Category: affordable housing

Is the “economic development” tail wagging the transit dog?

Map from Charlotte Area Transit System shows current plan for the Silver Line light rail, which would be built after funding is found for it. A closer view of the west section of the route is below.

Some controversy continues over the decision by the Charlotte Area Transit System (CATS) to route the proposed Silver Line light rail outside of the heart of uptown Charlotte, bypassing the most convenient transfer points with the existing Blue Line. ) See “Five key takeaways from Charlotte’s newest transit plan”)

The Silver Line would run from Matthews, through uptown, out Wilkinson Boulevard to the airport and west to the Gaston County town of Belmont. One idea studied would have run it through uptown via a tunnel under Trade Street. That would add roughly $1 billion to construction costs. In my reporting, I referred to the tunnel idea as costing less to operate over time and shortening travel time considerably. But Brock LaForty, the Carolinas area manager for the consultant WSP, which CATS hired to study Silver Line routes, contacted me to make clear that WSP’s analysis found the tunnel route would save two minutes per trip, a difference he and CATS officials both called marginal, and he said WSP had not analyzed whether the tunnel would cost less to operate over time.

The statements about travel time and lower operating costs were the personal opinions of Ron Tober, a former CATS CEO with extensive transit planning and operating experience in multiple cities, who was working for WSP as a consultant on the project.

Tober’s remarks created a bit of a stir between WSP, CATS and Tober. Tober told me he was deliberate in speaking out about CATS’ decision to opt for a route bypassing the heart of uptown Charlotte and the Charlotte Transportation Center in favor of one farther north, along the side of the Brookshire Expressway. Tober said he recognized there might be blowback if he went public with his concerns. And there was. Tober was to have left WSP at the end of March. Instead, he left last week.

CATS Chief Executive John Lewis told Steve Harrison of WFAE, Charlotte’s public radio station, that the decision not to select the tunnel option was influenced by the city’s goals for economic development. “From a purely mobility standpoint, the tunnel was a great alternative for us,” Lewis told Harrison, but said CATS couldn’t look only at mobility. “Lewis said CATS is a part of the city of Charlotte and the city has other goals, like economic development. The area around I-277 is mostly empty today,” Harrison reported.

He quoted Lewis: “And being a part of the city, we had to look at it beyond just the mobility aspect of, how do we move people from one point to another” Lewis said. “There were the economic development goals, there was supporting affordable housing.”

Remember, Lewis works for City Manager Marcus Jones. And the City Council, as well as many others in the community, have deep and appropriate concerns about the city’s need for more affordable housing. Putting affordable housing along the city’s new light rail lines is a longtime – if under-realized – goal.

But look at the areas near the Brookshire and North Tryon Street where the Silver Line would go. The area is already redeveloping and gentrifying. Residents and small businesses in Belmont, Optimist Park, Druid Hills, Lockwood and the Greenville neighborhood are already worried about land prices zooming upward. (See “North End Is Hot, But Can It Handle Coming Change?”) It isn’t as if those areas will see no new development without the light rail. To contend the Silver Line is needed for “economic development” is – to put it diplomatically – misguided. Some might even say untethered from reality.

Plus, there is no funding to build the Silver Line. Today’s GOP leadership at federal and state levels are either virulently anti-transit or just not interested in spending more money on it. Any new taxes to support CATS and the Silver Line would need a state legislative OK and would presumably involve surrounding counties which have not in the past two decades offered to tax their own residents for transit. Do not hold your breath that anything will happen until well after 2020, and quite possibly 2030. In other words gentrification will have swallowed the area now being eyed as needing economic development long before the Silver Line gets built. A deep concern that development needs a boost is, to my eyes, misplaced.

Is this just the latest impatient development push from Charlotte’s uptown leaders, who have not in my 40 years of residence here ever met a glitzy development project they did not welcome? Are they embarrassed that North Tryon Street is not yet glossy enough? After all, there are two facilities for the homeless on North Tryon near where the Silver Line would run, and the area can look at bit down at the heels. Can’t have that, can we?

I’m not a transit analyst and not equipped to say whether long-term cost savings of the tunnel would make up for the extra cost to build it, or whether the inconvenience of the Silver Line bypassing the heart of uptown will be a serious impediment to ridership, or not. That deserves clear-eyed study. The local nonprofit Sustain Charlotte contended just that in comments to the Metropolitan Transit Commission. Assessing the way the route will affect real estate development deserves some clear thinking as well.

