[Durham INC] March Meeting Minutes

[Kevin Davis]

Christy,

I would question your assertion that "we are gobbling up field and forest
to create sprawl that is much less expensive than near-town neighborhoods
because it’s not in demand."  It is absolutely in demand, but it is in
demand at a different price point.  It is not demanded by upper middle
class families who can pay $850k for a home in a near downtown neighborhood
or $300-500k for a downtown condo, but is much in demand by individuals
with five figure household income who are very much in need of housing that
is affordable to them.  I have a friend who has been looking at homes in
the mid-$100s to low $200s range for a year and these properties, across
the county, are getting multiple cash offer sales.

I don't disagree with your proposed improved solution to build more
connected neighborhoods with integrated retail, commercial and other
spaces. Many of us had concerns as to whether it was being built in the
ecologically correct location, but 751 South is an example.  Further north,
the Latta project with a Publix integrated at least had walkable shopping,
akin to a much smaller Woodcroft.  Instead we get more projects like that
on Ellis Rd, out of sight to many, a massive development in the Northeast
Creek area that only has retail attached, very much lacking the commercial,
transit and walkability goals you cite.

My wife and I are only in Durham occasionally these days, but we live in a
very dense suburban Charlotte neighborhood (Antiquity, in Cornelius) with
walkable retail and restaurants (and soon breweries), access to downtown
Cornelius, biking distance to nearby Davidson College, and an adjacent bus
stop that uses the toll express lanes to get to Charlotte.  Ironically, the
neighborhood was zoned so densely because it runs along a Norfolk Southern
corridor that was expected to become the CATS Red Line, but which is on
what is likely a permanent hold due to the railroad's change in public
policy.  Which to me shows that the kind of density that it takes to build
the kinds of community you are advocating for either need strong transit
first (unlikely in Durham at the moment), or a strong willingness by
elected officials to demand the kind of hyperdense communities that will
support true integration -- and echoing Nick Tennyson's old saying, to be
willing to stand up to residents in a community whose residents hate sprawl
more than everything except density.

BTW, kudos to INC for bringing Yonah -- a Hillside and Yale grad -- in to
speak!  His Transport Politic blog has long been one of the go to sites for
transit lovers.

