I 200% agree with Both Comments…@evan.j.bost @Robert1977 there has to be some give and take here when it comes to affordable housing. I used to live in North Hills off Six Forks and I saw my Rent rising and not my Pay, and was working TWO JOBS at that. In the end I could no longer afford to live in the area and had to Stay with a friend until I can find a much affordable Apartment. A Year later and still staying with my friend, I Don’t want to live far out from my Job and spend my time in a Long commute to work each day, and finding a place close to my Job is too Damn expensive. Had got a raised Just this passed Month and it didn’t even make a dent, I thank GOD that I don’t have tons of Bills to pay. But taking Public Transit to/from work is a Job itself, but it gets me where I need to go so I can’t really complain much. The City of Raleigh Seriously needs to Put the Reins on affordable housing, I’m sure that there are some decent places that are in my Price range, but that is like a needle in a Haystack.
Without meaning to be rude or making this personal, it sounds like you have a lot of wants. You want to work the job you have, you want to not have a long commute, etc. It’s something to strive for and work towards. I just don’t feel like it’s the government’s job to provide that for you. I’d like to live in a fancy house near my job and downtown, but sadly it doesn’t always work out what way.
No…your are Right…and in some ways it is a lot of wants. But in reality I do not expect that…And I do not expect the Government to provide for me either, I earn my own Keep. But don’t we all want to live where we can afford to ??? Just saying.
Don’t feel to much pressure to answer, but what rent would you be looking for and what would it be near (where is work)?
I prefer to pay a mortgage instead of rent, and I don’t want to live downtown. Just near enough that I can get there easily. Maybe something in West Raleigh, for about $400,000. I might be biased because I did exactly that. 
Between 700 and 900 a month and I work at RTP but would prefer to find something in West Raleigh/Cary.
This article seems to be going around. I liked this musical chairs metaphor, never thought of it like this before. The point may be not to only build expensive housing but this shows you that adding the supply, no matter the price, still has positive impacts on housing prices.
But when a household moves into a new unit, they initiate a kind of housing musical chairs by vacating their existing unit. A second household then moves into that unit, in turn vacating a third unit. For each new market-rate building, Mast follows this trail of movers back through six moves, tracking where residents are moving from, a process he calls the migration chain. By the sixth link of this chain, Mast finds that approximately half of the movers are moving out of census tracts with below-median incomes. As many as 20 percent of movers are coming from the poorest tracts in the city
Great article, the best thing to make housing more affordable is to build market rate housing. Blocking market rate housing will only make the problem bigger.
Thanks for reviving this thread Leo! I wholeheartedly disagree with the lip service certain council members are giving the affordable housing issues facing the city while simultaneously making decisions that seem to either do nothing to provide relief or actually make the problem worse.
I looked up the current mayoral candidates’ campaign websites to see their proposed solutions and are pasting below for consideration:
Assuring Housing Options are Available for Everyone
Everyone’s Raleigh includes a place for all of us to live: we need housing options for the teachers and first responders that serve our city, the growing number of senior citizens, single moms who are struggling to support their families, residents with mental health and substance abuse disorders, and those who are or at risk of homelessness. These different people require different strategies and solutions. Raleigh is not alone in these challenges—housing costs are rising in large cities across the country. We must study innovative solutions from around the nation to help find those that may work best for our city. Some tools to address the rising costs of housing include:
- Working with developers to provide affordable units in new projects and finding innovative ways to support financing of these projects
- Increasing the availability of “middle” housing options, such as townhomes, duplexes, and granny flats
- Establishing a plan to preserve existing affordable units
- Acquiring land along new transit corridors for affordable housing
- Leveraging resources for housing to create additional supportive housing for individuals with severe mental health or substance abuse disorders transition into community living
- Joining the Mayors Challenge to End Veterans’ Homelessness
- Encouraging home ownership
We need to work together to make sure people can stay in the neighborhoods they love even as those neighborhoods grow and change. And as our neighborhoods grow and change, we need to ensure that the rich history of our communities that we are all proud of isn’t lost in transition, but is protected and shared with future generations.
Housing
Our Challenge: Too many of our neighbors work full-time but still have difficulty affording housing. Raleigh must stop talking about affordable housing and increase access to housing for more people — to rent and purchase.
