The Orange County Affordable Housing Coalition hosted their first Affordable Housing Summit last Friday to bring together elected officials, government staff, community organizations and the public to have a conversation about affordable housing development in the county.

Carrboro Mayor Lydia Lavelle called the summit informational and interactive and said she thinks it could start to occur on a regular basis.

“I bet there were a couple of hundred people there. When I looked around the room, I saw folks – not just elected officials – but people who work with affordable housing organizations, persons who live in affordable housing, staff members of municipalities and governmental agencies were there,” said Lavelle.

According to Lavelle, one of the most helpful parts of the conference was a powerpoint presentation that was full of statistics and a summary of challenges and plans to address them.

“The challenges are how overwhelming, really, the problem is,” Lavelle said. “It was really startling almost to find out that the very lowest group isn’t really being addressed in our county, the 30 to 80 percent is where we’ve been doing, most of our efforts have been most successful in the county by way of certainly rental and some degree of affordable hosing ownership, so that was one startling thing.

“Some of the slides illuminated the despair and impact on African Americans and how clearly also a racial divide in terms of these inequities and so some discussion of that.”

Other issues mentioned at the conference were landowners tearing down old housing and replacing it with apartments and living spaces that are not affordable and landlords hiking up rent prices and renting to college students in the area.

Lavelle says that while there is limited local authority, certain land use ordinances in Carrboro are being looked at for possible amendments to allow for more affordable housing opportunities such as tiny homes.

According to Lavelle, representatives from the Lloyd-Broad neighborhood in Carrboro talked to the town’s Board of Aldermen in February requesting for them to pass certain home-occupancy ordinances.

“One of the big topics there has to do with occupancy. There’s at least one house, and perhaps more coming, which is what we’re trying to stop, that is really out of character with the neighborhood, that appears to be able to house five-plus occupants, almost like a dorm of sort, and that’s something that we could try to attempt to regulate in some way with an occupancy type limit such as Chapel Hill has,” Lavelle said. The Chapel Hill ordinance limits more than four unrelated occupants living in one home.

Other neighborhood concerns mentioned at the meeting or the Lloyd-Broad neighborhood were size compatibility for zoning standards and a lack of room for parking.

Lavelle said that Carrboro’s Affordable Housing Task Force report initiatives are being worked on by staff and a new commission of citizens who continue to give feedback to revise policies, including the possibility of waiving certain fees for affordable housing builders in Carrboro.

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