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DURHAM — Affordable-housing advocates are stepping up their pressure on the City Council to devote a small piece of the land targeted for redevelopment in the Rolling Hills or Southside neighborhoods to the fight against homelessness.
They made sure the issue got a hearing Thursday at a news conference announcing the latest “point in time” count of the homeless, as Genesis Home Executive Director Ryan Fehrman standing up to ask Councilwoman Cora Cole-McFadden whether she and the council will back the request.
But Cole-McFadden sidestepped the question.
“I support efforts to end homelessness. I support affordable housing,” she said. “And if a proposal comes before us, we will review it and act accordingly.”
Fehrman didn’t miss the non-committal wording of her reply.
“I wasn’t sure I really got an answer on that one,” he said later. “I’m a little disappointed that Cora hasn’t really embraced this proposal just yet.”
The brief confrontation came as city officials and a St. Louis developer continue working on plans for a 132-unit, first phase redevelopment of the Rolling Hills neighborhood.
A preliminary application to the N.C. Housing Finance Agency indicates that officials are expecting the project to cost between $17 million and $18.5 million, not including the cost of grading the Lakewood Avenue site and the cost of infrastructure like new streets.
That’s on top of the $5.8 million the city committed to buy back existing homes left over from earlier, failed attempts to redevelop the site, and the $745,000 officials earmarked to pay planning costs.
Fehrman and other housing advocates like former Durham Housing Authority board member Jack Preiss are fretting that with bills so large, Rolling Hills could damage the city’s broader effort to promote low-cost housing.
Unless, that is, officials make sure the project addresses established policy goals.
That’s where the homeless issue comes in.
Housing advocates would like officials to make sure there’s enough money in the project to buy a 1.5-acre parcel in the adjoining Southside neighborhood that could accommodate about 20 units of nonprofit-built “permanent supportive housing” for the formerly homeless.
The word “supportive” means that people with mental illnesses, substance-abuse problems or other issues would be sure not just of being able to live there, but of getting long-term care and assistance.
Advocates tout the creation of such housing as one of the main solutions to chronic homelessness, the sort that keeps people on the streets for years on end. And they’re happy that nonprofits have created 98 new beds of supportive housing in Durham in the past three years.
But with two previous, nonprofit-led redevelopment failures at Rolling Hills already on the books, city officials appear eager to keep the new project simple.
Mayor Bill Bell has already warned advocates against trying to add facets to it, saying in December that “in this project we aren’t going to satisfy everybody.”
As it is, the city and developer McCormack Baron Salazar are expecting to mix market-rate and low-cost rental units in the same project. They do figure to include in it 20 units for people who make less than 30 percent of the area’s median income — a target federal regulators say would translate into an annual income of less than $15,000 for a single person.
Fehrman said he’s hoping Cole-McFadden — the council’s point woman in dealing with the countywide “10 Year Plan to End Homelessness” — prods the mayor to get on board.
“Her first question when we presented this [at a committee meeting] was, ‘What does the mayor think?’ ” Fehrman said. “It seems that’s her question on a lot of things. But I’d like to see Cora out in front rather than following the mayor.”
