Raleigh City Council Looks to Durham for Help in Launching its ‘Moonshot’ on Affordable Housing
Raleigh’s City Council held a special work session on Tuesday dedicated entirely to the city’s continuing challenges with housing affordability.
At present, there are about 56,000 low-income households unable to find an affordable place to live in Wake County, and this number is expected to more than double over the next 20 years. To make matters worse, Wake County is losing around 800-1,300 affordable units each year
Mary-Ann Baldwin, Raleigh’s newly elected mayor, called for a ‘moonshot’ on affordable housing earlier this month, citing rapidly rising rents, increasing home prices, and stagnant wages as reasons to act now to increase the supply of affordable housing for low- and moderate-income residents. As reported recently by the News & Observer, the average rent in the Raleigh-Durham area rose 5.3 percent this year compared to 3 percent nationally.
The major focus of Tuesday’s meeting was a presentation from Durham Mayor Steve Schewel. In November, Durham voters overwhelming approved an historic affordable housing bond to fund an ambitious plan that, according to Mayor Schewel, will ultimately assist up to 15,000 Durham residents with housing.
Durham’s bond will raise $95 million over the course of five years, and this money will be combined with $65 million from other local and federal funding sources to inject a total of $160 million into the City’s Affordable Housing Bond Investment Plan.
At Tuesday’s work session, Mayor Schewel laid out the details of Durham’s affordable housing bond and provided recommendations to Raleigh’s leaders for what we might need to include in our own “Quality of Life” bond, which is presently planned for November 2020.
Market forces are driving the housing crisis that many cities throughout the U.S. are facing, Mayor Schewel said. But, he emphasized, we have a choice in what our cities’ futures will look like. And if we want to avoid a future in which our central cities are largely rich, white, and unaffordable, then we need to “intervene boldly.”
In addition to loosening regulations on moderate forms of density, including duplexes, triplexes, and accessory dwelling units, Mayor Schewel stressed the importance of building mixed income communities and adequately addressing what he called the double burden of poverty. Of many residents living on Durham Housing Authority properties, Mayor Schewel said, “Not only are they poor, but everyone around them is poor.”
Mayor Schewel also spoke about the importance of setting and managing appropriate expectations, saying that even though $95 million is a lot of money, Durham’s recently approved housing bond is still not going to be anywhere near enough to solve the city’s housing problem entirely. As such, we need to look to other options besides just funding, such as changes to land use policy.
“We cannot subsidize our way out of this,” he said, noting that land use can be a powerful tool for affordability.
Moreover, change is going to happen slowly even with massive financial investments in new housing choices. Mayor Schewel said that only about 45 new affordable units are expected in the first year of the Durham affordable housing plan’s implementation.
Addressing Doubts and Questions
Aside from general distrust of government spending and questions about oversight, Mayor Schewel said the biggest challenge to winning public support for the $95 million dollar bond was addressing legitimate distrust and concern among Durham’s African American Community.
“Because of our history of urban renewal, highway 147, the destruction of the Hayti community and other communities in Durham,” Mayor Schewel said, “our African American community really did not trust that when we made promises about this housing that we were going to be able to keep them.”
Mayor Schewel said that earning that trust came about gradually and only after he and the Durham City Council appointed a diverse community advisory group to help shape the goals and priorities of the housing bond over time. With particular attention to the concerns of Durham’s African American community, the advisory group was instrumental in getting more home ownership and economic development opportunities added to the bond.
You can watch Mayor Schewel’s entire presentation below.
What are the Next Steps for Raleigh?
At the end of Tuesday’s work session, Councilor Melton stressed that although Raleigh has a lot of work to do on the issue of affordable housing, we should act quickly to begin addressing the broader issue of housing affordability, which includes issues such as “missing middle” housing.
Echoing that sentiment, Mayor Baldwin tasked City staff with identifying, prior to the next City Council meeting, the “low hanging fruit” that Council can begin acting on right away — three to five issues that will have the largest impact on expanding housing options in Raleigh.
Mayor Baldwin concluded the work session by acknowledging the large number of residents who came out to listen to the meeting, thanking everyone for coming out so close to the holidays.
“This is the first step in all of us moving forward on what we feel is a very urgent need on housing in our community,” she said. “Housing choices, housing affordability, and affordable housing.”
What Can You Do to Support Affordable Housing in Raleigh?
As we’ve written before, WakeUP Wake County supports a solution to the problem of housing affordability that is, above all else, holistic, forward-thinking, and equitable. We support re-evaluating exclusionary land use policies, planning around reliable transit, implementing new programs to better protect vulnerable residents, such as low-income renters, establishing new partnerships and revenue streams, and prioritizing direct engagement with impacted and traditionally marginalized communities.
If these priorities are important to you, too, you can reach out to Raleigh’s City Council members to let them know.
You can also join the fight for expanding housing affordability options throughout all of Wake County by making a financial contribution to WakeUP Wake County. We plan to do a lot of work on this important issue in the new year!
Click here to become a sustaining member, and click here to make a one-time donation.