Candidate Questionnaire: Reeves Peeler, Raleigh City Council At-Large

Name as it appears on the ballot: Reeves Peeler

Age: 37

Party affiliation: Democrat

Campaign website: www.reevesforraleigh.com

Occupation & employer: Community Development Finance at First Citizens Bank

Years lived in Raleigh: 30

1. Given the direction of Raleigh government, would you say things are on the right course? If not, what specific changes will you advocate for if elected?

In the next 10 years, Raleigh should become a City where working class people can thrive. This means firefighters, nurses, teachers, bartenders, cab drivers, and everyone in between. We cannot keep pushing our most vital members of our workforce farther from the center of the city and farther from our best resources and walkable/cyclable spaces. Raleigh isn’t just for the wealthy and we should do everything we can to highlight and preserve the best parts of our history and unique neighborhoods, while building a city that works for everyone.

2. If you are a candidate for a district seat, please identify your priorities for your district. If you are an at-large or mayoral candidate, please identify the three most pressing issues the city faces.

1. The destruction of naturally occurring affordable housing due to out of control real estate speculation. This displaces poor, working class, and middle class people and pushes them outwards from Raleigh – creating added pressure for unsustainable sprawl-style development and destruction of tree cover.
2. Lack of true community engagement and citizen-led efforts to democratically influence local policy. This is true over a wide range of areas from rezonings to comprehensive plan changes to campaign finance rules. 
3. Our unwillingness to pay living wages for our municipal workers. We are falling behind most of our neighboring municipalities with regard to pay and benefits because we cannot hire and retain good talent to a variety of different city departments. 

3. What in your record as a public official or other experience demonstrates your ability to be effective as a member of the city council and as an advocate for the issues that you believe are important?

I was born and raised in Raleigh, attending all Wake County public schools and graduating from NC State. In my 30 years here, I have seen great growth but also see us drastically falling behind in how we plan and provide for middle class, working class, and poorer residents.

I was driven to community organizing out of necessity, facing housing insecurity while living in San Francisco. I began volunteering with a tenant union in order to learn about what my rights were as a renter in California. I soon began volunteering on local political campaigns in 2018 which taught me the value of meeting people where they are on a given issue. I worked on several different City Supervisor races and ballot measure campaigns to help fund affordable housing and protect tenant rights. During this time I got a crash course in municipal public policy and learned the ins and outs of city planning. 

I worked as an Organizer and Field Manager with Down Home NC in Granville and Johnston Counties, working on parks and transit budgets and also ran field campaigns for a variety of different state and local candidates in rural counties. I’m proud to say I ran a campaign that put the first Black Sheriff in Granville County’s history, Robert Fountain. I also managed Damon Chetson’s campaign for Wake County DA in the 2022 primary cycle. These experiences taught me that local government is the best and most accessible way for regular citizens to interface with their government. 

I’ve gained great experience serving on Raleigh’s planning commission where I get a first hand look at development projects and interact with developers to share my vision. Lastly, I work in community development finance, and focus my professional efforts on financing LIHTC affordable housing. I have been able to build great relationships with community advocates and real estate developers across the Triangle through these experiences and have gained great insight into how we can plan for regular folks much better than we currently do. 

4. In 2021, the Raleigh City Council enacted a missing middle policy to allow for the construction of new, diverse types of housing across the city. More than 2,000 newly-allowed units have been added to the city’s housing stock under the policy, yet there has been pushback from residents, including lawsuits. Do you support Raleigh’s missing middle housing policy as is, or do you think it needs amending? If you feel it needs to be changed, please explain. 

Missing Middle’s theme of allowing smaller, more dense, and more affordable homes to be infilled into Raleigh is vital to our success as a city. 

There is plenty of room for improvement on Raleigh’s urban infill ordinances to better include our low and middle income neighbors. Currently our Missing Middle rules don’t do enough to encourage smaller/medium sized housing. While Missing Middle has done good things to streamline 100% affordable developments and ADUs, it also has had some adverse effects. In many instances, the new housing developed under Missing Middle rules has been much larger and more expensive than what previously existed in its place. 

