Property taxes kill the middle class and sales taxes kill local retail at the benefit of online retailers. Shift the burden to a municipal income tax.
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But don’t forget those same neighborhoods were mostly white first so claiming “black & brown” people are the only people who ever lived in these neighborhoods is a bit misleading.
We live in a market driven, capitalist society. That is how free markets work sometimes.
Using the rationale some are trying to put forward I should be able to say I should not have to pay higher property taxes because wealthier people have bought properties all around me thereby driving up my tax bill…
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Using the rationale some are trying to put forward I should be able to say I should not have to pay higher property taxes because wealthier people have bought properties all around me thereby driving up my tax bill…
I mostly agree with this but I see a difference here.
In one scenario, you might have a neighborhood that has been mostly white for the last 100 years. Pick one family, the relatively poorest compared to their neighbors, if everyone around them over time built larger homes and everyone’s property went up in value, I can’t be convinced that this poorer family gets a tax relief due to the value that was given to them with their property value increase. The system benefits them.
In another scenario, you might have a neighborhood that has been mostly black for the last 100 years. Pick one family, the relatively poorest compared to their neighbors, if everyone around them over time built larger homes and everyone’s property went up in value, I CAN be convinced that this poorer family gets a tax relief. Why? In short, the system did not benefit them over time.
- This family, for the last 100 years, was probably restricted from buying into other neighborhoods, probably in the neighborhood I mention in scenario 1. They couldn’t “move up”.
- This family, for the last 100 years, has probably NOT realized land value gains probably because the neighborhood was predominantly black (AKA racist real estate policies or redlining)
- There are more including inadequate access to school, transportation, and health care.
I acknowledge this history and believe it has played an impact on the city we’re building today. Am I strongly advocating for it? Maybe but I can START with the conversation and can be convinced (scenario 2) versus a situation in scenario 1. When you layer it with history, I think the conversation gets more nuanced.
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“The last 100 years” is misleading.
It’s not the most recent 50 of the last 100 years that all this redlining stuff has been happening.
Portraying it this way that for “the last 100 years” something heinous has been happening to certain populations of people makes it sound like its something that now needs to be changed or stopped. Illegal racist redlining HAS stopped DECADES ago when it was outawed 50 years ago. But real estate individuals (like all individuals) will continue to have individual opinions and behaviors that are inappropriate or with whom we disagree. Those same people are merchants, employers, customers, etc. They require individual decisions of how we’ll choose to interact with them.
When people’s rent or tax or whatever goes up, if they can’t afford it, they move elsewhere. They may need a different mode of transportation or a different job due to the move. It doesn’t mean some entity ought to pay people because they’ve been inconvenienced for the hassle. Life is full of changes.
Its up to us individually to make decisions to adapt and yes, sometimes move, when circumstances favor that as the best way to get ahead or make ends meet.
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Just to level set, I am mostly with you and @UncleJesse . That’s why I said, I CAN be convinced. As in, there is some argument there in my opinion. The steps forward depend on if our city wants to address those injustices done in the past. Right now, it seems we haven’t figured it out yet.
I also don’t think that just because redlining was outlawed in the 1970s (?) that we now say all is equal. A metaphor I really like is one that involves, a white guy and black guy starting to run a marathon. The black guy had a 50-pound rock tied to his back. (redlined) Later in the race, when we removed the rock, now everyone thinks it’s fair.
Anyway, I’ll just leave it at that and check out. In my opinion, there’s an argument here for some help.
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I think there is an argument for providing some stability for people in very historically redline and underinvested in neighborhoods. That is maybe 3 or 4 neighborhoods in Raleigh and a subset of the residents in those neighborhoods. Over time the neighborhood will still change and new homes will still increase in value. A subset of people will be able to keep living their older years with fixed incomes there and sell or move on eventually which would close out this policy.
I think bringing some tax stability to that subset of residents would be a good thing.
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I agree with this statement wholeheartedly, but I also think the idea of people being taxed out of their homes is not the larger problem. It’s renters being priced out of their homes as the homes change hands beneath them. In my neighborhood as an example average rents have gone up over 100% since 2015–far more than the tax paid by the few remaining long-term owners. Indeed the tax valuations in this neighborhood have fluctuated even as the market value has trended inexorably upwards, a product I personally (though without evidence) believe is a simple matter of which appraiser comes through the neighborhood and how they feel about black and brown people.
