Affordable Housing and Housing Affordability

[keita]

There’s an Indy article with more detail about Bufkin’s controversy, but the City Council thread is probably a more appropriate place to talk about his missteps. So sticking to the topic of affordable housing, I read the Facebook post you posted, and…

@Wake Co. Housing Justice Coalition Facebook post

[H]ow will converting low-wealth natually occuring (sic) affordable public housing at Heritage Park to [mix-]income housing address this housing inequity […]? […] the majority of the residents living at Heritage Park are Black/African American people.

[Converting] to mix-income housing will only create more housing opportunities for those at a higher income bracket [and] doesn’t expand lower income affordable housing. Further, during the demolition and conversion, Black people will be uprooted and displaced from their homes and their current neighborhoods of opportunity. Some may return–but there is no guarantee.

…are these not the exact issues the city and/or some of us on here have pointed out and addressed? At least for this Facebook post, the main concerns (and pertinent solutions) seem to be:

• Lowering the number of lower-income subsidized units: increased density would help with this because it enables more houses to be built in the same lot space compared to the current proposal.

• Displacement of current Heritage Park residents during the move: the city’s proposed policies (again, see here) is literally directed towards this specific problem. It gives residents the option to move into other RHA units, transfer to a different unit, or live elsewhere using a Section 8 voucher (which has its own problems but it’s still something), as well as the opportunity to move back into the development once the rebuilding is complete.

If that Facebook rant is a good model of what we should expect to see, then wouldn’t it mean that retail politics will favor a denser design (barring some weird, low-effort misinformation campaigns)?