We should amend MM ordinances to have better affordable housing conditions, amend the conditions to require that new market rate infill stock is not super-sized and expensive (aka “McMansions”). And we should amend MM to require more tree cover in residential lot redevelopments.

Missing Middle should aim to improve affordable, modestly sized, public transit friendly, walkable, and cyclable housing choices and to allow room for more local, neighborhood centric (and not car-reliant) commercial and public spaces. It should not create a land speculation frenzy, which I believe has happened in some parts of Raleigh. This is a tool that the City of Raleigh should use carefully and responsibly so that we reduce the pressures of gentrification and displacement, not heat it up. 

5. Raleigh has many funds, programs, and partnerships in place aimed at addressing affordable housing, but still has a deficit of some 23,000 affordable units. What more can the city do to secure affordable housing, and what more can it do to ensure that low-income residents don’t face displacement?

The biggest thing Raleigh could be doing currently is guiding real estate developers to contribute directly to subsidizing affordable housing. Raleigh should have a transparent and predictable process for this. We need smarter conditional inclusionary zoning rules as a city. Our density bonus is a good start, but we can do much more. Better inclusionary policies allow corporate real estate developers to pay their fair share and also take the burden off our property taxes to help fund our badly needed infrastructure. 

We should do more to protect tenants and low income homeowners. I have advocated for forming a tenant advisory council that would act like many other of our city commissions. We can also create zoning overlays that would a) limit short term rentals (which are eating away at our long term rental stock) and b) identify areas of the city that are particularly susceptible to gentrification so they can be addressed during rezoning hearings.

We should also be aggressively lobbying the state legislature to allow us to utilize real estate transfer taxes in order to help fund affordable housing subsidies. Many cities across the country do this to great success and several NC counties in the NE part of the state use local transfer taxes as well. 

Finally, we need a bond measure that focuses on very low income (<30% and <50% AMI) housing subsidies.

6. The recent resignation of GoTriangle’s CEO raises questions about the future of the county and regional transit strategy. How do you see the future of transit in Raleigh when it comes to Bus Rapid Transit, microtransit, and commuter and regional rail projects?

BRT is vital to our future and we should look to connect with other public transit corridors regionally and to RDU airport in the near future. I hope to build out our BRT system so it connects directly with regional rail and longer commuter buses. I also have been an advocate for permanently investing in fare-free transit for GoRaleigh. 

I had the privilege of closely working on the rollout of the New Bern BRT station planning and TOD zoning through the Planning Commission. We need density along public transit lines, but we have to do more to ensure that density does not displace working class communities that rely on the bus, and that the new density is affordably priced. Relying on the TOD Density Bonus alone will not achieve this, in my opinion. We must do more to include working class, poor, and middle class communities when creating these bus corridors to help ensure the success of our public transit investments. 

7. A common complaint from residents is that the city council doesn’t do enough public engagement, with the plan to relocate Red Hat Amphitheater being one recent example. Do you agree with this assessment? If so, what more should the city government and council do to engage residents with city business? 

Raleigh must fully invest in its CACs and further expand how they integrate and operate with various different communities and wealth levels. I believe the City must do much more to educate and interact with residents about rezonings and sweeping text changes and Comp Plan Amendments. This means more than community meetings and mailers. As I said earlier, I firmly believe that limiting public comment times, ending CACs, and pushing more and more decision making to backroom processes as happened throughout 2020 to 2023, and still sometimes happens now, has been a net negative for the City of Raleigh. Cutting out the processes rather than doing the hard work of improving and expanding them to include more people was a bad decision that lowered many residents’ confidence and trust in their local government, no matter who sits in the leadership roles. I think Raleigh will unfortunately be feeling the indirect effects of these choices for years to come and the next City Council and Mayor will have significant work to do to rebuild this trust. The only way to do this is to expand our community engagement tactics, bringing in more residents’ voices (specifically residents at lower wealth levels), and doing it at a time and place where they are comfortable. Often this will take shape outside of Council meetings, which many people are unable to make with their daily lives. The City of Raleigh must invest in new avenues of engagement, whether that be digital, door-knocking, roving events, and more.  

