Council Pans New Housing Policy; Foxx Pushes For Inclusionary Zoning
A new set of rules to determine where subsidized housing can be built in Charlotte got a cold shoulder Monday night from the city council, which fretted that a proposed locational policy doesn’t go far enough to help disperse affordable housing throughout the city and would still leave some of Charlotte’s most fragile neighborhoods vulnerable to clusters of poverty.
The proposed locational policy would permit new affordable, multi-family housing developments – a.k.a. subsidized housing – to be built in any neighborhood area that ranks as “stable” using the city’s quality of life index, as long as the total number of subsidized housing units doesn’t exceed 5 percent of the neighborhood area’s total housing stock. Developers, however, could still to apply for and council could grant a wavier that would skirt the 5-percent ceiling. New subsidized units would also be permitted within a half-mile of existing affordable housing, provided the total number of units doesn’t exceed 5 percent of a neighborhood area’s total housing stock.
The new policy would also allow for rehabilitations of existing subsidized units and conversions of market-rate developments to subsidized ones in neighborhoods that rank as “transitioning” and “challenged” on the city’s quality of life index, which uses various factors like crime, housing prices, family incomes, and school graduation rates to determine an area’s ranking.
“If the guiding principle is to deal with clusters of poverty, how does this help?” Mayor Anthony Foxx, a Democrat, asked of the proposed new locational policy. Foxx encouraged the city to pursue an affordable housing strategy that would used incentive-based inclusionary zoning rules to help achieve a goal of more widely dispersing subsidized housing. That would provide developers certain incentives – higher density bonuses, for example – in exchange for including subsidized housing as part of any new development across the board.
Other councilmembers said that continuing to allow waivers for developers to build subsidized housing in areas where it’s not permitted by policy would still lead to clustering of low-income housing and trigger heated community debates.
The city was rocked by several hot-button cases earlier this year, when developers requested waivers to build subsidized housing in areas where it was not permitted by policy. In response to a question Monday night from Councilmember Edwin Peacock, a Republican, city staff seemed to indicate that the new locational rules, and their accompanying 5-percent cap, might have altered the outcome of the tussle over new affordable housing in at least one case.
The council earlier this year rejected a wavier sought by the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Housing Partnership to build a subsidized housing complex in the Ayrsley neighborhood, within a half-mile of an existing subsidized development. The proposed rules would have exempted the project from requiring a wavier, because the number of subsidized units it would have added wouldn’t have exceeded the 5-percent cap.
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