Does Durham have the answer to Raleigh’s affordable housing challenge?
Raleigh voters should know within 60 days how big the city’s “quality of life” bonds for affordable housing, Dix Park and Raleigh’s other parks will be.
But first the city wants to know how much voters are willing to pay.
“Polling is going to determine the amount,” Raleigh Mayor Mary-Ann Baldwin said Tuesday. “We are not going to put something out that can’t be successful, especially on the housing side. That will set us back two years.”
The bill for polling won’t be footed by the city, but by the Greater Raleigh Chamber of Commerce and the Dix Park Conservancy instead.
The bonds, planned for November 2020, were just one part of a special meeting called by Raleigh’s newly elected leaders to discuss affordable housing and overall affordability.
Durham affordable housing bond
Rapid growth, stagnant wages and a lack of housing choices are forcing cities like Raleigh to rethink their affordable-housing efforts.
Durham voters just passed a $95 million affordable housing bond that includes improving public housing, helping homeless people and providing money for affordable housing developers.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Durham Mayor Steve Schewel laid out what it took to get the Bull City on board.
Durham decided to “intervene boldly” to keep the city from becoming a “rich, white, unaffordable central city,” Schewel said, and it’s a choice Raleigh now faces.
When a city says its going to raise people’s taxes, people are going to have questions and concerns. In Durham some of those doubts came from the black community, which been wronged by development in the past, Schewel said.
“Our African-American community really did not trust that when we made promises about this housing that we were going to keep them,” he said. “And that is still an open question. We have to be able to keep them.”
Durham was able to create trust, in part, by having diverse people on its city council — now predominantly black and with its first elected Latina member — adding diverse people to the affordable-housing bond committee and making changes to the bond based on its recommendations.
Durham voters backed the bond, which is part of that city’s larger $160 million five-year housing plan, with nearly 76% approval.
The bond will cost the owner of a $230,000 house about $37 a year, or the equivalent of 1.6 cents per $100 of assessed property value, over the next 20 years, The News & Observer has reported.
“We have our own strengths and weaknesses,” Baldwin said after Tuesday’s meeting. “But what I wanted to focus on was the process (Durham) went through. How they went about to be so successful. I mean he laid that out. They laid that out for us today. We know we have to reach out to the African-American communities and the rest of the community to ensure this is successful.”
Development changes
But Durham’s successful bond also came with zoning changes that allow more housing to be built near downtown, changes that some residents in established neighborhoods opposed.
“What I am absolutely sure of is we can’t subsidize our way out of this,” Schewel said. “The subsidized housing is critically important. And that is (part of) what the bond does. But land use is equally important.”
Backyard cottages, long debated in Raleigh, are allowed by-right in Durham and it’s easier to build duplexes and denser housing in areas once reserved for single-family homes.
It won’t cause rapid change to neighborhoods — Durham expects fewer than 50 new homes under those changes in the first year — Schewel said, but it’s a start to give more people housing choices.
Raleigh could make similar changes to its development rules, and Baldwin asked staff to bring back a handful of “low hanging fruit” regulations that could be changed or dropped to make it easier to build homes in Raleigh.
The city has already changed some of its rules like allowing townhomes to be built on private streets and allow developers to offer affordable housing when seeking rezoning. Other ideas, like reducing parking requirements and allowing duplexes in the same area as single-family homes, haven’t been approved
This story was originally published December 17, 2019 at 7:45 PM with the headline "Does Durham have the answer to Raleigh’s affordable housing challenge?."
