks comprising 73% of the median. Less than one-third of Black and Hispanic households in the city were homeowners.
Racial segregation enforced through red-lining, racial zoning and deed covenants divided Gainesville as much as other southern communities during the Jim Crow era, said GCRA director Rick Smith in an email to Mainstreet. But stable neighborhoods with minimal turnover like Heartwood can be tools for healing those social and economic wounds.
“A mixed-income neighborhood [provides] homeownership opportunities to both low-income residents as well as higher-income households,” he said. “Homeownership is essential for mitigating the impacts of gentrification, which dislocates renters by driving up property values, increasing rents and driving them out of their homes and neighborhoods.”
Wilburn said Heartwood also battled stigmas of crime surrounding East Gainesville and shifts in the market increasing material costs. But crews finally broke ground on infrastructure in 2018.
Known as the central wood of a tree that is “more durable and provides the strength and support for the tree to grow tall,” Smith said Heartwood’s name means to capture the physical nature of East Gainesville while reflecting the heart of the community’s spirit.
The 34 single-family homes planned for Heartwood range from $200,000 to $400,000 based on size—anywhere from 1,300 to 2,600 square feet—but Wilburn said the quality between each model doesn’t change since all specifications were pre-determined.
The neighborhood follows established Homeowners Association (HOA) covenants requiring high-quality and “green” interior and exterior finishes, appliances and landscape. Heartwood’s amended and restated declaration of covenants, conditions and restrictions helps maintain these standards and quality aesthetics.
The City Commission also voted to install Gainesville Regional Utilities’ (GRU) fastest high-speed fiber optic internet in Heartwood. GRUCom is typically only offered for commercial use but is now included in Heartwood’s $167 monthly HOA fees.
After a brief halt in construction during the COVID-19 pandemic, Elevated Design and Construction and The Flanagan Companies Inc. finished building the first Heartwood home in November 2022.
The full plan accounts for 23 market-rate homes and 11 affordable homes funded through Gainesville’s Dreams2Reality, a program established by the City Commission specifically for the Heartwood neighborhood.
Dreams2Reality applicants must be Alachua County residents who do not currently own a home and haven’t since 2018, are pre-qualified with a certified lender, able to contribute 2% of the sales price, fall within the 2021 HUD income limits, and attend a homebuyer education workshop in order to receive up to $70,000 in down payment and closing cost assistance.
“These are people that are great employees, but they don’t have huge salaries,” Wilburn said. “In most cases, those people would not be able to afford a house like the homes in Heartwood. But now many of them have close to six figure equity in their homes. They’ve got to be in the house for 10 years, but after 10 years they can sell it, and there’s no payback of the grant program.”
Fifteen of the 18 developed Heartwood homes are currently occupied, including all 11 of Heartwood’s planned affordable homes since January 2024 and four of the seven market-rate homes. An RTS employee and a school crossing guard were two of the Dreams2Reality grant recipients.
Smith said investments in neighborhoods like Heartwood aim to inspire growth not just in East Gainesville housing, but the whole community. Already this summer the Wild Spaces Public Places surtax funded renovations at Lincoln Yard Park, and UF Health opened an Eastside urgent care clinic as part of a multi-million dollar plan to develop the area over the next few decades.
But more than the financial value a “labor of love” like Heartwood brings to Gainesville, Wilburn said he looks forward to the priceless, intangible lessons people will gain by living next to someone who they wouldn’t normally get to know because of economic differences.
“There’s so much to learn. But when we have neighborhoods that are always segregated, you never get a chance to really get to know people,” he said. “Heartwood has always been a catalyst for change. It’s not about selling houses. It’s always been about changing people’s perspective.”