Fresh Outlooks:
- Increase the construction of tax credit housing and build a closer partnership with affordable housing developers
- Expand successful homeownership programs like the one in College Park
- Provide incentives to the development community to include affordable units in market developments
- Increase staff in City agencies dealing with development and get rid of unnecessary regulations that add to the cost of housing
- Identify underutilized parcels owned by the City, County or State which can be re-purposed to increase density and affordability
- Increase opportunities for homeowners to build accessory dwelling units (ADUs)
- Consider impact of any property tax increase on affordability and maintain relatively low city property tax rate
- Explore a new bond measure to expand the pool of funding for affordable housing
- Immediately establish task force to devise solutions that can be quickly implemented in Raleigh
10 Ways Raleigh Can Encourage Housing Affordability
“My goal is to make Raleigh an inclusive, welcoming city for all of our residents, a place where our children can afford to live, and a leader in innovative housing solutions.”
Cities throughout the country are struggling with the issue of housing affordability. In Raleigh, only single-family homes are allowed to be built in 80 percent of the city, reducing housing stock and housing choices. This is a complex issue and there is no silver bullet. But if we do ALLof the items below, we can make progress. One thing is certain – we cannot buy our way out of this crisis. We need strong policies, planning and partnerships to advance. As your mayor, I will propose the following:
- We educate, collaborate, and lead. Local elected officials must have the political will to act on the policy issues below – many of which DO NOT require the use of taxpayer dollars. And residents need to understand what’s at stake if we don’t act with urgency.
- Allow Accessory Dwelling Units by right in all residential housing districts. This would allow families to care for aging parents, house boomerang kids or rent property, building wealth. The city also benefits by increased property values.
- Encourage the construction of “missing middle” housing – townhomes, condominiums, duplexes, triplexes and quads – in residential districts. Four, 1,200 square foot condos located in one building look a lot like a larger home.
- Remove impediments to building cottage courts and tiny home communities. And while we’re at it, allow flag lots – which permit two homes on deep lots.
- Reduce minimum lot sizes and minimum parking requirements. Our current lot minimums actually encourage the construction of McMansions. And if we reduce minimum parking requirements, it will reduce the cost of housing.
- Work collaboratively with Wake County and Wake County Public Schools to identify underutilized properties that can be developed for affordable housing. Could we build a “teacher’s village” adjacent to a school? Transform an aging building into housing for homeless vets or women with children? Work with health care systems to create workforce housing?
- Upzone for density in transit corridors, especially Bus Rapid Transit corridors as well as heavy use transit and automobile corridors.
- Incentivize private developers to build workforce and TOD housing. Some ideas include land swaps, gap funding or grants, expedited approvals, a reduction in impact fees, the use of TIF financing, or the creation of municipal service districts. Let’s establish a committee of industry leaders to help define what is possible.
- Partner with land trusts to provide long-term housing affordability and assist in land banking properties for affordable housing purposes.
- Create a well-crafted affordable housing bond to support the above policies. To be effective, we must seek public input, secure partners to advocate for its passage, and conduct polling to determine a dollar amount that the public will support. (Similar to the creation of the Wake Transit Plan). Funding priorities will be established during the public input process.
I didn’t see a section of her campaign site dedicated to issues or policies, but will update if it is added.
I’m still confused why this is so difficult to grasp for many in our local Government. We aren’t building fast enough to meet demand, so the tide rises across the board. Detroit has numerous “luxury” condos and apartments, but once people began fleeing the city ALL the prices dropped, because there were drastically less people in the market.
https://www.newsobserver.com/news/business/article231113598.html
“Sandman said that his group wanted to build a condo building instead of apartments because there was nothing inside the Beltline at this price point”
-Weird, a developer decided this on their own without pressure from the city because they saw a need in the market, weird indeed.
Because the places where the housing wants to go is in or near established neighborhoods with a lot of political power who don’t want the new housing to be near them.
I saw this article posted on the /r/urbanplanning subreddit too. I’m not an expert, but people don’t seem to have a favorable opinion of the author’s methods over there.
And in his best case scenario, for every 100 high-end housing units constructed, about 32 affordable units are freed up over a span of 10 years.
