Name as it appears on the ballot: Charlie Reece
Age: 49
Party affiliation: Democrat
Campaign website: www.charliefordurham.com
Occupation & employer: Attorney, Rho, Inc.
Years lived in Durham: 12
1) Given the direction of Durham government, would you say things are on the right course? If not, for what specific changes will you advocate if elected?
Despite the problems we are working to solve, I believe that Durham is headed in the right direction. During the four years I have been on the Durham City Council, our community has had success in bringing down the crime rate while bringing more living wage jobs and more affordable housing to our city. We’ve also opened up city government to more folks by letting our residents decide how to spend $2.4 million of their own tax dollars to improve their own communities and by being more transparent about the nuts and bolts of local government. We still have a long way to go to bring safe, decent housing within reach for more of our neighbors by not only building more housing that’s affordable to our low-income Durham residents but also bringing more living wage jobs to our city. These measures will improve the quality of life for Durham residents while attacking the root causes of crime in our community and reduce crime throughout the city. The city of Durham must also do much more to support local minority- and women-owned businesses. Our Built2Last economic development strategy is designed to do just that by providing start-up capital and technical assistance to our homegrown entrepreneurs to help them get their businesses off the ground and to help them compete for city contracts as well as contracts with other large enterprises in Durham. These efforts are a much better use of our economic development dollars and will ensure that more Durham residents participate in our city’s growing prosperity.
That’s the work I am committed to doing over the next four years if I am elected to a second term on the Durham City Council.
2) Please identify the three most pressing issues you believe the city faces and how you believe the city should address them.
The rapidly rising gentrification (and accompanying displacement) in and around downtown is one of the three most pressing issues facing our city. If we don’t address this problem head-on, the Durham we love will continue to recede into memory, and this great city of grit and determination will be transformed before our eyes and beneath our feet – transformed despite our best intentions – into a sanitized, gentrified, Disney Land version of itself.
That’s why it’s essential that we pass the proposed $95 million affordable housing bond this November so we can build and preserve thousands of homes for our low-income neighbors, make significant investments in new homeownership, provide property tax relief for longtime low-income homeowners, expand eviction diversion efforts, and much more. The bond is also a lifeline for our downtown Durham Housing Authority communities, funding the redevelopment of those crumbling communities so that current residents can continue to live there. During my time on the city council, we have more than doubled our budgetary support for affordable housing, and we should also continue to do expand our funding of these critical initiatives.
Finally, gentle increases in residential density can also be helpful in counteracting the supply/demand imbalance in Durham’s housing market. We must be vigilant to make sure that this is achieved in a way that is sensitive to the context of our existing neighborhoods and is not harmful to our environment. But allowing more duplexes and accessory dwelling units in Durham’s existing residential neighborhoods is a good way to increase the overall housing supply in our city without fundamentally altering the character of those neighborhoods. These types of changes also work to reduce sprawl and make it easier for new residents to walk, bike and/or take public transit rather than driving cars, and as a result they help Durham advance our sustainability goals as well.
In addition to attacking our housing supply problem, we must also find ways to boost the wages of low-income workers in Durham so that they can afford more housing. The failure of wages in Durham to keep up with the cost of housing (and the cost of living overall) is a second of the three most pressing issues facing our city. The North Carolina General Assembly has not raised the state’s minimum wage in over a decade, and the failure of the minimum wage to keep up with the cost of living has had devastating consequences for the people of Durham. Despite the fact that municipalities in North Carolina do not have the legal authority to set living wages in our communities, the city of Durham must be aggressive and creative in finding ways to raise wages here. This is especially critical for our lowest-paid workers, who are primarily women and people of color.
One way to do that is to lead by example, and the city of Durham is doing just that. Last year, we raised the wages of all full-time city employees to at least $15 per hour, and this year we will do the same for all part-time city employees. We have also indexed our city living wage to inflation so that it will rise with the cost of living – currently the city’s living wage is set at $15.48 per hour. The city council has also used its moral leadership in the community to encourage (and cajole) Durham’s private employers to pay their employees a living wage. Thanks in part to our public and private lobbying, Duke University – the city’s largest employer – now pays its employees at least $15 per hour. We also lift up the work of the Durham Living Wage Project, an initiative that allows Durham businesses to become certified as paying all of their employees a living wage. I’m also proud to say that our own family business (Rho, Inc.) was one of the charter members of the Durham Living Wage Project.
