I’m agreeing to your suggestion, my overall argument is that we need “affordable housing” developments to be mixed-income. As you suggested, developments that are dense should have affordable and market rate units.
I’m sorry for the confusion. Agreed, this should probably be moved to a different topic.
Not sure if this is the right thread for this, but earlier this week, the Durham city and county (some of their functions and departments are shared across the jurisdictions) reviewed the results of a pilot program on how different parts of local governments could rapidly share information to provide comprehensive social services for “friendly faces” (i.e. chronically homeless people who are ‘friendly faces’ to the police, hospital emergency departments, and/or local shelters) - and how they could pull this off in a way that leads to lasting changes. This is a nationwide series of attempts that Wake County is trying to be a part of, too, though it’s much less mature here.
Durham successfully won a grant to launch a temporary fulltime “familiar neighbors care team”, created protocols to thoroughly pull the “friendly faces” out of their feedback loops, and trained people to do this. This turns out to put us on the cutting edge of research in this field, since:
This is a relatively new strategy that’s shown to be effective but slow to expand
Local government agencies and big hospitals like Duke Health’s have historically been in the business of protecting data instead of sharing 'em - especially if it’s across multiple agencies at once
Best practices are yet to be solidified beyond a few case studies - and it’s not like Wake County is any farther ahead in being innovative in this field
This initial progress report shows what kinds of resources and people are needed (with anecdotes that this could even save taxpayer money in the long term, too, by being more efficient with how social services are directed). And more importantly, it also shows an example of the timeline of one “familiar face” who successfully achieved several milestones to get their life back on track (i.e. hit several “stabilization markers”) over the course of a year by getting this sort of dedicated assistance:
If Durham funds a full, successful test run of this approach, this could also inform how downtown Raleigh could deal with its own homelessness challenges - not just by putting a band aid on it by driving homeless people away, but by getting to the root of the problem and dealing with challenges once and for all. (Plus, industrial design 101 tells us that solving challenges for particularly disadvantaged people should make things easier for everyone else, too!)
The full slide deck is fascinating, if y’all have the time to go through the whole thing:
There was a masterful op-ed in the Indy today:
Here are some key quotes (I hope its okay that I am excerpting this much text…)
Durham City Council member Nate Baker is absolutely right to spotlight Durham’s affordability crisis—one of the defining challenges of our time. But the policies he promotes—rent control, resistance to housing supply reforms he dismisses as “neoliberal,” demanding steep developer concessions and additional discretionary review—may inadvertently worsen the very problem he’s trying to solve. …
When we build at scale, landlords and developers compete for tenants and buyers. When we don’t, residents do—and those with fewer resources lose. That’s why Baker’s frequent “no” votes on new housing matter: however well intentioned, they deepen scarcity and intensify the competition that advantages the wealthy. Want to see what happens when a community chooses that path? Look 30 minutes down the road.
When we build at scale, landlords and developers compete for tenants and buyers. When we don’t, residents do—and those with fewer resources lose. That’s why Baker’s frequent “no” votes on new housing matter: however well intentioned, they deepen scarcity and intensify the competition that advantages the wealthy. Want to see what happens when a community chooses that path? Look 30 minutes down the road. Baker advocates the same approach that helped transform Chapel Hill from an affordable college town into an exclusive enclave.
