More than 75 residents gathered June 4 at the Tarboro Road Community Center for a Livable Raleigh forum on the city’s affordable housing crisis, where five longtime community leaders shared recommendations for addressing displacement and preserving affordable communities. If you weren’t able to attend you can watch the video now.
Eight neighbors from Litchford Forest spoke at the Public Comment Session asking City Council to uphold the decision of the Planning Commission which voted 8-1 to DENY rezoning case Z-43-25.
The choice is not between density everywhere anywhere and slow growth. The answer lies in responsible growth.
Why does “the greater good” so often require loss from the same communities? Why are the people who already rely on transit the ones most at risk of being displaced from it? What does it mean to build a transit corridor that the current riders might no longer be able to afford to live near? if the greater good keeps requiring that the same communities lose everything, perhaps we need to ask ourselves what “good” really means.
Raleigh adopted a carefully thought-out and comprehensive rezoning of the entire City just 10 years ago which was and is designed to handle the growth we are now experiencing. But, Raleigh incentivizes speculators and hustlers to find cheaper and less densely zoned land not in the core of downtown and then rezone it because the city will rezone almost anything so long as you commit to building more density whether affordable or not.
Growth is inevitable, it can be transformative; it’s up to us to see that it isn’t destructive. Zoning and land use planning are the tools we use to meet this challenge.
“We’re growing! we’re glowing!” the press release says. The Mayor’s got plans and a very nice suit, Telling us Raleigh is “ripening fruit.” Just remember, dear Leader, amidst all the hype: If you don’t fix the potholes, the fruit’s overripe.
It turns out that at that January hearing when North Hills traffic was lightly discussed, the referral to the Transportation Committee – which had been previously promised to opponents – was not for any review of North Hills traffic at all but rather for the Six Forks Corridor Project – a dead project that would have provided little if any relief for traffic congestion in North Hills.
Let’s move on from self-serving and counterproductive supply-side theories used to justify massive developments that are violating our neighborhoods and our adopted growth plans. Instead, let’s work with Wake County’s Affordable Housing Director toward solutions described in Livable Raleigh’s Affordability Agenda, to produce much more affordable housing and more growth according to our adopted plans.
The most devastating loss of affordable housing in the past 20 years has been the city constantly greenlighting the destruction of vast numbers of small brick ranches, duplexes and mom and pop apartment buildings in the older parts of town to give way for McMansions and “luxury” apartment towers.