We should also be working with companies seeking economic development incentives from the city of Durham to ensure that their projects would benefit the actual people who live in Durham and not just our city’s property tax base. I have been working with community advocates over the last year to create something called the equitable development scorecard that will help us do just that. The equitable development scorecard will allow elected officials and community members to understand with full transparency exactly what the city proposes to incentivize with the money being requested by developers. Moreover, the content and structure of the scorecard means that projects will score better if they commit to paying living wages, hire residents who live in the community where the project will be built (especially residents from low-income communities and communities of color as well as justice-involved individuals), support local businesses (especially women- and minority-owned businesses), and promote affordable housing and prevent displacement. Perhaps most importantly, the scorecard provides a concrete method for holding both developers and elected officials accountable for the decisions they make when granting financial incentives. An equitable development scorecard is a concrete way that we can turn the traditional economic incentive process on its head, and ensure that it works for the people of this city and not just for corporations.
Finally, the city of Durham can and must push aggressively to find ways to empower our homegrown black- and women-owned businesses with startup capital and technical assistance, and to support our residents with job training and job placement resources. The city has adopted a new strategy for inclusive and equitable economic development called Built2Last which will create an entrepreneurial debt and equity fund to address the disparity in access to capital. This fund will address the reality that access to capital is the biggest barrier faced by minority- and women-owned businesses. Not only will we be helping with start-up financing, but we will also be providing technical assistance and training to help get these new businesses in position to compete and win city contracts as well as contracts with Durham’s other large employers. We will also focus our job training and job placement pipeline so that our resources are focused not only on Durham residents who need this kind of support the most but also on the kind of living wage jobs that are coming to Durham right now.
The third of the three most pressing issues facing our city right now is improving community safety. Improving housing affordability and bringing more living wage jobs to Durham are two of the most fundamental things we can do to reduce harm and increase community safety, but there is more we can and must do to help reduce crime in the city of Durham and make our neighborhoods even safer. Violent crime is a serious problem in Durham. Despite the fact that violent crime is actually down significantly over the last two years, one violent crime in our city is one violent crime too many. I’m proud of the good work of the Durham Police Department over the course of 2019 in responding to violent crime in our community. I’m also grateful for the strong partnerships between our police department and the Durham County Sheriff’s Office and the Durham County District Attorney’s Office; these partnerships allow the kind of coordination that Durham needs to improve community safety. Our police department must continue to focus its energy on responding to violent crime in our community, and recent changes in enforcement priorities (de-emphasizing low-level marijuana offenses, for example) will allow our officers to continue to do so. Chief Davis has also done an excellent job restructuring our officers’ patrol patterns to focus more attention to parts of our city hardest hit by violent crime, and her Robbery Task Force is helping to hold the worst of Durham’s violent offenders accountable for their actions. More overtime resources will be made available so that directed patrols can be conducted where needed.
But we need to continue to look beyond policing for solutions to the underlying causes of crime in our city. As I said above, expanding housing affordability and living wage jobs are two major initiatives that the city must continue in the months and years to come as two of the most fundamental things we can do to reduce harm and increase community safety in Durham. But our community we must also put more resources into the violence interruptor work that’s succeeding in Durham right now to lower tensions and reduce the likelihood of retaliatory violence in key areas of the city. We must also keep expanding the city’s critical work with re-entry of folks coming home to Durham from the prison system so that we can continue to reduce the risk of recidivism. One of the most visible expressions of this critical work is the Welcome Home program, which connects Durham residents returning home from prison with critical resources to make their re-integration into our community easier. As part of our partnership with our local re-entry council, these returning residents receive one-on-one counseling from peer support specialists who are themselves formerly incarcerated individuals who can help these returning residents make the transition. The city of Durham is further supporting this important re-entry work by implementing a new jobs program for Durham residents who are returning home from prison, and I look forward to working with local employers to expand this program and to increase these opportunities for our returning residents.
We also need to start building real partnerships with communities to build and fund harm reduction and community safety strategies that run parallel to law enforcement. This approach was recently proposed in the form of a community task force by a coalition of community groups including Durham Beyond Policing, and I’m eager to work with community members to determine what that task force might look like, its mandate, and the timetable for its important work. In my policy platform for this campaign, I take the position that the city of Durham should “[p]artner with members of the Durham community to develop and fund additional strategies to promote harm reduction and community safety separate and apart from law enforcement.” The task force proposed by this community coalition aligns with the vision laid out in my platform, and I’m ready to begin that work. Because no one knows what it will take to make communities safer and reduce harm better than the people who live in those communities. Empowering them with the resources they need to improve safety in their own neighborhoods makes all the sense in the world. And where there is consensus around specific strategies, the city should fund them promptly.
