Greensboro, Alabama has just over 17,000 residents. It boasts a historical neighborhood teeming with antebellum mansions and examples of Greek Revival architecture; a stately Main Street with 70% of its buildings unoccupied (including a few burnt-out shells); a dramatic block-to-block residential shift between races; two somewhat racially-segregated grocery stores; a legally-integrated high school with no white students (white students go en masse to a nearby private school that looks just like a public school, but costs each kid $300 per month); the Safe House Museum, once used to shelter Martin Luther King Jr. from the Ku Klux Klan during a 1960’s meeting; the best restaurant in town is El Tenampa Mexican Restaurant; a former Opera House, the focus of a recent $200,000 restoration fundraiser; numerous Auburn University Rural Studio architectural projects; and the headquarters of H.E.R.O. (Hale Empowerment and Revitalization Organization).
Greensboro is a city of contrasts, and a place where new design thinking is revealing itself in a surprising number of ways.