@evan.j.bost I appreciate your consideration of what I said and your fair response.
We do desperately need more housing, however, we have needed it for quite some time. It has not just happened that the council(s) have seen the need, however, they did not deal with it when it was for poor people who needed affordable housing. Developers haven’t done it either because it isn’t profitable. The new residences need to take that into account and the precedent that this particular development will set without having to have affordable housing (even though there are incentives to do so) don’t bode well for those who truly need housing and can’t afford it elsewhere.
New housing construction lowers the price of housing, even for those who can’t afford the new units.
Transportation cost is a huge unsung factor of housing. It’s becoming more obvious with gas at nearly $5/gal. Building housing next to BRT line further lowers the total cost of ownership. The “drive til you qualify” mindset is harmful to society for a multitude of reasons, including carbon footprint, safety, and cardiovascular health.
Just throwing out ideas that need to be a part of every conversation regarding new dense housing near transit and within walking distance to urban centers.
i lived on clarendon crescent in longview in the 80s. it was a .5 mile walk on a pleasant neighborhood st ( often seeing neighbors in their yards) to new bern ave for groceries or pizza or pharmaceuticals.
many acre or near acre lots are in that area. i cant imagine much BRT usage from that area and the density required along new bern nearby would seem to have to be great indeed and likely far off to me to jusitfy dedicated BRT as opposed to just more regular bus service and safer bike lanes east to Downtown or west to ‘tower shopping center’.
i and my family wasn’t nimby and really stil arent until government housing and gunshots and crime entered dead-end wexford drive in Raleigh in the late 70s in south raleigh. what was a quiet dead end st became noticeably more unpleasant. when it happens you bemoan it and if you can leave you do. it IS what happened. now before you call those early peeps as SFH zombies, disconnected from soulful urban life, wexford was on a steep hill and when the snow allowed nearly everyone on the street would come out at night to the top with hot chocolate and a bonfire and the kids and adults would sled…so disconnected i suppose. i expect if the type of density that is at issue isnt just a few extra stories nearby but just what type of density is occurring. quail corners years back in raleigh was a lot of IBMers. it was bordered by a few blocks on fall of neuse road buy reasonable apartment complexes and non-fancy shopping center at eastgate sc and had a cat bus running through it. no great nimby issue that i recall.
Saw this quote in a tweet this morning. Very relevant to what you’re talking about here.
When people at higher income levels can’t find housing, they move into lower-income neighborhoods.
The only way to prevent this is to increase supply.
Like it or not, we’re a supply and demand economy. We’ve seen the price of used cars skyrocket over the past year because supply chain issues slowed the production of new cars. We saw the price of masks and hand sanitizer skyrocket at the beginning of the pandemic because folks flooded grocery stores and pharmacies and wiped out the stock.
Housing is no different. If we keep blocking development until we get the “right” development that has the “right” percentage of affordable housing at the “right” price, we’re not going to build enough housing to meet demand, and the hundreds of people moving to this area every month are going to keep buying flipped single family homes that were once considered naturally affordable.
The City has been working hard to improve their options for developing affordable housing. I personally think the TOD height incentives are a brilliant piece of that puzzle. But these things aren’t instantaneous, and if the council instead opted to block every single development that didn’t have an affordable housing component while working on these text changes, we barely would have built anything, and dang near every single property in lower-income areas would have flipped by now.
When governing a region with a growth rate as intense as ours, you have use every tool at your disposal. You have to build more market-rate housing, you have to purchase property to set aside for affordable housing, and you have to provide incentives for developers to create their own affordable housing. All of these are proven methods for increasing supply and affordability, so why would you not do all of them simultaneously?
Supply and demand. That’s where we’re at, it’s what we have to work with, and we have to respond accordingly.
I think you’re coming to this group with good faith so I’d like to respond in good faith. Others already have but I feel the need to add to it. Hope you don’t think we’re ganging up because that’s not the intent.
I completely understand the concerns about the gentrification, or reinvestment, depending on what term you like to use, of this area. We see it ourselves and we know that it often leaves longtime residents behind. However, when proposals like this one are denied, all it ends up doing is increasing peripheral pressure on every surrounding lot in the neighborhood. One-for-one teardowns are a perfect example, and a clear indication in real time of a neighborhood that is becoming less affordable while also not building any additional housing units. If supply stays the same, so will demand.
While $200-$250k isn’t something everyone can afford, that would represent the most affordable housing option in this neighborhood by a third, if Zillow is correct. It also would directly appeal to service workers through both 1) not needing excess space and 2) being on the highest-capacity transit investment the city of Raleigh has ever seen. If we don’t reduce parking requirements/needs in a place like this, where can we? How can we incentivize using the major transit investments that our (regressive btw) sales taxes pay for when we make car ownership and storage so important that we’re willing to kill additional residential units during a housing crisis over it?
