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Chapel Hill’s Affordable Housing Strategy Has Failed

A perspective from Linda Brown

 

The demand to place housing on public green spaces points to the complete failure of the town’s affordable mixed income housing policies—especially its failure use many other available options.

It is curious that advocates only call for affordable housing on public recreational property while failing to object to the elimination of existing affordable to market rate housing (e.g., the Park Apartments) and its replacement with luxury apartments with few affordable units.

Advocates of affordable housing on public green spaces repeatedly used the excuse that apartments are the only thing banks are willing to finance while refusing to explore the variety of other financing options used successfully by other communities.

Most housing advocates, who support the building of apartments instead of for sale homes, do not themselves live in apartments but, in contrast, own their own homes.

The Council and affordable housing advocates have failed to:

  1. Move forward to place tiny homes and supplemental housing units on large lots where space permits
  2. Use housing funds to purchase inexpensive small 1-to-8-acre sites where 12-18 for-sale permanently affordable mixed income townhome units per acre could be constructed.
  3. Advocate for permanent housing affordability
  4. Advocate for for-sale units (condos and townhouses), thereby effectively denying people of modest income the opportunity for home ownership and limiting home ownership to a wealthy few
  5. Consider the quality-of-life impact of creating housing in Legion Park on people living in the area, who are already adversely impacted by the increased traffic, air, and, light and noise pollution generated by the development of 2000+ new luxury apartments in Blue Hill
  6. Consider the environmental impact of the creation of Blue Hill which results in a heat island that will be intensified by the loss of Legion Park’s green space—and failed to rectify the form-based code which created Blue Hill.
  7. Proposed the development of the new site in NE Chapel Hill as an affordable mixed income community
  8. Realize that using public green space for housing significantly limits green space to only the wealthiest neighborhoods
  9. Insist on a much larger percentage of affordable units in new apartment developments. (Saying that developers can’t make the numbers that work is an excuse.  If Clay Grubb can make the numbers work, others can too. Furthermore, it is the council’s responsibility to prioritize the needs of its citizens—not developers.)
  10. Failed to realize the impact of their current strategy on the town’s economy which results in the lack of space for small businesses and capital fight, while increasing property taxes, housing unaffordability—and homelessness
  11. Consider the environmental impact of most of the town’s employees commuting here because there is little affordable housing
  12. Urge the largest employer—UNC—to build workforce housing that would substantially reduce the number of commuters
  13. Press UNC to build more student housing which would make more rental homes available to families of modest income, and make land now used for student housing available for the development of permanently affordable mixed income housing
  14. Follow the recommendations of the Stevens housing needs report that explains that:
    • most people living in the new apartment developments will commute out of Chapel Hill to work and will later by homes in in other places where housing is more affordable (so we are not prioritizing people who work here)
    • the town needs to plan holistically rather than on a project-by-project basis

Unfortunately, there seems to be little interest in doing things differently.

 

“Viewpoints” on Chapelboro is a recurring series of community-submitted opinion columns. All thoughts, ideas, opinions and expressions in this series are those of the author, and do not reflect the work or reporting of 97.9 The Hill and Chapelboro.com.

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