That’s because everyone knows the one dated building on Glenwood south will be torn down and redeveloped at some point in the not too distant future.
My argument is not to “not” provide affordable options for seniors but rather than build a single targeted demographic project on one single plot of land, thereby reducing the value of everything around it (rightly or wrongly), develop a project that provides the same number or units (or possibly more) blended with market rate housing. The reality is people don’t want to be next door to what the perceive as a public housing project…period. While this will be a ‘new project’, it is still public housing. Why do we think suburbs continue to thrive…people want to be near 'like kind" and they effectively keep lower income housing locked out.
America has seen what happens when we isolate poor people in public housing projects…it doesn’t work…never has. It just perpetuates a cycle of poverty.
I get it these are old people which is a selling point you see a lot now by municipalities in public housing efforts.
People are not as scared of poor old people…but still why build a single use ‘low income’ project and run the risk of the stigma it creates around it when you could build something where everyone of all races and socioeconomic backgrounds can live together?
This proposal just perpetuates the same old, same old; putting poor people in one place and hurt the development around it as a result.
I dunno man, as others have already said, the church sits on what is pretty much a 4.6 acre plot of land; with 150 units you’re talking a density of around 32 units per acre. That is incredibly strong, and it’s going to be residents who will mostly be car-free and dependent on the high-capacity transit corridor the city is building right next to it, a corridor that many people on this very forum have called a waste of money! I swear sometimes we can’t win for trying.
And if you’re worried about the entire neighborhood becoming a dead zone because of one five-acre plot being dedicated senior housing, then you know less about real estate than you think. A high-capacity transit corridor will boost values far more than one senior/low-income housing complex will depress them, and the momentum of investment coming east from downtown (including but not limited to the Alamo Drafthouse, College Park redevelopment, WakeMed’s various expansions, and the Longview, to name just a handful) shows no signs of stopping. The Washington Terrace development is low-income and senior as well…it’s not stopping mid-century single family split-levels from being flipped for $350,000 in adjacent neighborhoods.
It’s time to start thinking holistically about this entire corridor. When single-family owners on New Bern, not to mention auto-oriented businesses, decide to cash out due to the momentum from BRT, they’re not going to be thinking of charity…nor will the developers who buy their properties. Hence, this is a good way to get in front of the affordable housing problem on the transit corridor.
I’m with you on the approach to AH. I think the scale is an important consideration with this project.150 units is not that large and by itself shouldn’t tip the scales to a lower income demographic, for that area. The issue would be if the adjacent parcels also started going AH, with a cluster of low income development growing outward from the DHIC development. As long as the market holds I don’t think that’s a high risk because private developers are trying to maximize cost and profit. In an quickly growing urban setting you can have a mid range product next to a high quality AH development without market pressure to devalue the adjacent properties. Basically, most new development in ER is going in next to existing affordable or lower priced housing, so having “new” affordable or lower priced housing could be seen as a positive for the adjacent developments. This is very situational.
Another factor with this development is that generally DHIC does a good job with their properties. They are high quality, have good partners, good management, and a reputation to maintain. Greg Warren has found a way to be a developer of high quality developments, and keeping them “affordable” which deserves alot of respect. The problems would come if the City, RHA, CASA, or other developers think it’s appropriate to cluster AH in this area because DHIC has broke the seal.
I prefer to think that DHIC got in on this corridor at the front end, and that the City isn’t going to let the BRT corridors turn into the “affordable housing corridors”. That would surely be a way sabotage the whole BRT concept. I would prefer it if the City codified that AH multifamily developments had to be located at least 1000’ from each other, but I don’t any pending restrictions at all in the current political environment.
For something to be public housing, doesn’t it have to, you know, be owned by the public…through the government? Did I missing something?
At any rate, I see UncleJesse’s point with mixed income, it waters down the effect on neighboring property values. I could actually see a senior community the perfect place for mixed income and it also has the benefit of the up-tier rents balancing out the lower tier rents. I really don’t know how it would work in other developments though, unless there isn’t a wide margin between the affordable units and the standard units. Millionaires will never live around people on the bottom of society; they don’t have to, there is no reason to.
Good, everyone should vote for it. With the increasing property values by the recent tax re-evaluation I am sure that working folks will face higher rents and thus possibly be pushed out of housing. That would create a mess of houseless people!
I get that priorities have changed. It does suck to hear that a parks bond is off the table though. Some of the future John Chavis Park renovations rely on the passage of a parks bond. Plus, there are lots of opportunities for improvements to the greenways (which I was hoping would be at the top of peoples’ minds since a lot of people are out using the greenways just to get out of the house these days).
Hopefully priorities will shift slightly from this situation. Hopefully more people are out biking and realizing how important bike facilities are, and how viable biking can be with proper protected bikeways. Hopefully with priority comes funding. Hopefully…
City will hold off on raising property taxes this year for certain. Any publicly elected official would be insane to move forward with any tax increase in 2020.
The fallout of COVID-19 remains to be seen. Hard to predict what impact it will have on migration patterns.
Maybe domestic internal migration will take a pause for a while as the economy slows down, as they do during most normal recessions.
But then, certainly NYC, and possibly other cities like Boston or Chicago, are likely to lose a lot of residents permanently, we could be a destination for a lot of those folks. We’re just about the closest sunbelt boomtown to NYC (cheaper, way less dense, fully auto oriented, good economic fundamentals, at least before COVID.) Not quite as “cool” as Nashville/Austin/Orlando, or as big as Atlanta/Houston/Dallas/Miami, but also a lot closer to NYC.
(FWIW, Richmond is closer still, more connected with the northeast, and as such, in my estimation, is likely to see an even greater portion of this migration than Raleigh.)
Furthermore, as with the folks who left New Orleans after Katrina for places like Baton Rouge, Houston, and Atlanta, it’s highly possible that the people who leave NYC are likely to be the people hardest hit by COVID: those in the least secure economic positions, rather than white collar financial/tech/etc types that we’re more accustomed to receiving. So yeah, affordable housing could be badly needed.
Hard to say.
I do agree that putting it on the ballot this year is suicide for the initiative, though, and possibly for the entire council.
For years I’ve heard on other forums like City-Data how Richmond is going to explode, and every year Raleigh’s growth laps it. Then again, I’ve constantly read how Cleveland, Detroit, Buffalo, Pittsburgh, and other cities’ rebound and resurgence was right on the cusp of happening.
As for affordable housing, a market downtown is inevitable if we go deep into recession. When projects that are coming online this year aren’t met with demand for them, we’ll see prices come down.
If prices do happen to come down then this might be a good time for picking up well positioned properties for AH, these things take time and next thing you know we’ll be right back/still in another AH crisis if we wait to only approve funding when prices are up.
I couldn’t find any other appropriate/active threads to post this, but Raleigh won and allocated some money from federal grants via the CARES Act. They got about $2.8M from HUD to “assist persons experiencing homelessness and persons otherwise affected by COVID-19 by loss of jobs or wages”.
They’ve spent the last month looking for companies and organizations that’re willing to give a helping hand to people with COVID-related housing issues. Here’s the shortlist city staffers came up with:
I think I’ve said it before on this forum but we need affordable housing developments to have small libraries, community centers, and or fitness centers. That would probably help low-income families catch up to middle-class families in regards to equal opportunity and education.
