With for-profit, nonprofit, public-sector and indigenous interests at work, a new age is developing for the depressed district south of downtown that still is known as "Hayti."

* Reconstruction is scheduled to start this summer for developer Andy Rothschild's replacement for the Heritage Square shopping center on Lakewood Avenue near Fayetteville Street.

* The St. Louis firm McCormack Baron Salazar and Struever Bros. Eccles & Rouse of Baltimore are investigating redevelopment of the Rolling Hills subdivision at Morehead and South Roxboro.

* Campus Apartments of Philadelphia is buying the Durham Housing Authority's run-down Fayette Street complex and plans to demolish and build student housing just east of the Hayti Heritage Center.

* And the Southside/St. Theresa neighborhood has organized and entered partnerships with the city, N.C. Central University, Self-Help Community Development Corp. and other agencies to program its own redevelopment.

"We know what time it is," said Southside neighborhood spokesman Ray Eurquhart. "All these plans say very little about us.

"We've seen what happens. ... They just come in and bulldoze the community down, and we don't want that to happen to us."

Urban renewal and road construction in the 1960s and '70s removed the original Hayti, the earliest black neighborhood and business district in Durham. Past ventures at economic revival there have largely failed. Larry Jarvis of the city housing and community development department said the area suffers from deteriorated housing stock, high crime and decades of public neglect.

"We don't want to displace long-term residents," Jarvis said. "We would like ... a mix."

Evan Covington Chavez, residential director at Self-Help CDC, said her nonprofit has been buying property in Southside and intends to continue; but before it does any building, it is helping the residents lay out their own "vision of how they would like to see the neighborhood grow." Meantime, both parties are "trying to get the city's ear on code enforcement and crime."

Bringing a plan of their own to the table, Eurquhart said, gives the present residents a voice in what happens around them.

"We are our own leaders," he said. "We're controlling our own destiny."