I agree that increasing the number of subsidized units is not going to solve the problem of housing affordability by itself. Like you said, this is a complex issue that’s really about economic mobility crossed with market and policy failures.
(I’m also not particularly opinionated on inclusionary zoning. It sounded interesting to me mainly because I’m from Chapel Hill so the link I posted earlier just came to mind, but the literature for that doesn’t seem to be too conclusive so I’m definitely open to thinking about other policy spaces)
I think robust affordable housing needs to be one part of a broader wave of improvements like raising the minimum wage (like cities like Seattle have done; North Carolina doesn’t allow at a local level, but there’s a push to change that) or ensuring that the city’s new community engagement processes actually work like they’re supposed to. The only way to truly minimize the need for affordable housing is to enable more people to afford market-rate houses, and the only way to get people to buy into that narrative is to properly communicate it.
After all, if you’re going to control changes to a complex system*, your solution needs to work as a complex system too.
*: I mean “complex” in the systems theory way like the Butterfly Effect, and not as a synonym to “complicated”
Going back to how to make Heritage Park’s renovation work: I feel like the sketch you drew out is hard to build in a phased approach while displacing as few people as possible (i.e. the rules Raleigh Housing Authority is setting for itself), but I do like the idea of using surface-level parking as a placeholder for denser developments!
Can’t we just have the redeveloped buildings be mixed-use, then? If the cost of heavy-duty structures is preventing the number of units the city could get, I’m struggling to understand why we can’t take advantage of other potential revenue sources. Like @orulz said, for example, we could lease out spaces in new buildings to commercial or office uses, and use the profits to supplement affordable housing-specific revenues. This would be separate from what @bartonfj said in the paragraph above my quote since you’re not transferring functional land ownership; the Housing Authority truly acts like the landlord, with private businesses as benevolent tenants.
Good example of the criticism that will face anyone redoing Heritage Park with more density and mixed use. Redirecting...
edit: the first part of their post is about something Bufkin said that lots of social media is reacting to this morning. I was sharing this more for the end which is about Heritage Park.
I’m not sure if you can have the city build a parking deck next door and then have the developer submit a project for tax credits at a lower per-unit cost.
Isn’t this similar to what Durham is doing? See the summary for the 300 and 500 blocks of affordable housing on E Main – over 300 units in two buildings wrapped around county-owned structured parking. One building includes a daycare; the other includes retail and market-rate housing alongside the affordable units.
Financing for the affordable housing developments should include 4% low-income housing tax credits. Durham County is willing to serve as the issuer of tax-exempt bonds.
• The bond is sized at 50% of the aggregate basis and the County assists, in the form of a grant, with any gap between a permanent loan and the bond proceeds.
• The Durham Housing Authority (DHA) is currently undergoing Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) conversions in downtown Durham. RAD Project-Based Vouchers (PBV) are applied to the 1- and 2-bedroom units set aside at 30% AMI. Coordination with DHA, however, will be required to secure the RAD vouchers and is contingent on the timing of DHA’s projects.
• Durham County intends to maintain the long-term affordability of the affordable housing pads. The parcels used for affordable housing are ground leased to the developer at a nominal cost. Terms will dictate the period of affordability and conditions of sale. • Parking for the affordable housing will be financed and operated by Durham County at low or no cost to the developer. Developers are expected to comply with parking requirements set by the North Carolina Housing Finance Agency’s (NCHFA) Qualified Allocation Plan (QAP). However, due to the urban location of this site, developers are expected to negotiate a parking reduction with NCHFA, as allowed in recent versions of the QAP.
The developer will lease parking spaces from the County for the market-rate units. There’s a 40 year deed restriction on both properties ensuring the units remain affordable for a long time. If the city were to partner with a private developer, they could require things like this as part of the transaction.
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…
…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)?
I also found this just-released white paper about housing affordability from the Dix Edge study, and it included several comments that are relevant for what we’re talking about here.
Doesn’t look like it’s getting a ton of traffic. Maybe they shouldn’t have lead with the anti-racist accusations, instead focused on blufkins policy and how it affects low income and people of color residents in the city. Maybe one day Americans will realize that it’s best not to make enemies with the people that have the power to make the change you want to see
Heritage Park → “Low wealth naturally occurring affordable public housing”
That’s been a below-market public housing development since day one dude. Not “naturally occuring” in any way.
