If affordable means just marginally lower rents, it shouldn’t be too hard to make that happen in the design decision making. Another way to achieve it could be by reducing the size of each unit, and keep all of the fancy stuff.
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Which one is that? 
Dripping with irony calling David condescending. If you think the politicians in this city were elected to rubber stamp projects like this and not consider AH then I’ve got some bad news for you. And as I’ve posted on the AH thread you follow closely, 80% AMI here is around $52K for 1 60K for 2, not 20K. Although there’s a good argument that the AMI could be a little lower. You treat each project like this as if there’s a few lucky winners, but if you add up all these little allocations then you start to make a dent.
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It’s amazing to me that people are for some of these AH strong armed tactics from the city of Raleigh, even when a lot of them are actually bad AH projects. Just because it is AH doesn’t make it good or right. There is just a better way to get good quality and quantity AH than how Raleigh is currently going about it.
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That’s a big part of the point…
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wow. 47 posts about affordable housing. any hope of getting back on topic?
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Raleigh should be a partner with developers to help get AH built. Not a bully and adversary. They should work with developers and offer certain incentives and encourage the building of AH. Right now the winners are those who don’t ask for a rezoning. The losers are those who ask for a rezoning. And it all seems to be happening just downtown. How much of North Hills has AH? It is so haphazardly done and so strong armed that it is patently unfair to just about everybody.
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It’s not haphazard that it’s in the downtown area, that’s where the services and transit are. And the City IS working with developers to incentivize AH, look at East College Park, Washington Terrace, the area just north of Seaboard, etc. Could they potentially do some more incentive/partnerships with private developers? For sure, hopefully the new council considers that among the other tools mentioned.
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Give a day and I’ll move, bring it back. The fact that AH is a factor on this project keeps it relevant though. (sort of)
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Also having the less desirable views, lower floors, etc…
Open Bizjournals in Chrome, click the article link and once the page just begins to open hit stop loading 
Just saw your post about not wanting to go around pay walls. Disregard
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”And the delay is due to demands by liberal politicians on private developers to have to have non-market rate housing for a select group of citizens. It’s bad policy. It’s mind boggling people expect a 40 story luxury tower (Kane, etc) to have to have affordable units. It’s a luxury tower for pete’s sake!
How many of us on this forum live in downtown? Probably not even 20% us. And if you make just 50K a year, you wouldn’t qualify for one of these subsidized units, but maybe someone making 20K would. So they get to live cheap, right in the finest projects in downtown, but not the rest of us. Wow, that’s really inclusionary!"
(I’m gonna learn how to use appropriate quoting another day.)
I am a liberal and vote for liberal politicians. But I agree with this exact point. I don’t think I’ve seen it written better.
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Durham is building out 2600 AH apartments with market-rate and retail built in as well… And Raleigh can’t even figure out how to get 10 into a building it shouldn’t even be in.
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I mean, a developer could come in and say they want a 500ft landmark full commercial project, and the CC would say, where is the affordable housing.
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Some billionaire should propose a self-financed 70 story building with 5,000 affordable housing studio apartments directly next to boylan heights. Raleigh’s collective head would explode
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Just mouse over/highlight the text you want to quote and a little grey box that says “quote” will pop up. Click that and it replies with the quoted text. 
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Even better, someone could build 5,000 affordable housing as futures. A developer can then buy blocks of debt from the construction of affordable housing to make their luxury development sail through the city planning department faster.
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What’s a mouse? 
I’m usually posting from my phone but I saw the quotes and then realized I was doing it wrong. I’ll practice tomorrow. On the desktop first with your suggestion and then the phone. I know I can do it! 
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I’m no expert, but I saw a lot of criticisms of the methodology behind the “study” that this article summarizes over on reddit.com/r/urbanplanning after it was first published, so I’m not sure I’d put much stock in it. That said, there’s plenty of history supporting the idea that the new (and expensive) units of today will end up being the mid-market units of 2-3 decades from now. It doesn’t solve the problem that exists today, but it helps to keep the the problem from getting worse today, and from being even worse in the future.
I also think there’s an argument to be made that these aren’t even really luxury units the way that most people think of “luxury”, it’s just that they’re marketing them as “exclusive” due to much higher demand than supply because what people are demanding is changing. They’re usually quite small and you hear complaints over and over again about how they look nice when they’re new but all of the fixtures are cheap and plasticky and the cabinet doors start falling off after a year. I’m sure some of the more up-market ones are really premium, but I think that the only luxury that most of them provide is that new condo-smell and the great location and walkability; it just so happens that people are now starting to value location and walkability much more than they used to. So, until the supply catches up with demand (if it ever does, but that will require actually building enough to meet that pent-up demand) they’ll remain much more expensive than they otherwise should or could be. I’m actually quite afraid that as more people buy these “luxury” units, they’ll turn around and strongly oppose any more building because they want to keep demand for their unit high.
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As someone who bought a new “luxury” condo downtown 14 years ago, I don’t agree that luxury condo buyers want to “pull up the ladder” to keep demand high. If anything, new luxury condo projects going up actually pushes the market higher by creating more expensive comps and making my older unit more desirable as a less expensive option.
When I wrote my contract in pre-construction, I was astonished that I was doing so at $233/sf. Today, that’s laughable with new units having higher $/sf prices out by Wake Medical, never mind The Fairweather where they are over $500/sf.
While existing condos will never command the prices that new units can, they aren’t negatively affected by new projects built at an always higher price point, as long as there isn’t an insane oversupply to the market like has happened in places like Las Vegas and Miami. In order for that to take place, there’d have to be an insane amount of supply dumped into the market at this point, and Raleigh just hasn’t ever been that sort of market. You might point to what happened to the condo market after the 2008 financial crash as an example of that occurring in Raleigh, but that was a national anomaly/crisis, not one that was created by what was happening locally.
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