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?
For the last four years, it has been my privilege to serve as a member of the Durham City Council. During that time, I’m proud of the work the city has done to expand housing access and affordability in Durham, to bring more living wage jobs to our community, and to engage with our residents in a more meaningful way on land use and green infrastructure planning. I strongly believe that my experience during my first term in office position me to continue to make a powerful contribution to our community over the next four years.
I am a lawyer by training, and I believe that my skills and abilities as an attorney have served me well in my four years on the Durham City Council. I also have considerable experience in business and finance, and that has armed me with the ability to review financial statements and examine the potential fiscal implications of whatever budgetary options the council may be considering at that time. Believe it or not, my extensive experience on social media has allowed me to use social networks like Facebook and Twitter to demystify the operation of city government in ways that would have been difficult to believe just 10 years ago. Finally, I love helping people, and so I’ve developed a reputation as the council member most likely to respond to a Durham resident’s email about a problem with their garbage collection, or a mistake on their water bill, or a request for a study of what sorts of traffic calming measures will make their neighborhood street safer for them and their family.
Prior to my election to the Durham City Council, I held numerous positions within the North Carolina Democratic Party including precinct chair, member of the State Executive Committee, and treasurer of the state party. Charlie has also been privileged to serve on the boards of many non-profit organizations, including the Durham People’s Alliance and Planned Parenthood South Atlantic.
4) In your view, what’s the best or most important thing the city council has done in the past year? Alternatively, name a decision you believe the council got wrong or an issue you believe the city should have handled differently. Please explain your answer.
Usually, the most important vote the city council takes every year is our vote on the city budget. The budget is more than a collection of numbers – it is a moral document that expresses our values as a community. In any other year, that would have been my answer.
But this year, the best thing the council did was to vote to put the $95 million affordable housing bond on the November ballot. I will have a lot more to say about the bond in my lengthy responses to question 10 below. But in short, let me just say that this bond referendum is the only way that we can begin to make a real dent in the housing market in favor of increased housing access and affordability. If the voters reject the bond in November, the city will continue to do the work we’re doing right now on housing affordability, and that’s amazing work that is making a real difference in our community and of which all of us should be rightly proud. But that amazing work is not enough to intervene in the market forces that are quickly remaking the face of Durham right before our eyes. Durham’s housing bond is a lifeline for the city we love and the only way to preserve the kind of community we want to live in.
In terms of what the city council got wrong this year, I believe we missed an opportunity during the budget process to expand the city’s Longtime Homeowner Grant Program to cover all longtime, low-income homeowners throughout the city. Let me explain how.
When city staff recommended the elimination of the Longtime Homeowner Grant Program in February of this year, I was immediately, vocally and vehemently opposed. During the public meeting when this recommendation was first made, I said that I would never support the elimination of the program and that I would not vote for this year’s city budget if it did not include funding for this program. Ultimately, funding was restored for the current year.
Having said that, there are significant problems with the program. The grant program was hobbled from the very beginning by the geographic limits imposed. I have opposed these limits from the outset, arguing when we first created the program that the city should be more aggressive in providing this sort of relief for longtime, low-income homeowners due to the city’s aggressive pursuit of public-private partnerships downtown for the last 15 years. Those partnerships certainly revitalized downtown Durham, but they also superheated the residential real estate market downtown and in the residential neighborhoods that surround downtown. This grant program should at least have covered downtown and all of those neighborhoods.
The program has also been hampered by the fact that the county has not joined the city in providing these grants to longtime low-income homeowners. Because county taxes make up about 60% of a property owner’s tax bill, the city’s participation alone doesn’t amount to a lot of money in most cases. The county’s participation is crucial to the future viability of this program.
I still believe in the Longtime Homeowner Grant Program. My hope is that the coming year will find the county more amenable to considering partnering with the city to provide property relief for longtime low-income homeowners here in Durham.
5) This year, the city has since an uptick in gun homicides compared to 2018, recently including the tragic death of a nine-year-old boy. Gun violence is obviously a multifaceted problem with no simple solutions. But, in your view, what can or should the city be doing to stem the tide of violence that it isn’t doing now?
