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A dilapidated gem will yield to housing

The News & Observer BY JOSH SHAFFER AND SARAH OVASKA - Staff Writers   RALEIGH -- In its time, the Water Garden stood as a shrine to modern design: a complex of low-slung, hill-hugging offices surrounded by tall, ivy-covered pine trees and ponds topped with lily pads. You'd never guess from the car dealerships and furniture warehouses that such a gem stood hidden off Glenwood Avenue. And for the last three years, the complex has slowly rotted and gathered squatters' trash.   But now the site of the 11-acre Water Garden campus, home and life's work of master landscape architect Dick Bell, is being put to use. Starting next spring, its lush and rolling hills will be converted to low-income housing in a northwest Raleigh neighborhood where it is sorely needed. Quantcast   The roughly $6.1 million project by Downtown …


Renters feeling mortgage crisis shockwaves

Ripple effects now squeezing area's financially vulnerable due to greater competition for affordable housing Jim Wise Raleigh News and Observer August 30, 2008  Durham and the Triangle have been spared the worst of the credit crunch and foreclosure wave, but the effects are nonetheless rippling through the local economy, sometimes in unexpected ways.   Everyone knows that banks, builders, and home-buyers and sellers are suffering from a credit crunch these days.   But so are others whose situation has not been so well publicized -- even those who don't have homes.   "Foreclosure has hit lower-income people," said Jack Preiss, a retired Duke University sociologist and former Durham city councilman who has been building low-income housing for decades. "These people have been hit very hard."   The crisis in mortgage lending that began a year ago has set off a …