“Economic development” brings higher land prices to an area. That makes affordability even harder to provide. The city has not to date ensured that any affordable housing gets built near its existing light rail line. It hopes to rectify that, which is admirable and I wish them well. But so far those plans are embryonic, not a proven and successful strategy.

So do they want “economic development,” or do they want affordable housing? It is very hard to have both at the same time in one place, especially if that place is in an extremely hot development market, like Charlotte.

I’m left with this question: Should the city reject without further study what may be a better mobility option – which would benefit all transit riders – in hopes that its still elusive transit-oriented affordable housing wishes bear fruit?

A closer view of where the Silver Line would run through west Charlotte, across the Catawba River and into the town of Belmont. Map courtesy of CATS

Should affordable housing be treated as basic city infrastructure?

Here’s an interesting piece in The Washington Post today that should be provoking some discussion among people concerned with housing affordability: In expensive cities, rents fall for the rich – but rise for the poor.

The conventional wisdom is that a housing oversupply will cause the costs to go down – the famous law of supply and demand. If we just allow developers to build plenty of housing, rents will sink. But that appears not to be happening.

The article, which is pegged to information from Zillow, does not address Charlotte specifically. So while maybe the same is true here it′s also possible that given the growth pressures in this fast-growing city – named by Zillow as the nation’s fourth-hottest housing market – the top rents here are staying high.

The most significant ponderable here, I think, is whether – if that old law of supply and demand appears not as reliable as we′ve been led to think – the free market on its own can provide enough housing at a price more city residents can afford. The City of Charlotte is helping with its housing trust fund, but it seems doubtful we can simply build our way out of the problem.

I was talking last week with a zoning and planning lobbyist in Charlotte – a guy whose planning background doesn′t stop him from generally hewing to a basic free-market approach. He said he′s starting to believe cities should consider housing affordability as part of the basic package of infrastructure the local government provides like streets, police and fire service, parks, public health services, etc. Maybe the city builds it, maybe it helps other people build it, maybe it helps people afford it, or maybe there′s another way to accomplish this, he said.

For a generally fiscally conservative guy to propose that speaks, I think, to the reality Charlotte and many other cities face: Too many residents don′t earn enough money to afford much of the available housing. And beliefs about how the marketplace can provide it may need some readjusting.

D.C. planner: Affordability is cities’ next big challenge

“Rock star planner” may be an oxymoron, but if there are rock star planners, Harriet Tregoning is one. Tregoning has been chief city planner in Washington, D.C., since 2007— a time of rapid growth and change in the District of Columbia. She’s stepping down to run the Office of Sustainable Housing and Communities at the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.

A looming problem in many U.S. cities is affordability, she said in an interview with Next City, but looking only at real estate prices masks the problem.  “I think the challenge for American cities for the next decade or more is indeed affordability, but it’s not just about housing,” she said. (Read the whole interview here.)

She noted that for the 8 million jobs lost in the recession, the average wage was $24 an hour. While that number of jobs has been created in recent years, their average wage was $11 an hour.

“Middle-wage jobs are declining,” she said. “Or if they’re growing, they’re growing at a much slower rate than the other categories (high-wage, and low-wage hospitality and retail jobs). So affordability needs to be broadened to talk about job creation, middle-income job creation. What are we going to do with our infrastructure to enable us to produce more employment?”

Two topics in the interview have specific resonance for Charlotte. Tregoning talked about the retrofitting of some
suburban areas. “We have more urbanizing suburban development here in the Washington area than in any place in the country,” she said. “When Tysons Corner decided to do this, when Fairfax County decided to do this, it tipped the balance for a lot of other places.”

And she talked about the challenge for the city (which has a height limit) in accommodating new growth. Should the city, which has many areas of one- and two-story buildings, scrap or at least raise the height limit in order to allow towers in some areas in order to keep the growth from spreading into less-dense neighborhoods. Tregoning said:

“Our relatively torrid rate of [population] growth — more than 2 percent a year, 1,100 people a month — is causing the dialog to change. … Plenty of other places around the world accommodate much larger populations in the same kind of geography without having tall buildings. I think the dialog in our city will be, how do we want to accommodate such growth? What kind of neighborhood change are we willing to tolerate? And how will that dictate where in the city growth will go?