Gun violence represents a failure at every level of government, and every shooting tears a hole in the lives of the family members of the victim and in the heart of our community. We must do more as a community to reduce gun crime, and we are pushing forward on multiple fronts to make a difference on gun violence here in Durham as described at length in the third part of my answer to the second question above. I won’t copy and paste that text here, but I hope folks will go back and re-read that section again.
The painful reality is that no other country in the world has the level of gun violence we experience in the United States. Other countries have more poverty than our country; other countries watch more violent movies; other countries play more violent video games. The difference between other countries and our country is the fact that our country is awash in guns. Guns outnumber people in the United States and right here in Durham. Ultimately, the fundamental answer to the problem of gun violence in our country is the adoption of common-sense gun safety legislation at the state and federal levels. Until the political will to take those actions is mustered, local governments like Durham will continue to do the hard work of doing our very best to keep our communities as safe as we can.
6) In recent elections, residents have supported leaders who have embraced criminal justice reforms, including reducing or eliminating cash bail and court fines and fees. Advocacy groups have argued—in our view, rightly—for more systemic solutions to violent crime than incarceration. But some of these solutions, which aim to reshape disadvantaged communities, will take time to bear fruit, whereas gun violence is causing harm right now. What do you say to residents who want more immediate answers to crime problems in their neighborhoods? In what ways can the city help them?
What I have told folks is this: I hear you, I understand the fear and the concern you are feeling, and I feel it, too. My wife and I have two young daughters we are raising in Durham, and they run out to the school bus every day carrying with them our most fervent hope that they will come home at the end of the day. No part of our city has been spared from the scourge of violence in our city; in January, there was a double murder less than a mile and a half from our house. I totally get it, and I want to do everything in my power to help make Durham a safer place for all our kids.
But the answer to how we keep ourselves safe is not a police officer stationed at every street corner. Certainly we can put more officers in hot spots that show a particularly high level of gun violence on a temporary basis, but we can’t do that everywhere in the city of Durham and we can’t do it permanently. We need to keep doing the same difficult, persistent policing that our current Police Chief CJ Davis does so well while continuing to boost our efforts at tackling the pernicious causes of violence in our community. And as elected officials, we have to remain in engaged with these communities so that they know we hear them and that we will be here for them.
7) Earlier this year, the council declined the police chief’s request for additional officers. Do you believe this was a wise decision? Why or why not?
I voted against funding for the 18 new police officers for District 4 as requested by Chief Davis from the city budget, and I stand by that vote.
There are lots of data that demonstrate that hiring 18 new police officers in Durham’s District 4 is not warranted at this time. The number of priority 1 calls for service (911 calls of the most serious variety) are down compared to last year, and it took less time on average for officers to respond to those calls for service than it did last year. And clearance rates for most crimes were also up from last year and beating national benchmarks. Moreover, crime is actually down in District 4 this year as compared to last year, and that’s the very district where the additional officers would have been assigned.
But beyond the data, the simple fact is this: Durham (like every other community in our country) invests too much money in policing and not enough money in affordable housing, job training, health care, public schools, and living wages. When the data show us that our law enforcement officers are responding to fewer calls than last year and that they are responding to those calls more quickly, hiring 18 more police officers makes little sense. Better instead to tackle some of the other pressing problems in our community that we’re not handling so well, like increasing eviction diversion efforts, paying part-time city workers a living wage, and putting additional resources into economic development and affordable housing.
8) This year, the Durham-Orange Light Rail project collapsed over a route dispute with Duke University and other complications. Tell us how you envision what Durham’s approach to public transportation and mass transit should look like going forward. Where should the city focus its resources?
Duke University, North Carolina Railroad and the North Carolina General Assembly killed the Durham-Orange Light Rail Transit Project. In its wake, Durham must work together with our regional partners to develop alternatives to light rail that reduce traffic congestion, meet our region’s growing transportation demands, combat sprawl, and address the critical environmental crisis of global climate change. That’s a tall order, but I know we’re up to the challenge.
We need a safer, more equitable and more environmentally friendly way to think about transportation in Durham, by mapping out a future which prioritizes public transit by keeping bus fares low while expanding service, reducing wait times and building more bus shelters; by promoting traffic calming measures to reduce the dangers posed to cyclists and pedestrians by cars and trucks and to make our streets safer for everyone; and by investing in more sidewalks and protected bike lanes and greenway trails to make walking and cycling truly viable commuting options for more and more Durham residents.