--
Kevin Davis
ksdavis at gmail.com

On Wed, Mar 31, 2021 at 8:10 AM Christy Ferguson <christymferg at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I appreciate Freemar’s remarks, but they leave out a couple important
> points.  First, we are simply replicating single-family zoning outside of
> the so-called urban tier; over a thousand acres a year (several times the
> area of Trinity Park, for example). Every year.  We are gobbling up field
> and forest to create sprawl that is much less expensive than near-town
> neighborhoods because it’s not in demand.
>
> There’s a reason that the near-town neighborhoods have a lot of demand,
> and it’s not proximity to the downtown loop; it’s that we are not building
> the types of neighborhoods that we used to build.   A more straightforward
> approach to increasing housing supply would be to change zoning in
> greenfield areas such that every new development is required to be dense
> and include multiple housing types, as well as commercial centers, civic
> spaces, walkable block lengths, connectability to transit and other
> neighborhoods, and so-on.  We need greater supply of what people are
> seeking at the level of the neighborhood, at least as much as we need
> supply at the individual unit level.
>
>
>
> Please let me know about any additions or corrections.  Thanks, pat
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> *March Delegate Meeting of the InterNeighborhood Council of DurhamVia
> ZoomMarch 23, 2021 Attending the meeting were:NeighborhoodsAutumn Ridge –
> Leo Cruz Bragtown – Constance Wright, Vannessa EvansColonial Village –
> Charles GiamberardinoCross Counties – Pat CarstensenFalconbridge – Richard
> Ford Forest Hills – Sarah MorrisLong Meadow – Eric HamiltonMorehead Hill
> – Rochelle Araujo                Northgate Park – Keith Cochran, Debra
> HawkinsOld West Durham – David EklundTrappers Creek / Greymoss – Will
> Wilson, EIleen SarroTrinity Park – Philip Azar, Mimi
> KesslerTuscaloosa-Lakewood – Susan SewellWatts Hospital Hillandale – Tom
> Miller VisitorsAnnette Smith -- Durham Parks and RecreationYonah Freemark
> -- Urban Institute, on housing affordability and land useDeDreana
> FreemanPresident Will Wilson called the meeting to order, and those present
> introduced themselves.  We are still looking for a Vice-President. Philip
> Azar moved to approve February minutes, Rochelle Araujo seconded, and the
> minutes were approved.  We agreed to move the April meeting to April 20th
> to avoid a conflict with the Planning Commission meeting.Affordable Housing
> Discussion -- Yonah Freemar, Senior Research Associate, the Urban
> Institute, gave an overview of what academics are finding out about
> affordability and zoning code.  Affordability is defined by HUD as spending
> less than 30% of income on housing (rent, mortgage, utilities, etc.).
> Currently only 35% of the low income households can afford their housing by
> this measure, because of more poverty, less subsidy, and increasing cost.
> Areas are relatively cheap because there is less interest in living there.
> Gentrification can happen relatively quickly in places like Walltown
> because they suddenly become attractive.  Communities with more housing
> generally have lower costs.  In Durham’s most popular neighborhoods, it is
> hard to add housing due to zoning codes, making the costs higher.  There
> are nuances, however.  FIrst, more construction can be related to more
> demand, becoming self-propelling, so cost of housing in the neighborhood
> still increases, although the overall cost in the larger community goes
> down.  We are just starting to get results from studies of the changes in
> zoning code that allow alternatives to single family homes.  What we are
> seeing is a small (maybe 10%) increase in the cost to buy a house as the
> cost of land goes up, at least in the short term.  In theory, in the
> long-term, more housing and housing choices should give moderate-income
> families access to the more desirable neighborhoods.  Furthermore, the
> volume of new housing construction may not meet the demand for housing in
> Durham, changing zoning doesn’t address income issue and we still do not
> have tools to address economic disparities caused by racist policies.  The
> institutional ownership of single-family homes (that is, ownership of
> rental homes by profit-seeking entities) is another factor.  In concept, if
> you build more expensive housing, people who can afford more will move
> there and free up older housing for more moderate-income folks; the process
> (called “filtering”) is slower than building directly for moderate and
> low-income households.  However, options for building directly for
> affordability tends to either mean building at the edges of the urban area
> (with all the issues of sprawl and infrastructure costs) or having
> subsidies.  The puzzle with subsidies is how much to spend the limited
> subsidy amounts we have to create moderately-priced housing (where the
> limited funds go further) or housing for the lowest-income households
> (where the need is greatest).  Developers need incentives to build for
> moderate income households, by for example, getting land from the city.
> Downtown became attractive after the city poured resources into it, without
> realizing how equity would be affected; what would have been better -- and
> may be appropriate if we wanted to develop other new nodes -- is to somehow
> reserve opportunities and promote equity so that those who have lived there
> get more benefit of the growth, not just being displaced.  New duplex
> apartments tend to rent for significantly more than older ones.
> Disinvestment in some communities and expensive housing in others is much
> too complex to be handled with just zoning policy; some cities are doing
> better at transformative planning that addresses the weaknesses of the
> market.  There is a lot of interesting information on the Urban Institute
> (urban.org <http://urban.org/>) website.  Yonah’s prepared remarks are in
> Appendix A.OLD BUSINESSAutumn Ridge / Willow Hill Rezoning -- Sometime in
> February, homeowners were notified about proposal to develop 516 units (60%
> townhomes, 40% single family) on 146 acres, currently heavily wooded and
> zoned RR,  in North Durham.  The developers have told the group of
> concerned neighbors that they won’t scale it back as their business plan
> requires the full size.  There are 3 other developments in the area.  The
> roads are currently 2-lane and there are a number of creeks that come down
> from that area, so there are lots of issues.  The developers aren’t
> offering any solutions, and ideally the PDR will eventually have a bunch of
> commitments to deal with the issues -- but the neighborhood shouldn’t have