We do need new housing at all price points, especially deeply affordable housing. I would be thrilled if we could build public housing anywhere at anytime (and in fact, I sometimes refer to myself as a PHIMBY…Public Housing in My Backyard). However, every single new additional unit of housing built will lessen the pressure facing the deeply affordable units elsewhere in this neighborhood. Many of these types of developments lining New Bern Ave. could be what saves Poole Rd., or Hargett St., or Oakwood Ave. Saying “we can’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” isn’t always applicable, but it certainly is here.
i wasnt sure about this but i recall on here that the hyatt behind bahama breeze on falls of neuse was closing and going to be turned into some type of residential housing? curious, i was wondering if any large metro had done something similar as far as buying some land or hotel and offered it for first housing for police or firefighters etc so as to prevent excessive commutes?
Affordable housing is great, but there needs to be a balance. As far as I can tell, private developers agreeing to include ‘affordable housing’ within a development shift the cost burden to those that can pay. This in turn lifts up the unit cost and folds into price per sqft, further increasing the demand for affordable housing. It can be an ugly cycle that is very synonyms with development impact fees that aren’t favored in NC. It’s a truly difficult situation, because continued price increases will begin to include more folks looking for that ‘affordable’ housing - and the cycle continues.
So all this talk about affordable housing and opposing displacement is great, but I think what’s missing here is the connection between what you’ve been doing and actually creating affordable housing.
You’ve said that you opposed the development because it wasn’t affordable enough, but the development wasn’t up for public hearing, the zoning was. The development hasn’t been stopped, they’re likely just going back to the drawing board to build something within the current entitlement which requires exactly no affordable units and no parking spaces. In fact, because they’ll probably have to build fewer units, they will likely be larger and less affordable than the what the developer had proposed.
Micro-units were probably the most affordable possibility for this site, without significant public investment which as far as I know was never on the table, and so what you’ve accomplished is to get them scrapped in favor of less affordable condos/townhomes/apartments. Congratulations I guess?
On a related note, the suburbs of San Francisco have been run by people using the same rhetoric and policy as Livable Raleigh for decades, and all they have to show for it is having become the most expensive place to live in the world. Livable Raleigh has its roots in a “movement” that opposed a grocery store opening outside of one of the wealthiest planned developments in North Raleigh. They claim to stand for equity and fairness, but do you really think that such a group can represent the interests of a neighborhood that has been a food desert for decades? It’s all smoke and mirrors to obscure their anti-housing politics.
…and therein lies the hypocrisy of the “Livable Raleigh” crowd - fight the inevitable just enough to make it worse for everyone so long as it doesn’t change anything significantly for you
Do middle-income people not truly need housing, but only optionally need housing? I thought housing was a basic need that everyone truly needs.
Yes, we need more subsidized housing for the poorest, but that requires operating subsidies that city government cannot afford on its own.
The two are not mutually exclusive. The difference between subsidized housing and unsubsidized (aka market-rate) housing is the subsidy, not the housing.
$10 million piece of land off New Bern Ave near Wake Med now listed as under contract. Any of you internet sleuths know what the plan is for this land?
It’s not the developer’s job to create affordable housing. His job is to make money. If you care about affordable housing then you should encourage the developer to build as many units as possible. Supply<Demand. You’re NEVER going to get your way EVER because there’s just too many people for the amount of land that you’re referring to (that apparently belongs to a certain group of people?). You know that land belonged to someone else before that. And someone else before that.
This 10000000%. In the summarized words of Garner planning staff to a planning board member when asked if a development was going to be affordable: affordable housing is going to have to come from the federal/state government, because there is too little land and too much demand to force a developer to include subsidized housing. The local municipalities don’t have the funds to subsidize these projects. So, no.
Going to push back a little. I agree to an extent, but a community is not obligated to pad a developer’s profit margin. It’s to decide what’s best for the community. If they decide that allowing all high cost development without any chip in towards housing for people that help the community, and then turn around and say ‘whoops’ our land is too expensive now…then they’ve failed. While filtering may (arguably) work to help ease this over time, it’s not and should not be the only tool in the box. It should be pretty obvious to everyone by now that relying on current tax rate and ‘market’ does not make up for this need. I do agree that the push back against this project on New Bern is myopic, but the answer isn’t just the free for all that we’ve accommodated in the past.
NIMBYs always say “the community” should decide. Who is the community exactly and why do they get a say in what gets built?
The “community” is not padding the developers’ pockets because the community is not giving them anything. The person that sold them the land did and made that decision. The seller could have sold it subject to a height limit and chose not to. I’m genuinely curious.
Fair comment, but you know as well as I do that asking a developer to ‘chip in’ is not necessarily putting the burden on the developer. It is a shifting of burden onto those that will pay ‘market rate’ that will increase due to an ask to subsidize. For a rental example: where we might have had $1200/mo rent at market rate we will now have $1500/mo market rate, so that the ‘affordable unit’ price can be decreased. This in itself inflates the market rates that will eventually price those affordable units out. I’m not saying we don’t need affordable housing, but I am saying that we need to be careful with this model of burden shifting.
