Stef Mendell has lived in Raleigh since 1964. She is a retired international communications executive and former Raleigh City Council member. She is a founding member of Livable Raleigh (www.livableraleigh.com).
Stef sent the following to INDY Week in response to a piece they published:
In Indy Week’s November 15 article about takeaways from the Raleigh City Council election, they refer to me as “Livable Raleigh co-founder Stef Mendell, who ran on an anti-development platform.”
I am not and have never been anti-development. And neither is Livable Raleigh.
I support development if it meets three criteria:
1. Development must be environmentally sensitive, i.e., don’t bulldoze lots thereby destroying natural habitats, increasing stormwater runoff, and creating heat deserts by eliminating our tree canopy.
2. Development must be supported by appropriate infrastructure, i.e., the roads and water and sewer systems must be adequate to meet the demands of increased density. And first responders must be able to provide services to the development within appropriate time standards.
3. Development must be compatible with existing neighborhoods, i.e., don’t put a 30-story building in the backyards of one and two-story single family homes. That’s what transitions and buffers and stepdowns are for. We shouldn’t have to fight so hard for them.
The Woodcrest neighborhood is an example where the neighbors support increased density, but not at the level of a 600% increase from 2 single-family homes to 12 luxury townhomes. Read more here: Fix this now.
Another example can be seen on Litchford Rd where the applicant wants to go from R1 zoning to R10 and replace 2 single family homes with 40 townhomes, a 2000% increase in density. Again, the local neighbors support adding density. Just not at this level. Going from R1 to R6 seems much more reasonable.
Then there’s the Glenwood Brooklyn case where the developer was asking for 30-40 stories on the downtown edge while the neighbors supported the 12 stories it is already zoned for. And 12 stories cannot be described as low density. Read more here: Downtown Edge Heights.
Labeling an individual or an organization as “anti-development” simply because they oppose increases like the ones cited above is out of line. Those kinds of increases cannot reasonably be described as “gentle density” or “a bit more density” as a number of councilors have referenced. Livable Raleigh and I support gentle density that is compatible with the existing community context. We do not support destructive mega-density.
Gentle Density meets Missing Middle
Adding “gentle density” is the branding for Missing Middle development. It sounds good and it makes people think that the City is improving housing affordability. That could indeed be the outcome if Raleigh’s Missing Middle policies incentivized affordability. But they do not. Read more here: Will Council fix the Missing Middle?.
Daniel Parolek, the planner who invented and popularized Missing Middle housing calls for combining developer profits with community benefits to allow increased density in a thoughtful and non-disruptive way. Unfortunately, Raleigh’s rules promote developer profits, but not community benefits. Read Parolek on Missing Middle’s Biggest Mistakes.
And Missing Middle was implemented in the guise of a text change, when it was actually a massive city-wide rezoning, so that they wouldn’t have to proactively notify every single homeowner in Raleigh. If you bought a house in a neighborhood that was zoned R-4, that no longer means four houses on a one-acre lot. Your property was rezoned via a text change (during a pandemic I might add) and you had very little opportunity to contest that.
Missing Middle is not delivering affordability and that is one of the reasons why affordability is such an issue here. Raleigh leaders laud themselves for adding affordable housing, yet don’t track the approximately 5,000 Naturally Occurring Affordable Housing units lost every year due to demolition and redevelopment. When we are adding less than 300 affordable units a year, are we making progress or rapidly falling behind? Nobody knows. This matters, and if it matters, it should get measured!
When I was on Council, we pioneered a way for developers to voluntarily offer conditions that would include some affordable housing in return for increasing a developer’s profit by upzoning their property. But unfortunately, most developers are reluctant to offer anything other than a token number of units at 80% AMI (Area Median Income) for a limited number of years. There’s fearmongering in the community about people who need housing at 60% AMI or even lower. The fact is these people are not low-life criminals and freeloaders. These are the people who teach our children, the police officers and firefighters who keep us safe, the cooks and servers who work in our restaurants, and the nurses and healthcare aides who tend to us when we are sick.
Yes, it is true that Raleigh must, and should, develop to accommodate all the people who want to live here and help grow our community. But we must not turn our backs on the people who built the community that is now so attractive to newcomers. And we must not destroy the quality of living that attracts those newcomers.
Unfairly labeling individuals or groups as anti-development only makes constructive dialogue and positive action harder. Let’s work together to encourage new development that works for everyone.
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