It’s tilted, scratched, faded and overgrown by a long-untended cedar hedge, and doubly symbolic.

On one hand, it represents two decades of failed attempts to build a neighborhood.

On the other, it represents the hopes at City Hall for a third attempt to build up 20 acres now occupied by rank grass, weeds, bushes, trees, concrete debris and streets to nowhere; and, unlike the previous failures, to revive 125 acres in what was once the heart of black Durham.

“This has been a difficult project,” said Mayor Bill Bell, “in the sense that ... we are traveling new grounds.

“But I’m convinced that if we’re successful it will be something we’ll all be proud of in this community, and specifically the persons who live there.”

At the moment, estimates are that success is going to cost more than $28 million, on top of more than $7 million the city has already spent on Rolling Hills since repossessing unsold lots and two unfinished houses nine years ago.

After a last review on June 7, the City Council was ready to approve a set of contracts with the St. Louis developer McCormack Baron Salazar to construct a mixed-income rental complex, with the possibility of more than 300 units and a community center, on a reconfigured Rolling Hills site; and one contract with the Durham Center for Community Self-Help to buy 71 parcels, some developed, in the Southside neighborhood just west of Rolling Hills.

In the near term, those contracts set off a first phase at Rolling Hills for 132 apartments, 80 of them “affordable” to households making 60 percent or less of the area median income and to remain so for at least 30 years; and in Southside, construction or rehabilitation of 35 houses for low-income owner-occupants. The idea is to build everything to market standards of quality, in the hope of attracting renters and buyers who can afford to live where they like as well as those whose housing is subsidized.

All in all, the project – which also involves vocational training and other social services for residents of the impoverished Southside – is projected to cost around $48 million and produce a transformation in the area just south of the Durham Freeway, between Fayetteville Street and the American Tobacco Trail.

Since its inception, Rolling Hills-Southside has produced skepticism and suspicion. Residents of the Southside and others who remember the 1960s and 1970s Durham Freeway and urban renewal projects that swept away Hayti, the once-bustling black district established immediately after the Civil War, felt that history was repeating itself. Others, remembering the earlier debacles at Rolling Hills and similar cases elsewhere of city-sponsored revitalization, figured that history would repeat itself.

Other neighborhoods targeted for city uplifts, and agencies used to paying their ways with federal money dispensed through the city, complained that financing for Rolling Hills/Southside would leave little for anywhere else. And after McCormack Baron failed to come up with its share of project planning money – $325,000 – some saw the project as a sweetheart deal for an out-of-town business, one-third owned by the financiers of Goldman Sachs – which will end up owning Rolling Hills while investing very little cash of its own.

By then, Mayor Bill Bell made Rolling Hills-Southside’s success a top priority for his administration, and his colleagues on the City Council have generally been willing – with more and less enthusiasm – to carry on with a vision as it gathered its own momentum.

“But here we are now,” said Council Member Eugene Brown, who has been the most outspoken skeptic.

And the sign does say, “New Homes.”

Monday’s City Council meeting begins at 7 p.m. The public is welcome to attend at City Hall, or may watch the meeting live on Cable Channel 8.