> to become experts to figure out what commitments to ask for.  Their website
> is at https://saynotorezone.org <https://saynotorezone.org/>.  Committee on
> equity for cultural and historical non-profits -- As funding has become
> tighter, the governing bodies have concentrated the limited funds on
> entities where they have a stake in the buildings.  The city and county
> have a cultural advisory board, and we could have them speak about the need
> to a new master plan and re-looking at the funding patterns.  Will will
> consult with Annette about getting a presentation.Comp Plan Revision --
> Public hearing is April 27th; there is no other business at that Planning
> Commission meeting.  We can submit our document to the Planning Commission,
> and should have a couple speakers to hit the highlights.  The committee
> will get back together to plan.  Bylaws Revision Update -- We have gotten
> the formal agreement from the Duke Law Clinic to work with us and the
> committee is making progress.  Development project updates - The Planning
> Department is re-looking at how they and developers engage the public.
> Respond to their survey.  There’s a lot of bad stuff in the omnibus change
> text for the UDO.- Autumn Ridge/Willow Hill -- discussed earlier- Black
> Meadow Ridge.-- Board of Adjustment has an item on its agenda about
> this. INC Vice President needed -- Will’s family will be moving out of his
> neighborhood, which may mean he can’t continue as President.  In any case,
> we need a vice president so someone needs to step up.There was nothing to
> report from the Communications and Internet Committee.Treasurer’s report --
> Nine neighborhoods have paid dues.  Susan paid the Post Office box bill.
> That leaves $5501.39 in the bank. Neighborhood Reports  - Northgate Park is
> starting its season of food-truck pop-up events each month, plus there is
> one on April 6th and for CInco de M- John Schelp is doing a virtual history
> tour in March.- The planned Golden Belt parking structure needs some
> “adjustments.” Adjourn.Appendix: Speech for InterNeighborhood Council of
> Durham Yonah Freemark March 23 2021  Thank you for the opportunity to talk
> with you all tonight.  As some of you know, I’m originally from Durham and
> as a result I jumped at the opportunity to be able to discuss matters
> related to affordable housing – an issue that is near and dear to my heart,
> and also my professional background now that I am a researcher and head of
> the Fair Housing Practice Area in the Metropolitan Housing and Communities
> Policy Center at the Urban Institute in Washington.  David Eklund and Will
> Wilson asked me to speak about issues related to zoning policy, housing
> supply, and the affordability of market-rate housing, and I am under the
> impression that some of you may have seen some academic research that I
> conducted on the subject in recent years.  So I’ll try my best to give a
> concise overview of this issue as a whole over 15 minutes or so—then we can
> open it up for questions and a conversation if that is useful.  What do we
> mean by housing affordability? Let’s start with that.  The U.S. Department
> of Housing and Urban Development defines affordability as paying less than
> 30 percent of your income for housing—either rent or, if you’re an owner,
> for your mortgage and property taxes. About half of Durham households rent
> and the other half own their homes.  Affordability has been worsening in
> Durham—there is no question about that. And the situation has been
> particularly troubling for very low-income families—those who earn less
> than about $25,000 a year. There are about 14,000 families in Durham—that’s
> about one-tenth of the county—who earn that little.  Unfortunately, only
> about 35% of those families are able to afford the homes they live in,
> either because of public subsidies or just cheap market-rate units. That is
> a much worse situation than in 2000, when 50% of very poor families could
> afford the housing they lived in.  Now, communities like Durham are hardly
> alone in experiencing this problem of housing affordability, because it has
> a number of sources: Too few federal housing supports, inadequate supply of
> new housing units, and increases in poverty are chief among them.  The fact
> that communities like Durham are highly segregated by race and by class
> makes matters worse. You have certain communities with what people often
> describe as higher quality schools, better public services, and less crime,
> and those are the communities that are both expensive and that have the
> most demand to live in them. On the other hand, you have communities that
> are relatively cheap—but because of other conditions in the city—like
> schools, services, and crime—there is less interest in living there.  You
> also get situations where certain communities—like Walltown,
> perhaps—suddenly become popular and gentrify quickly, replacing a largely
> low-income Black population with a wealthier, whiter one. These types of
> changes provide upwardly mobile families the ability to invest in what
> appears to be an affordable home to them, but in the process, lower-income,
> typically minority households are left unable to pay.  So what can we do
> about this? Many cities across the U.S. have been focusing on altering
> their zoning codes to address this problem. I know that Durham’s planning
> department, too, has been discussing zoning changes as a mechanism to
> induce more affordability.  The concept behind zoning changes has a number
> of premises. For one, many zoning codes throughout the country were
> originally enacted to enforce strict racial and class segregation. As a
> result, you had communities that were strictly defined as only open to the
> construction of single-family homes, for example, which is the reason why,
> in most of Durham, you see block after block after block of single-family
> homes alone, with no apartments of any size in between.  Some argue now
> that we must change the zoning code in order to ensure that we rid our
> communities of this stain of racist policymaking.  Others point out that,
> on average, communities with more housing units available generally have
> more affordable housing. The idea is this: When there is a greater supply
> of housing, if there is demand for that housing, the prices go down
> overall. This is one reason why, for example, the Houston metropolitan area
> is cheaper than other places: It is simply easier to build more housing
> there, and as a result, more people are able to buy into housing at a
> reasonable cost.  To the contrary, in some of Durham’s most popular
> neighborhoods, the fact that little new housing can be built—the fact that
> only single-family homes are allowed—means that many of those communities
