PEACH Apartments for Vulnerable Residents Break Ground in Chapel Hill

 

“Three… two… one… PEACH Apartments!”

Around 100 people gathered on Johnson Street in the Pine Knolls neighborhood in Chapel Hill Tuesday morning, cheering as a dozen local leaders and nonprofit staff shoveled the first dirt of the project.

PEACH stands for Pine Knolls EMPOWERment Affordable Community Housing and is a project of EMPOWERment Inc. — a nonprofit in Chapel Hill that helps find and provide housing while encouraging homeownership for the area’s low-income residents. The ten units of housing will be dedicated to people earning 30 percent or less of the Area Median Income, or AMI.

Tuesday’s celebration highlighted the importance of such housing, with speakers sharing the difficulty of fundraising and coordinating a project by a nonprofit of EMPOWERment’s size and the housing market with as high of demand as Chapel Hill. The nonprofit raised $3.5 million to not only cover construction costs, but to build the project debt-free in order to keep its commitment to tenants of affordable rents.

Before it was set for PEACH, though, 107 Johnson Street was known for being the home to the Pine Knolls Community Center – an independent facility run by Ted Parrish. The main building and playground served as a spot for children to come play and residents of the historically Black neighborhood to meet for years.

EMPOWERment Executive Director Delores Bailey said as time went on, Parrish approached her with a different plan in mind for the property.

“He wanted it to be housing for teachers,” she told Chapelboro, “and the more he talked about it, the more I caught hold to his vision. So we started thinking, ‘okay, we’ll do affordable housing there.’ But then we understood the need – the greatest need – was for those families at 30 percent [AMI] or below. That’s people making minimum wage, $12 an hour… where are they going to live?”

The newer vision was designed by Chapel Hill architect Josh Gurlitz, who described creating such housing for low-income residents as something he “very much” cares about. The units will be split across three buildings, which will be facing each other across a central, open walkway. He described their style as fitting in with the context of the surrounding Pine Knolls neighborhood through the siding and roof designs.

Gurlitz said that creating a design and layout of the site that helps further cultivate community among its residents was “foremost in his mind.” Not only through a garden at the center and a rain garden area toward the back of the property, he said the mix of unit sizes with each other also aims to achieve that sense of togetherness.

“I hope very much,” said Gurlitz, “through we way we’ve configured and organized them, that we’ll be able to have a mix of ages living within this sub-community of the larger community. That mix of ages will include everything from community elders to young families.”

While Bailey pointed to the turnout of town and county leaders at Tuesday’s ceremony as a testament to the community’s buy-in on the project, others also pointed to Bailey’s focus on accomplishing this goal for her organization and fellow Chapel Hill residents. EMPOWERment board members shared how the nonprofit director remained dedicated to serving residents at 30 percent and lower AMI while pulling together as much local government, county government, state, federal, and private support as possible.

That included Chapel Hill Town Council Member Tai Huynh, who has served on EMPOWERment’s board of directors. He said during Tuesday’s gathering that sometimes the only way the PEACH Apartments project was able to move forward was through Bailey’s “sheer willpower.”

“I can’t think of another person in this town, in this county,” he said, “that could bring together an intergenerational, diverse, grassroots coalition to do this kind of work other than Mrs. Bailey.”

Bailey maintained that she felt excited by the presence of so many supporters of the project on Tuesday – as it helped further affirm her hopes to set an example for others looking to address affordable housing shortages locally and beyond Chapel Hill.

“This is just the beginning,” she reiterated. “We can do more. It’s not going to be easy, but we’ve broken the ground now and I don’t see anything that can stop us from building more [PEACH Apartments.]”

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