All this message does is attempt to weave a tangled web of confusion and fear.
Let’s take these scenarios:
RHA and Raleigh build 400 affordable units there as a 100% publicly financed, 100% public housing development in a suburban, moderate density, low rise, surface parked complex
RHA brings in a private developer as a partner who plans to build 1000 market rate units. The denser form factor means the same amount of public funding from scenario 1 will only build 300 units, but the developer’s payment to RHA provides enough money to build another 200 PH units of equivalent size and affordability.
Scenario 1 yields 400 affordable units. Scenario 2 yields 500 affordable and 1000 market rate units. 500 is better than 400, and the 1000 market rate units help to reduce gentrification pressure elsewhere, in the real naturally occurring affordable neighborhoods, no?
There have also been studies about how interspersing affordable housing throughout market rate housing is important especially when it comes to success factors for the children that grew up in those areas. I forget the exact study, but there was a really interesting TED talk on it that has always stuck with me. I’ll see if I can dig it out of the archives…
It seems what they’re missing is that a big boost in density allows both (a lot) more affordable housing AND introduction of market rate housing, to turn it into a mixed-income complex which (as you point out) can often yield better outcomes even for low income residents. They don’t seem to grasp the scale of development that this massive 12+ acre hunk of downtown land can support.
The land Heritage Park sits on would be REALLY VALUABLE if it were for sale!
Just selling it and using the proceeds to build AH elsewhere would probably yield the most affordable units, but assuming that’s off the table (which I agree with), some possible responses when one acknowledges this fact are:
Let’s keep it basically like it is forever to really stick a finger in the eye of those awful developers and the real estate industry!
Let’s leverage that value in whatever way necessary and redevelop it into the most affordable housing possible, in the best configuration possible.
That Facebook post is clearly calling for option 1.
Yep - and combining it with market rate housing would encourage this not to be turned into what people consider ‘projects’ and an area to stay away from.
You’re ultimately hitting the nail on the head with response 1. Some people (including the Wake Housing Justice Coalition) are using the concern of affordability/displacement/gentrification as a concern-trolling shield for their actual end goal, which is completely anti-capitalist and has a lot more to do with making sure the Kanes of the world don’t get their next money-printer. This is why they were also against the very generous affordable housing referendum. If they actually did care about affordability/displacement/gentrification, response 2 is the correct way to go: leverage any tool in your toolbox to get the most units built possible to house those in need. If a developer makes some money off of it, so be it, at least make them give you some of the eggs from their new golden goose.
This is to say nothing of the NIMBYs who are just pure NIMBYs looking out for number one (“Livable” Raleigh chief amongst them).
I’m not a fan of the suburban layout but even if they kept the general site plan the same and added some height to the apartment buildings for more density would be a huge win. Something like this basically only changes the buildings along South St.
I am kind of curious about this topic since it is being discussed more and more in development and local government. Could you share any links of articles or examples where low income high rises have failed?
As Boltman mentioned above, there was Cabrini-Green in Chicago. There was also Pruitt Igoe in Saint Louis. These projects were built under the ideals of modernism and were meant to be nice modern housing for lower income families to move them out of the slums. However, they were poorly built and became slums themselves. Eventually, they were imploded.
Here is link to an article about them: https://www.arch2o.com/unsuccessful-public-housing/.
Now, that’s not to say that high density developments cannot work if done right. I just believe that cities have shied away from them since these failures.
Isn’t there some sort of theory about height, rather than density, being a big part of the issue? I know for all those late 50’s/early 60’s public housing projects were set in a fair bit of green space, but they were multi-story and lead to feelings of dislocation and isolation. The areas then descended into crime-ridden chaos, which is certainly not fair for the people living there.
I’m sure height is a major factor. Also, the fact that they were all rentals. The people didn’t feel invested in the units. So, as they were poorly maintained and deteriorated, the residents didn’t care what they did to the units.
