Affordable housing is part of an ongoing discussion in Chapel Hill as the town continues to grow.

The Chapel Hill Town Council passed a resolution on Monday night with an eye on the long-term availability of affordable housing.

Sally Greene is a Council member and Mayor Pro Tem; she also serves as the liaison to the Housing Advisory Board. Greene says this resolution came about as a result of public discussion.

“It got generated through last year’s budget process, in which Council was responsive to a deep community interest in increasing the public investment in affordable housing,” she says. “We have an affordable housing coalition in the county, who was a strong advocate of it. We have a Council who did not need much persuading.

“Because we all understand that there is a crisis of affordable housing in Chapel Hill.”

That discussion set the wheels in motion last budget cycle, according to Greene.

“We made the decision in last year’s budget cycle to allocate – as close as we could get within that budget structure – to a penny of the tax dollar to go to affordable housing,” she says. “And that comes out to, for this year, something over $688,000.”

This money will be used exclusively for development and preservation of affordable housing, focusing on land acquisition, rental subsidy and development, and future development planning, among other areas.

A Housing Advisory Board has been established to put forward guidelines used to spend this money.

“They have been charged with coming up with a process and a system for responding to requests for this money,” Greene says, “and also responding to the Council’s priority interest in spending this money.”

Greene says the Council’s attention will focus on helping those at the low-end of the affordable housing need, but as funds are available it may also be used to help bridge the gap for those at the higher end of the curve. Although Greene adds the market can help with that segment.

“We think that the market can do a lot to support the higher end of the affordable housing need,” she says. “It’s not that there would not be room for public investment in the higher end of low-income housing.

“But that the expectation that I have, that I shared with the Housing Board, is that the public investment in that 80 to 125 percent range would be less than the public investment in the zero to 60 to 80 percent range.”

Some of the funds put forward in this program have already been disseminated to help in this fight.

“This money was allocated in last year’s budget cycle, and this year comes to an end on June 30,” Greene says. “$200,000 of that money has already been set aside to support the Northside Neighborhood Initiative.”

Greene says this project is being put in place with the idea of undertaking a large affordable housing project in the next four to five years as funds are accrued. She adds the town would have creative options to integrate several major development plans.

“We could us that money, in addition to supporting the existing initiatives in Northside and Pine Knolls,” she says, “we can look to the future to think about using that money to develop land banking programs around future light rail stations that are in our control in Chapel Hill.”

Greene says planning for growth and development while keeping affordable housing options in mind is one of the biggest challenges before the Council.

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