> steadily become more and more expensive as demand creeps up and supply
> doesn’t follow.  Now, this doesn’t mean that new housing specifically is
> less expensive, but the theory is that, if you allow more housing to be
> built, eventually housing will quote-on-quote filter down to moderate- and
> low-income families, making it possible for them to afford units that were
> previously unaffordable.  As a result, proponents of zoning change suggest
> several possibilities, mostly related to encouraging more neighborhood
> housing production. The idea is that, if you allow developers to build
> apartments in now single-family-only neighborhoods, or if you allow
> homeowners to build what are called accessory dwelling units, you’ll
> eventually end up with more housing available and thus, the demand will be
> met by supply. The end result will be more affordability.  This basic
> economic principal of supply meeting demand is not something that can be
> contested: If there are more homes available in a community, controlling
> for the demand for homes, the average home will be cheaper. There is little
> question about that.  There are a few elements of this conversation,
> however, that require more nuanced analysis. The first is that, just
> because you allow more homes to be built in a certain neighborhood does not
> mean that that neighborhood, in and of itself, will become cheaper. The
> reason for this is that more construction can be associated with more
> demand to live in a certain neighborhood.  An example of how this might
> work would be downtown, where, despite thousands of new housing units over
> the past two decades, more people want to live downtown—there’s a bit of a
> self-propelling effect there. As a result, downtown homes are more
> expensive now than they were when I was growing up.  But to say that this
> indicates a failure in the principal of demand and supply would be
> wrong—it’s just that we have to take into account considerations of scale.
> Even if downtown becomes more expensive with new construction, overall in
> the county, housing will become less expensive. This is because more
> interest in living downtown means less interest in living in places like
> American Village or Forest Hills, or what have you.  The second issue we
> need to examine is what happens when you execute a zoning change. It turns
> out that this is the focus of much of my research, which hinges on using
> what are called econometric methods to examine how policy change results in
> changes in the housing market.  The truth is that we are at the beginning
> of research on the impacts of zoning change. What we know so far—partly
> informed by my own research in Chicago, but also by new research in places
> as far-flung as Minneapolis and New Zealand—is that the immediate impact of
> zoning changes that allow more housing construction is actually higher
> housing costs.  Now, the reason for these higher housing costs isn’t too
> hard to identify: When you allow a land owner to build more on a plot of
> land, that land becomes more valuable.  This raises some concerns. Does
> this mean housing becomes less affordable for the people in certain
> communities? Well, the answer is, we’re not entirely sure. We do know that,
> in the period following a zoning change that allows more construction, the
> cost of housing for homebuyers goes up. It goes up a bit—we’re talking
> maybe a 10 percent change, once you account for other variables at
> play.  We don’t really know if the increases in costs of land get
> translated into higher rents.  But the increased value does suggest that
> what will eventually happen is more housing will be built. Some of my
> colleagues at the Urban Institute showed that a careful reform of the
> zoning code there to allow for the construction of backyard cottages
> resulted in a massive increase in their construction. This suggests that,
> over time, zoning changes that allow more housing to be built will,
> actually, result in more housing construction. And more housing
> construction should mean, eventually, cheaper housing on average.  In
> theory, the wider availability of more types of housing in more
> neighborhoods should mean, eventually, the creation of more equitable,
> integrated communities. The ability of a moderate-income person residing in
> an apartment to live adjacent to an upper-middle-class family residing in a
> single-family home should give them access to many of the neighborhood
> amenities that the upper-middle-class family is able to take advantage
> of.  But the speed at which these changes occur is not yet clear. So zoning
> changes of this sort cannot be the only way that cities like Durham push
> for greater housing affordability.  Indeed, the reality is that no single
> policy will come close to resolving the sorts of housing affordability
> problems that communities like Durham face. It is true that new housing
> supply is likely to be associated with less housing costs over the
> long-term, on average, but costs are more likely to reflect overwhelming
> and rising demand to live in Durham—a problem that cannot be easily solved
> by the volume of new housing construction that we’re talking about
> here.  Moreover, no market-rate housing is ever going to be able to meet
> the affordability demands of the lowest-income members of our community.
> Those households will continue to need significant subsidies—whether
> through the federal, state, or local governments—in order to address the
> fact that they simply do not have access to the income necessary to afford
> comfortable, convenient homes at all.  Finally, we still don’t have the
> tools to deal with the vast patterns of economic and racial segregation
> that define our communities. These patterns make their way into the housing
> market, perpetrating perceptions of neighborhood quality, reducing the
> wealth of low-income people of color, even as they allow higher-income,
> largely white families to build wealth.  No zoning change is going to be
> particularly effective at reducing disparities between neighborhoods,
> especially for those communities that have faced systemic disinvestment
> over the decades.  Thanks – and I look forward to our discussion!  *
>
> _______________________________________________
> INC Website: https://sites.google.com/view/durhaminc/
>
> Durham INC Mailing List
> inc-list at lists.deltaforce.net
> https://lists.deltaforce.net/mailman/listinfo/inc-list
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> INC Website: https://sites.google.com/view/durhaminc/
>
> Durham INC Mailing List
> inc-list at lists.deltaforce.net
> https://lists.deltaforce.net/mailman/listinfo/inc-list
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.deltaforce.net/pipermail/inc-list/attachments/20210405/4bc30f86/attachment.htm>