As is so often the case it really is the renters who are getting screwed, much moreso than the legacy owners. Again, as I said I agree that protecting the ability of elderly owners to stay in their homes is desirable, I just don’t think it’s a solution that addresses the larger problem in these neighborhoods. What would? I don’t know. I don’t know if there is one at all, or if we as a city even have a unified view on what that problem is. Does Rochester Heights need to remain a primarily Black neighborhood because that’s what it was intend to be when platted in 1959? Is that even legal? (Pretty sure the answer is no.) Could public ownership of new mixed-income housing be a solution, and we let legacy neighborhoods just respond to the market? (I think so, but public ownership is probably not politically feasible.) I don’t know. As is so often the case I think making housing available to all sectors is going to require a lot of different small solutions, none of which will make everyone happy, and at least some of which will really piss some people off. And there’s never any political will anymore to support anything that will piss off anyone, unless of course there’s no way the thing you’re supporting will actually happen.
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I saw an email from Southeast Raleigh Promise that mentioned this WRAL article about housing market changes around downtown and was suprised I had not heard about it on social media. Not really sure if Gentrification was the right thread for this, but for a local news station I thought it was fairly well done. I will say that Deborah who speaks from Longview Garden is someone I know and say hi to. We have a funny story about the time I was running to catch the bus and tripped/face planted in front of her house. So I was like, what about me? When she said the new people ignore her. Haha. They also cut from that/my neighborhood to an area 2 miles away like they are the same area which I thought was a big stretch. WRAL Documentary: Home Economics :: WRAL.com
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This video by Vox talks about new housing construction in a way that I feel goes over a lot of peoples heads. New housing should always be welcome, especially when it comes to multi-family.
Also interestingly talks about how NIMBYs use the guise of gentrification and displacement as a means to keep SFH neighborhoods exclusive.
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Nice. This reminds me of the study that was completed a few years ago comparing two similar neighborhoods over several years. One would receive a luxury condo development priced way above market rate, and the other did not receive any new units in the same time span (I think I’m remembering this correctly). Median rent rose faster in the “no units” group than the “new luxury units” group.
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Yep. Supply and demand, baby. Building new luxury housing reduces the number of folks descending on low-income neighborhoods to flip housing. In a growing city, the wealthy are coming regardless, so either you build housing for them, or they’ll take it from somebody else.
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The video references an organization called ‘Livable California’. That sounds familiar. 
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Livable California is the OG for what Livable Raleigh does. They fight things on a State level.
What I think is tough is that the effect is essentially slowing down a rise. People can’t see that prices would be higher in a world without new building because we can’t live in two realities at once lol. So I think a lot of people would want to see prices literally fall to believe new buildings made a difference. In Raleigh we have lots of higher income people moving here and housing is not keeping up, so it would be really hard for a new building to literally reduce prices. I do 100% think they keep prices from being as high as they could be though.
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For sure. Just frustrating that some people seem to be incapable of using the slightest bit of reasoning on this subject. It’s not a difficult thing to conclude if you give it just a little bit of thought.
That being said, I think some NIMBYs actually know exactly what they’re doing; they just like seeing the value of their property go up and don’t really care about the impact that has on others. “I was here first, so I deserve this.” Sucks seeing them rope less-informed people into the same rhetoric for their own benefit.
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While I agree that building new housing for luxury budget buyers because they are coming one way or the other is a sound strategy, I think it can’t be ignored that Raleigh’s gentrifying sfh neighborhoods are too close to the city center to successfully thwart gentrification in them by that strategy alone. There will always be deep pockets willing to obtain a single family residence that’s literally walking distance to downtown. A lot of cities can’t offer that to its citizens like Raleigh can on nearly all sides of its core. It’s a best of both worlds sort of scenario that is too tempting for the market itself to resist. I even suspect significant displacement in places like Boylan Heights that are poised to go through another round of gentrification as longer term residents die off and yield to the next generation of even wealthier buyers.
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Agreed. There will always be a demand for SFH housing near downtown despite how impractical it is from a city planning standpoint. I should clarify that I don’t think luxury housing is a silver bullet, but I do think it helps lessen the blow a bit.
My main frustration, and nearly all of us have expressed this in one way or another, is that these NIMBY groups turn the existence of mixed-use 5-over-1s into this gentrification scapegoat to distract from the fact that we ultimately just need to keep building denser housing if we’re going to make any form of progress in managing a housing crisis. A majority of people want to live near downtown; that’s why downtowns exist in the first place. If we want everyone to have that opportunity, then we need to increase supply.
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Frustratingly, our “inexpensive” 5over1 buildings are anything but inexpensive on the market.
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Not inexpensive now but this is a result of this type of denser housing being prevented from being built in prior decades. The 5x1s that are expensive today will become less inexpensive than new complexes as years pass. The problem is this is all new housing. Have it build it for the future.
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Sorry if it’s already on here, but has anyone already found a legible HOLC map of downtown Raleigh?