Accounting for possibilities like units sitting vacant, out-of-town movers filling the units, or units being used as second homes/pied-a-terres/safe deposit boxes in the sky, Mast’s model still indicates that for every 100 new market-rate units built, approximately 65 equivalent units are created by movers vacating existing units. If the migration chain is as robust as this paper finds it to be, as much as half of theses newly vacated units could be in low- and moderate-income neighborhoods.
I certainly think that encouraging more (and denser) building is the way to go for many reasons, but the building of new luxury housing exclusively is not likely to solve the problem by itself. I wonder why that is the only demand that seems to be being met by the market?
There have been many, many studies and stories over that last several years that shows creation of supply stems the rise of values compared to constricted growth cities where prices are rising more rapidly. Clearly there will be some outliers like Miami where international investors are parking their money to protect it from some out of control regimes or catastrophic economic conditions in the their cities/countries.
Because the only builders building residential in urban areas are smaller companies with less economies of scale, higher labor expenses, higher land costs, more permit fees, and higher building standards (typically, compared to tract builders). You can buy a $200,000 brand new house, but it’s going to be on previous farmland built by a tract builder who is not looking at profit per house, but rather profit per development. That same house built on an expensive infill lot would be $500k, and at that point you might as well upgrade all the finishes and charge $650k marketed as luxury housing.
This is a post from Smok(e)y Hollar that I put there by accident, lol.
Certainly many large urban areas (NYC, Chic) have torn down a number of high rise public housing units that had just become crime infested nightmares for the families living there. “Warehousing” the poor is not a good solution. The push for the less dense housing was, I believe, an effort to create housing and homes that were more familiar to most folks. Less density, better for knowing your neighbors and more pride of place leading to less crime and more success in education and economic advancement. But as is so often the case, there isn’t a “one size fits all” solution here. While I think the idea behind the new Chavis Heights was good, clearly there are to many parking spots and not enough density for a place so close to downtown. My belief is the solution will be found in the middle, a mix of higher rises - 4 & 5 stories - with townhomes and even single story buildings, at least as far as public housing goes.
How to get private developers building entry-level and affordable homes is a more difficult question. Cutting red tape and allowing for greater density is one part of the answer. So is new building techniques. CNBC did a story on Clayton Homes - I believe a NC company but now owned by Berkshire Hathaway - famous for mobile homes, bringing their prefabrication process to housing. The FHA is now going to finance these “pre-fab” houses, a change because their manufacturing style is so close to a trailer. That might help nationally solve part of the low-cost housing crisis. For many cities that will require a change in zoning laws.
One thing that was a major factor in the construction of Chavis and Walnut Terrace is that as you know Raleigh was a very different place back then. There wasn’t the downtown living, nightlife, “daylife” like there is now and Raleigh politicians lacked the foresight to envision what downtown would really become or how quickly. There certainly could have been a better mix of buildings.
Maybe one thing that the city can do to address affordable housing is to re-evaluate their current portfolio of subsidized housing that’s suburban and replace it? I don’t know enough about policy or how these things are done, but I can imagine them partnering with a developer and making agreements about affordable housing as a percentage of the overall development based on a below market price for the land. Just look at how much housing opportunity is being left on the table at Heritage Park with its 2-story building, suburban site plan, and don’t get me started (again) about the 27 acre Walnut Terrace project that was more recently built. There could have been hundreds and hundreds of affordable housing units on a site that large, in addition to hundreds of market rate units and a mixed use of retail and services. Instead, we have a two-story suburban style project that’s better fitted for Garner. IMO, that’s the biggest development “crime” committed downtown in recent memory.
Capital Park (north of Peace U) is similar, but at least its site plan is way more efficient use of land. Even then, Capital Park’s site plan isn’t as efficient as the market rate housing to the north of Cedar St. What gives on such poor land use decision making near the very core of the city where the land is the most expensive?
@John thank you for examples of them not doing their job and trying to force Developers to do it for them.
This all is a real real shame. I’m really sad to hear about this. If the council continues to make decisions that are anti development I know I’ll be leaving, along with a lot of my peers.
You’re welcome! If you are an urbanophile, and want to be triggered, just take a stroll through the entire Walnut Terrace site (either live or by Google Maps) and your blood pressure will surely rise.