I don’t think the height was the predominant reason they failed, although it probably didn’t help. In Pruitt-Igoe, at least, the project was set up such that rents went toward covering maintenance of the complex. But because people were paying affordable rents, it wasn’t enough to cover expenses. This led to things not getting replaced, and making the problem worse and worse over time. People stopped caring, moved out, and this only furthered the decline. It turned into a really unsafe place to live. As @ADUsSomeday says, “The Pruitt-Igoe Myth” is a great movie to watch if you’re curious on learning more.
This conversation should probably be moved to the affordable housing thread @dtraleigh, but I was also going to recommend The Pruitt-Igoe Myth as a starting point. One of the central points of the documentary is that the public perception/stigma against modernist housing projects is grossly reductive, and hardly representative of why Pruitt-Igo actually failed. It’s a fantastic exploration of policy, urban decline, economics, and social factors that challenged mid-century housing projects.
Remember that many of these projects uprooted thousands of people from their established communities and plonked them down on massive swaths of new land that was disconnected from jobs and social resources. This happened during the height of white flight and urban decline, when people were fleeing cities for the suburbs. For that reason, many of the towers had insanely high unanticipated vacancies. And while their construction was subsidized, their upkeep wasn’t, meaning high vacancies led to less money for maintenance, which eventually led to slum-like conditions.
The idea that high-rise public housing is unlivable can perhaps be traced back to academic discourse in the 70s. Oscar Newman’s famous “Defensible Space” strongly influenced policy at HUD and other public housing agencies. In it, he maligned housing towers, and The New York times summarized some of his findings in this article, with the telling headline: “High Rise = High Crime.” Throughout the 70s and 80s, this came to be a common position. The HUD secretary at the time once remarked, “the history is clear that the high-rises don’t work, and we have to replace them.”
However, the dominant position has really evolved since then. Scholars have critiqued Newman’s methodology. There’s recognition that from high-rise to garden apartment to walk-ups, there is a huge variety of success/failure.
And, above and beyond all of this, there’s increasing discourse about the idea that we might all be putting far too much emphasis on the impact of spatial configuration on poverty anyway. Spatial determinism, as it’s called, is just a distraction. Here’s a really great short read if that idea interests you.
Click to read some interesting excerpts.
Poverty is not a function of the spatial configuration of poverty. The concentration of poor people
in geographic space may well make the experience of poverty worse for some, and it certainly seems to lead to unjust outcomes such as poor quality services, schools, and amenities. But the root causes of poverty within capitalism are the organization of labor markets (and the structure and character of the demand for labor in those markets) and the centrality of wage labor to household income and wealth. Efforts to deal with poverty must, on some level, deal with this reality.
Besides trying to deal with poverty in a roundabout and theoretically and empirically dubious way, space as the solution is a problem. And just as mixed-income housing policy is repeating the story(doing housing policy for reasons other than housing), so too is it mimicking the history of urban planning; a history that is littered with efforts to solve social problems by using a rearranged spatial form. Spatial determinism has been nearly endemic in planning. Ebenezer Howard, one of the definitive figures in the history of urban planning (whose influence is acknowledged by Jim Fraser, Deirdre Oakley, and Diane K. Levy in the introduction to this Cityscape symposium) began this process. His anarchist-inspired, revolutionary book To-Morrow: The Peaceful Path to Real Reform was about how to fundamentally transform the brutal living conditions for working-class people in late-19th-century England without violent revolution (Howard, 1898). It was rebranded a few years after its initial publication into Garden Cities of Tomorrow, and instead of real social reform, we got spatial changes and, ultimately, garden suburbs for rich people. This spatial determinism continued with the Le Corbusier modernist work that inspired so much of postwar public housing construction; thus the machine for living became the towers in parks and all that. Finally, the current moment has given us the new urbanist designs that will purportedly solve so many ecological, political, and social problems (and have been so central to so much of the HOPE VI—or Housing Opportunities for People Everywhere—housing that has been constructed).
We have seen this movie before; several times. We know how it ends. Spoiler alert: it ends with people a few decades from now deciding on a different spatial solution. They will then ridicule the old solutions, because all good Utopian thinking requires a rejection of what came before. Then they will not actually deal with the social problems. I am being glib here, but the idea that the way to deal with poverty or race or class relations is through a different demographic map and different design is one that really is remarkably similar to so many solutions in the past—solutions that have simply failed to achieve their stated goals.
