CLEVELAND, Tenn. – Billy and Cathy Goins are surrounded.
After living near the edge of Lee University’s grounds for 14 years, the couple’s home has become an island enveloped by the school’s swelling campus, especially after Lee’s recent purchase of the nearby First Baptist Church property.
“They own the apartments beside us, they own the house next door, they own everything behind us and they own everything in front of us,” Billy Goins said.
University officials recently visited the Goins’ Sixth Street home to take pictures and ask about buying it, he said, but he won’t sell until the price is right. When that time comes, he said, he plans to move to 14 acres he owns in Charleston, Tenn.
The Goins’ neighbor, Wilma Mae Hicks, 94, lives with her 89-year-old sister on Seventh Street on the edge of Lee’s campus. She said Lee students sometimes offer to wash her car or mow the grass or even stop what they’re doing to help her with household tasks.
Two years ago, the university bought and demolished a house she once lived in to construct a religion building, she said.
University President Paul Conn also has asked whether she’d like to sell her current home, which she had built in 1950.
“I found him to be a very, very nice man,” she said. “But I told him I wasn’t interested in selling. He asked me if they found a place to move me, would I sell, and I said ‘no’; I want to live here until I die. It would be impossible for me to try to set up housekeeping somewhere else.”
Conn said he’s been talking with Hicks for more than a decade.
“She’s a good neighbor, and she understands we’re not in a hurry to buy her property,” he said. “It’s one of many conversations we’ve had with older people who own their homes but don’t want to be bothered.”
Hicks said she’s already turned down a $100,000 offer.
“I have an idea they’ll just buy this house and tear it down and use it for parking,” she said. “But I won’t be here. It won’t make any difference to me.”
Conn said he spent his childhood in the neighborhoods now enveloped by Lee, playing in backyards that no longer exist and crossing through Hicks’ lawn on treks downtown.
“We’ve worked really hard to be good neighbors,” Conn said. “Our expansion has been very good for the neighborhood and very good for the residents. … We all know that their property is worth a lot more now.”
City Councilman David May said the school bought his old Trunk Street home from his mother, and he was more than satisfied with the deal.
“Lee pays more than the market value would have been,” he said.
Cleveland Mayor Tom Rowland said he believes Lee has been an excellent neighbor.
“Anything they build has been first class and enhances the area,” he said. “They don’t hurt the neighborhood in any way.”
Maurice Murphy, assistant pastor of Tennessee Valley Community Church, said a university representative recently discussed buying three houses on Parker Street near the campus that the church uses for its drama ministry.
“They destroyed the house across the street from us yesterday,” he said. “I assume they’re going to make it another parking lot, because that’s what they do with everything around here anyway.”
Conn said that, while some land would be used for parking, the university is assembling a planning group to determine the fate of the 13 properties acquired in the First Baptist deal.
Lee paid $5 million for a seven-acre property that includes four houses, the main church complex and the former JCPenney building along North Ocoee Street.
Cleveland resident Matt Bible said that, since Lee annexed First Baptist Church this summer, he expects the rent at his Church Street apartment building to jump at least 20 percent.
“I think it could be good for downtown,” he said. “Right now there’s not a soul. It’s really dead; nothing stays open.”
Being closer to campus will mean more life, he said, and the increase in student activity finally may give businesses a chance to thrive.
Lee senior Daniel Wagner, who lives in an apartment near the university, said he figures his building one day will be absorbed, too.
“One man’s growth is another man’s destruction,” he said.