“ … The starting point will be asking every neighborhood, ‘Here’s the growth coming to the city, here’s what we project over the next 30 years. This is what your share of that growth looks like. How would you most like to accommodate that growth in your neighborhood?’ I think the easy answer is, ‘I know, let’s grow in that neighborhood over there! They need some growth, but our neighborhood, we’re good.’ The question is going to be, how to have a dialog where people really have to consider real choices about how that growth will be accommodated?”

Charlotte has yet to seriously confront that same issue: Where do you allow intense growth and how do you balance it alongside a wish to keep older, less-dense areas from being wiped clean of the past? The conundrum is most likely to arise as transit-oriented zoning comes to historic, low-density neighborhoods like NoDa and Optimist Park along the route of the Blue Line Extension. The city’s TOD zoning allows heights of as much as 10 or 12 stories. Even a beloved area like NoDa, which has no historic district protection, may well see most of its historic fabric scraped away in favor of 10-story buildings. Think that can’t happen? Just look at uptown Charlotte, which lost virtually all its old buildings and is now mostly new office and condo towers scattered among parking decks and surface parking lots that replaced its historic fabric.

What’s at core of the affordable housing problem?

I stumbled on this excellent piece “The Zen of Affordable Housing,” by Dan Bertolet, a “recovering electrical engineer,” who blogs at Cititank.org. In it, he tries to debunk some myths and expound on what he considers truths of cities, housing and the market. Example:
“The urban density debate is over. An ever-growing mountain of density research unequivocally demonstrates the benefits associated with energy, greenhouse gas emissions, water, habitat, farmland, economics, human health and safety, etc. It’s not hyperbole to say that in America, our future prosperity will depend heavily on the densification of our urban areas. Accordingly, high-density housing should be recognized as a public benefit in itself.” 
But his final point is one that, in my observation, is the core of the problem and gets overlooked by virtually all the interested parties in the affordability debate. It’s all about income. If your income is too low, it’s tough to afford a place to live: 
“Income inequality is the core reason why housing affordability is such an intractable problem in the United States. In pretty much every other industrialized nation on earth, greater redistribution of wealth helps ease the problem of affordable housing. This includes social investments that significantly reduce other major household expenses, such as health care, education, childcare, and transportation, thereby freeing up more income to pay for housing. Here in the U.S, we will be beating our heads against the wall forever trying to provide enough affordable housing to make up for this underlying inequity.”

But what about those duplexes?

Before the city Zoning Committee deferred its decision on a controversial rezoning for a Walgreens in the Dilworth neighborhood, the panel – a subcommittee of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Planning Commission – also postponed another controversial proposal.

City staff have proposed changing the Charlotte zoning ordinance, to allow duplexes on any property zoned for single-family residential. Some neighborhoods have protested, saying they worry that too many duplexes will bring rentals to otherwise stable neighborhoods and that single-family-home neighborhoods should stay that way. Want to read more on that? Click here: “Garage apartments now legal; duplex move stalls.”

The duplex proposal is part of a larger city initiative to increase the amount of affordable housing throughout the city, rather than letting it cluster in a few parts of the city. Read more about that initiative here.

More stick than carrot in Chapel Hill

I missed this when it happened, but last June, Chapel Hill adopted an ordinance requiring new development to include a small percentage of “affordable” units. Here’s what was reported in the Triangle Land Use Newsletter from the law firm K&L Gates:

“On June 21, 2010, the Town of Chapel Hill replaced its affordable housing “expectation” [which applied only for rezonings] with an ordinance requiring that nearly all development that includes a residential component set aside a part of the development for affordable housing. The new ordinance takes effect on March 1, 2011.

“The new ordinance is a type of ‘inclusionary zoning’ ordinance, and applies to any new development, renovation, reconstruction, or change in use that results in five or more new dwelling units. The ordinance requires developers to set aside 10 to 15% of the new homes for affordable housing. In return, developers will be offered a bonus to allowed density or floor area for providing the required units and a waiver of some development fees.”

The newsletter notes that a recent N.C. Court of Appeals ruling on Union County’s adequate public facilities ordinance leaves the issue of a mandatory inclusionary zoning ordinance “unsettled.”

