To keep Raleigh’s housing more affordable, make housing more abundant

I wanted to know about gentrification in Southeast Raleigh, a traditionally Black community now marked by new construction, soaring home prices and an influx of young white professionals who value the area’s close access to downtown’s bars, restaurants and entertainment.

I called Daniel Coleman. He knows Southeast Raleigh. He’s lived there most of his life. And he knows housing. He’s a builder who served on various boards and the local Citizens Advisory Council, before the city’s recent dissolution of the citizen council system.

At 67, Coleman calls himself a “senior spokesman,” with the emphasis on senior. He’s ready to get out of the fray and let younger people advocate for the future that will be theirs. And he’s done talking about gentrification in Southeast Raleigh.

“It’s almost like that conversation is passe´ now,” he said. “That cake has been baked and ate.”

Rising home values, especially in neighborhoods once beset by poverty and crime, isn’t something he opposes on its own. “On a certain level, there’s nothing wrong with that,” he said. “It’s the human cost that you have to worry about.”

The human cost is displacement, but it’s not the displacement of middle-class Black homeowners in Southeast Raleigh. Many of those residents moved out years ago, Coleman said, and the area became poorer and homes were increasingly occupied by renters. Renters don’t get the bounty of selling the home. They just get pushed out, and as home prices rise around the city, there are fewer places they can afford.

The problem isn’t so much price, it’s supply, Coleman said. For years he urged the city to build more row houses and multifamily buildings, but the city and many residents wanted single-family homes. If more units were built before Raleigh’s boom years, he said, low-income people would have more options today.

Coleman doesn’t want to dwell on that. “Hindsight is always 2020,” he said. “The question now is: Where is the foresight? What do we do? We don’t have enough housing.”

Nicole Stewart, an at-large City Council member and the city’s liaison to the DHIC, a nonprofit that develops affordable housing in the region, agrees with Coleman’s assessment, but she said the city is taking action. Raleigh adopted 1-cent property tax in 2016 to support affordable housing and voters approved an $80 million affordable housing bond in 2020. The city is also offering city-owned land for affordable housing and using federal COVID relief funds to reduce evictions and homelessness and create more affordable housing.

The next step, Stewart said, may be to follow Durham in providing tax relief to longtime property owners in areas where property values are rising rapidly.

But the focus on gentrifying neighborhoods misses the larger housing story, she said. The problem in Raleigh is that large swaths of the city are dominated by single-family homes with rising prices. What’s needed is more density and variety of housing. The city is using zoning changes and purchasing land along transit routes to meet that need.

“We have to do everything we can to get mixed-income housing throughout Raleigh so people can stay here,” she said.

Stewart said the city sees the trouble ahead and is pressing to avoid it.

“There are so many different cities that are warning signs for us and we are ahead of them,” she said. “We’re making it easier to build affordable housing.”

Residents of established single-family neighborhoods often resist the introduction of apartments and townhomes, but unless places to live in Raleigh become more numerous and more varied in price, more people will be unable to afford the city. In a way, all of Raleigh needs the kind of flexibility and dynamism that has transformed Southeast Raleigh.

Associate opinion editor Ned Barnett can be reached at 919-829-4512, or nbarnett@ newsobserver.com