From a regional perspective, the alternatives to light rail look both east and west. To the east, along the I-40 corridor we must move forward with commuter rail between Wake and Durham Counties; to the west, along the NC 54/US 15-501 corridor, we must move quickly to develop bus rapid transit between Orange and Durham Counties, perhaps along a dedicated route that uses the alignment already acquired for light rail.
These ideas will be more fully developed in the revised Durham County Transit Plan, which is currently underway. I will continue to be a forceful advocate for expanding both local and regional transit as well as cycling and pedestrian infrastructure.
9) Much of the city’s affordable housing strategy has been planned in conjunction with light rail, and as recently as last year, Durham Housing Authority CEO Anthony Scott called light rail “critical” to his agency’s goals for low-income housing. In what ways does light rail’s demise affect the city’s strategy? How should the city alter its approach, if at all?
Light rail would have been a reliable transportation system for many of our city’s low-income residents, and the project would have had significant benefits for the residents of Durham’s public housing communities. In the wake of light rail, the Durham Housing Authority is continuing to push forward with the redevelopment of a number of their downtown communities (see my answer on the bond referendum concerning that important work), and the locations of these communities are all very close to our existing transit infrastructure. Light rail would have been much better, but with the improvements to our transit system I described above, our neighbors living in those redeveloped public housing communities will still realize the significant economic benefits of proximity to transit.
10) In November, Durham will ask residents to vote on a $95 million bond to support affordable housing, a key part of a larger strategy to build or preserve more than twenty-five hundred affordable units and move at least seventeen hundred homeless households into housing, as well as create new homeownership opportunities and help those facing eviction. We’d like to ask a few questions about the bond:
· Do you support the bond, including the property tax hike that will be required to implement it?
Yes, I support the bond referendum, and the tax increase necessary to fund it.
· If you support the bond, what would be your argument to homeowners who have seen their property taxes rise over the last several years for why they should support the bond? How will it benefit them? Why is this bond so vital?
I enthusiastically support the $95 million housing bond because it represents an unprecedented opportunity to change the trajectory of the housing market in Durham, and because it is a critical step toward a future in which anyone can afford to live and work and raise their kids in our city, no matter how much money they make or what part of the city they call home.
The $95 million housing bond will supercharge our city’s work on housing access and affordability in order to create and preserve thousands of affordable homes for low-income families. Many of those affordable homes will be located downtown and in the residential neighborhoods that surround downtown. That means that these homes will be even more affordable because they will be within walking distance of the most robust parts of our city’s public transit system. Working to increase creation and preservation of affordable homes near transit is the key to unlocking a future for Durham in which our city is not only income diverse but also racially and ethnically diverse.
But the bond is not just about the creation and preservation of affordable homes. The bond will allow the city to spend over $4 million providing second mortgages to first-time homebuyers to bring homeownership into reach for more Durham families. The housing bond also sets aside millions of dollars to help folks stay in their homes, whether they’re renters or homeowners, by expanding current support for home repair and rehabilitation as well as property tax relief for low-income homeowners, and by supporting eviction diversion for renters. The bond will also make possible an unprecedented surge in resources for street outreach to our neighbors experiencing homelessness, and to build a new coordinated entry system for homeless individuals and families to get them housed right away.
The bond is also a lifeline for our downtown Durham Housing Authority communities, funding the redevelopment of those crumbling communities so that current residents can continue to live there. Any residents who must be relocated from their community due to construction related to these redevelopments will have an absolute right to return to their rebuilt community with the full protections afforded to tenants under federal regulations. Moreover, the construction plan for these projects will make maximum use of existing land at these communities to build in place without the need to relocate residents to other public housing communities. For example, where a new residential building can be built on existing land, residents in existing residences can be moved into brand new homes in the same community while their previous building is redeveloped. This approach will be followed in every conceivable instance during these projects, which means that this process will likely have many fewer relocations than other similar projects around the country. In addition, the city’s new affordable housing development on Willard Street will contain a significant number of apartments that existing public housing residents can move into temporarily while their communities are being redeveloped, and the county’s new affordable housing developments on Main Street will have more such apartments. With vigilance, we can ensure that every resident who wants to return to their community can do so.
