Affordable Housing

Raleigh City Manager Ruffin Hall recently took a bold and much needed step to allocate $5.7 million dollars in the City’s Fiscal Year 2017 budget to support the production of an additional 125 units of affordable housing.  We applaud the Manager for taking this action to support City Council’s stated strategic priority to expand affordable housing production.

I was recently listening to some music from one of my favorite bands, an Irish group called Rend Collective.  Here is the lyric that caught my attention:

Increase in us we pray

Unveil why we’re made

We’ve had more than 2,000 families complete a pre-application to buy a home through Habitat Wake in the past two years.  Only about 10% of those families will eventually be approved for homeownership through Habitat and the biggest culprit in preventing approval is a poor credit history.

Predatory lending products are a big part of that debt trap that many families find themselves in and that trap prevents families from taking advantage of the wealth-building that homeownership provides.

Thanks, Raleigh City Councilor, Mary-Ann Baldwin for stepping out to support local action on affordable housing.  She asks a great question, “Why do we keep talking about what we can’t do?”  Check out this article from the Raleigh Public Record:

http://raleighpublicrecord.org/news/on-the-record-news/2016/04/15/baldwin-on-affordable-housing-why-do-we-keep-talking-about-what-we-cant-do/

Would you be willing to pay an additional $40 in property taxes to ensure affordable housing in Raleigh?

Raleigh City Council held a budget work session this week and spent a considerable amount of time discussing the need for affordable housing in the city and some potential sources of local funding to add to the amount of affordable housing being produced.  Here is good recap from this morning’s N&O:

Check out this excellent piece written by Habitat for Humanity International CEO, Jonathan Reckford, for the World Economic Forum.  Urbanization is occurring rapidly across the globe and adequate housing is at the center of the crisis.  How will cities across the world respond to the housing needs in their cities with rapidly growing populations?

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/04/how-can-we-build-the-sort-of-cities-we-want-to-live-in-20-years-from-now

Yesterday, the Wake County Board of Commissioners hosted a three hour work session devoted entirely to the issue of affordable housing.  As Commissioner Jessica Holmes shared, this is unprecedented in the history of Wake County.

Check out this report on the current state of Latino housing in North Carolina.  There are some major disparities and major demographic trends that will have significant impact in the state over the next generation.

http://latinoccu.org/news/the-state-of-latino-housing-in-north-carolina-2015/

Thanks to the News & Observer for a great op-ed, by Chapel Hill attorney James Bartow, on the limited range of options that municipalities in North Carolina have to promote affordable housing.  The op-ed appeared on November 20.

Habitat for Humanity has long held a belief that all of God’s children (meaning absolutely everyone) have a right to simple, decent, affordable places to live.  In heated up markets, affordability falls prey to the market and many are left out.