Council Pans New Housing Policy; Foxx Pushes For Inclusionary Zoning
Councilmember Patsy Kinsey, a Democrat who chairs the council’s housing and neighborhood development (HAND) committee that crafted the new locational policy, conceded that problems with waivers and community angst were likely inevitable, even with the best-intentioned policies.
“We’re going to face those problems going forward,” Kinsey said. “There are going to be neighbors who will fight it and developers who ask for a waiver. That’s a fact and we’re just going to have to deal with it.”
One solution to potentially resolve that dilemma would be to eliminate a locational policy, argued Councilmember Warren Cooksey, a Republican who is a member of the HAND committee and who cast the lone vote against forwarding its proposal to council. A locational policy, he said, creates barriers to the goal of producing affordable housing by restricting where it can or can’t be built. That runs specifically counter to the reasoning city officials used to successfully lobby for passage of $15 million in affordable housing bonds at the polls earlier this month, Cooksey said.
“Our rhetoric on the housing bonds was we needed more affordable housing,” he said, “but a locational policy restricts that ability to provide housing.”
Democrat David Howard, who works for the Housing Partnership, said he also was concerned that the proposed policy and its 5-percent rule would make it more difficult to build new affordable units. He encouraged the council to be more flexible with locational restrictions, while crafting a policy that would do a better job at dispersing affordable units throughout the city.
“I thought the goal (of a new policy) was to simplify,” Howard said. “I’m concerned we’re instead making it too restrictive. You make it very near impossible to do anything.”
The proposed 5-percent cap for subsidized housing in neighborhood areas was selected to mirror a citywide comparison of existing affordable units and market-rate housing stock. There are currently about 300,000 households citywide, according to staff estimates, and 15,000 subsidized units.
Various reports indicate that Mecklenburg County is short anywhere from 17,000 to 24,000 subsidized affordable housing units to meet the needs of very low-income residents. The proposed locational policy would cover units designed to serve households earning 60 percent or less than the area median income, or about $40,000 per year.
Councilmember Michael Barnes, a Democrat and HAND committee member, said the new locational policy wasn’t an immediate fix to problems the city faces with affordable housing, but that it offered a good starting point for moving forward.
The proposed locational policy is slated for a public hearing on Nov. 22 and a full council vote on Dec. 22.
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