8. Downtown Raleigh has had a rough five years following the COVID pandemic with the transition to working from home and business owners reporting an increase in crime and other issues. Many see keeping Red Hat Amphitheater downtown as a positive step; what else does the city need to do to help downtown with its recovery and plan for its future?

I live on the edge of downtown, so this is a really important issue to me. The three things the City should do first to help downtown fully recover and thrive are 1) find better ways to help small local businesses afford their rent in downtown commercial spaces – we have a great opportunity to do this with the creation of a new Comprehensive Plan next year. 2) Invest in a fully independent alternative response unit. This will bring unarmed social workers to mental health crisis calls and not ask our police department to pull the double duty of also serving in alternative response calls – freeing them up to address violent crime issues. This will lead to less violent incidents downtown and better services for people struggling with mental health and living on the streets. And 3) Heavily invest in low income affordable housing around downtown. As housing has gotten more luxury oriented around downtown and gentrification has spiked, our downtown has become less and less accessible by young people who frequent downtown businesses the most. Despite good investments in our downtown area schools, housing for working class families has all but disappeared from our downtown neighborhoods and we must do a better job of encouraging it and protecting the existing affordable housing we have nearby. Without this, we make working and living downtown a less attractive prospect for people like service industry workers and city and state employees who do have to commute downtown for their jobs. In short, we can make downtown thrive better when we create more economically diverse living and playing options. 

9. Since 2012, the City of Raleigh has paid more than $4 million in settlements to 47 individuals, families, and estates related to RPD officer’s use of excessive force and other unconstitutional interactions. What are your thoughts on the current culture at RPD? For what changes would you advocate to improve the culture of policing in Raleigh, if any?

This is a very important issue to me as well – one that I focused on when working with Damon Chetson during his run for Wake DA. Raleigh PD absolutely needs changes. Officers cannot afford to live in Raleigh, yet we spend inordinate amounts of our budget on weapons and surveillance. Cultural and training changes are badly needed to cut down on officer-involved shootings and on officer misconduct such as we saw with the RPD informant ring that was pinning innocent Black men with completely fake heroin charges (one that cost the city many millions in damages). And we need a running dialogue and a strategic committee with the Wake DA’s office to better understand how our officers’ time (and therefore our City budget) is being utilized and what kind of charges the Wake DA is pursuing in relation to the types of arrests RPD is making. We also need outlined initiatives to help keep young and poor people out of jail, create better diversion programs, and lower the amount of nonviolent misdemeanor charges that Wake County pursues. 

10.  Some municipalities, such as Durham, have seen success with crisis response units that deploy trained workers to respond to non-violent behavioral health and quality of life calls for service. Should Raleigh consider such a crisis response program that’s NOT housed in the police department? 

YES!

11.  The next city council will transition from two-year to four-year terms with staggered elections. What other changes, if any, should the city council make to how voters elect its members? Should any additional changes be put to voters in a referendum or should the council make those decisions?

I have advocated for a variety of election changes over the years that I think would make our local elections more democratic. I have written an op-ed in the Indy Week about it before 🙂

I think Raleigh needs to aggressively push the General Assembly to allow us to lower our local campaign contribution maximum to something closer to $500 (down from the current $6,400). We should allot some of our own local budget to fund public campaign financing help to allow working class people to have a shot at running for office. We should pay our City Councilors a living wage so that we encourage an economically diverse range of people to run for office. And we should allow our councilors the funding so that they can hire dedicated policy aides that report to them (much like the General Assembly has).