Why bother with inclusionary zoning? Advocates, such as Charlotte’s Mixed-Income Housing Coalition, say it helps spread affordable housing throughout the community, instead of having it all clustered in some parts of town. Or, more to the point, it means the few affluent neighborhoods that don’t have any affordable housing would get a few units.

Opponents say it just raises the cost of all the other housing units. But Davidson officials report that it seems to have worked well there. (Back when developers were building housing, that is.)

Ballantyne ‘affordable housing’? It was there at the start

It turns out that affordable housing – a better term is “below market-rate housing” – was required to be built in Ballantyne as part of its rezoning request, which county commissioners approved in November 1991. This was more than just a verbal agreement from developer Johnny Harris. It was part of the legally enforceable zoning agreement. And the housing was built. (This relates to Tommy Tomlinson’s column today, “Is public housing Ballantyne’s IOU?”, in which he notes that we taxpayers spent millions to create the highways that allowed Ballantyne to prosper.)

Planning consultant Walter Fields, who for many years was land development manager for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg planning staff, worked with the Harris family over a period of years, starting in the 1980s, about their development plans for what used to be called “The South Farm,” a beautiful tract that was part of late Gov. Cameron Morrison’s vast property holdings.

“There was definitely something in there [the rezoning agreement] and they definitely did it,” he told me. He recalled it was small-lot, single family housing. And he pointed out one problem with those sorts of “affordable housing” provisions: Unless other mechanisms are in place the housing is below-market rate when it’s first sold, but after than it sells for whatever anyone can sell it for. Which is why, let me note, there’s still a need for below-market rate housing in the area.

Today, Ballantyne is awash with apartments, which Fields points out are another form of “affordable housing.” He was approached, he says, by a lot of people for help in fighting the now-dropped proposal for subsidized apartments at Providence Road West and Johnston Road. “I turned them all down,” he says. As a consultant he often advocates for multifamily.

And, he recalls, during negotiations with the city-county planning department over Ballantyne the planners were continually pushing the importance of a mix of housing types at Ballantyne.

But the project was controversial, not least because that was in the era when Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools was really trying to integrate its schools, because it was legally required to, part of a court order in effect. (Today, schools in the Ballantyne area are far less integrated than in much of the rest of the county; Hawk Ridge Elementary is 10 percent black; Community House Middle and Ardrey Kell High are 12 percent black.) Some school board members weren’t happy about the prospect of a vast sea of white kids that they’d be required to bus long distances – or, conversely, having to bus another sea of nonwhite kids long distances. Of course, that problem got solved by the dissolving of the court order to integrate …

This is from an article in October 1991, by the Observer’s Liz Chandler:
“Louise Woods [who later served on the school board], representing a citizens group, urged commissioners to make Harris detail how many low- and moderate-income homes he will build.
“We request that the Ballantyne proposal include a section of affordable moderate- and low-income housing,” Woods said in a letter signed by seven others.
Woods also said school and county officials should scrutinize Harris’ plans to ensure Ballantyne is an integrated community. Neighboring subdivisions are predominantly white. The group is concerned about what they see is a trend resulting in long bus rides for black students brought in to achieve integration.”

Granny flats, and granddaddy apartments

Here’s a short bit, referring you to an article on the value of accessory apartments — you know, those mother-in-law apartments, or garage apartments, or granny flats or carriage houses or whatever you want to call them.

A number of municipalities have relaxed their zoning rules to allow them as a way to get more affordable places to live tucked into existing neighborhoods. Since the single-family-home owner owns them, he or she can rent to whomever he wants. The rent helps the homeowner pay the mortgage, too.

Allowing more accessory apartments isn’t a silver bullet for affordable housing, but every little bit helps.

Long ago, when I was a kid and we were living for several years in Lakeland, Fla., my parents rented a house with a garage apartment in the back. For a time a young teacher lived there. She belonged to a religious group that didn’t believe in makeup. She had very long red hair and I remember thinking she was very very pale.

But most of the time my growing-senile grandfather lived in the apartment, before he decided he didn’t want to live in a state that refused to let him renew his driver’s license. So Granddaddy returned to his hometown of Wynne, Ark., where he knew everyone at the courthouse, and they gave him a license. It was a small town, and everyone in town knew that if old Mr. Newsom was out driving, just get off the road.