Finally, the bond will represent a significant economic boost for our local construction industry, especially minority- and women-owned businesses. The construction budget for the redevelopment of our public housing communities will be approximately $400 million, of which a minimum of 30% will be set aside for minority- and women-owned contractors. In addition, steps will be taken to reduce or remove obstacles that often keep such contractors from participating in these kinds of projects – bonding requirements will be reduced or waived altogether, general liability insurance requirements will be lessened, and financial payment support to ease cash flow constraints that many smaller contractors can find difficult to manage. There are also federal rules requiring that this construction work must draw employees for these living wage jobs from current residents of our public housing communities first, and then from the broader community of our low-income neighbors second. City funding has already been allocated in the current budget not only for hiring case managers to shepherd local residents through job training and job placement services but also to conduct significant outreach (including door-to-door canvassing) into our public housing communities and surrounding neighborhoods about these living wage job opportunities.
The bond isn’t free, and the cost will be shared by all Durham property owners to the tune of an average of $37 each year in additional property tax. While some Durham residents would view this as a negligible increase, I know that for many of our neighbors this will be a difficult tax increase to manage — especially after 2 real estate revaluations by Durham County government over the last three years. That’s why it’s critical that the city partner with the county to expand the city’s Longtime Homeowner Grant Program that provides small grants to longtime, low-income homeowners in certain neighborhoods to help them stay in their homes after a revaluation. The program can only be effective if we can convince the county to participate because the county is responsible for about 60% of each city homeowner’s property tax bill. And the program should be available throughout the city and the county. If we can partner with the county to expand this program, we can help low-income homeowners shoulder the burden of their tax bills.
Voting YES on the $95 million housing bond is absolutely the right choice for Durham.
· About $60 million of the bond would go to the DHA to redevelop its downtown properties, a project that is already in motion. Tell us how you’d like to see the city spend the rest? In what ways can the city promote affordable housing most effectively?
The important thing to remember is that the $95 million bond is merely one part of a multi-faceted funding structure for the city’s aggressive $160 million five year affordable housing plan. The remainder of the funding for the spending plan comes from the city’s dedicated affordable housing levy (two cents on every $100 of assessed property value in the city) as well as federal housing funds that the city administers. So while the DHA redevelopment projects taken as a whole are the biggest single category of the spending plan, most of the money that funds the plan itself – over $100 million – will be spent on other projects.
Aside from the DHA projects, the bond will provide millions of dollars for the construction and preservation of thousands of affordable homes for low-income families across the city; will fund renovations and repairs to allow thousands more low-income homeowners stay in their homes; will offer second mortgages to first-time low-income homebuyers to bring homeownership into reach for 400 low-income families in Durham; assist low-income homeowners with financing to construct accessory dwelling units on the property they already own as a source of income or to house family members; expand the city’s Longtime Homeowner Grant Program to help longtime, low-income homeowners with their property tax bills; provide millions of dollars to eviction diversion programs that hire lawyers to represent tenants in eviction proceedings in order to prevent evictions; and fund a dramatic expansion in street outreach, support services and housing for Durham’s homeless residents.
11) Given the influx of people and money Durham has seen in recent years, gentrification has become a major concern, in East Durham but also in other neighborhoods close to downtown. In what ways can or should the city intervene?
The $95 million affordable housing bond will put a real dent in rising gentrification in every part of the city, especially East Durham. From repair and renovation funding to an expanded Longtime Homeowner Grant Program to the preservation of existing affordable housing to financing support for the construction of accessory dwelling units, the five year affordable housing plan that the bond will make possible is our best chance at arresting the rising tide of gentrification and displacement in Durham. For more information about how the bond will help, please see my full answer to question 10 above.
12) Durham’s downtown is ringed by low-density neighborhoods, which has contributed to rising home values in the urban core. Earlier this year, the city proposed a plan called Expanded Housing Choices, which would allow for more—and more kinds—of housing near downtown. It met with pushback and has been delayed for months. (EHC is scheduled to come back before the council on September 3.) Disputes that seem to turn on the question of density vs. neighborhood protection seem to be emerging all over the country, including in Raleigh. What are your thoughts on the city’s approach to EHC? Is it adequately considering the desires of neighborhoods? Is it being aggressive enough in adding density in the urban core? Is it handling the situation just right?
I was proud to support the Expanding Housing Choices (EHC) amendments to the Unified Development Ordinance when they came before the council for public hearing last week. I’m also proud that the council voted overwhelmingly to approve EHC at that meeting.
The ultimate problem that EHC is intended to address is Durham’s residential housing supply problem. Residential construction has not kept up with population growth for the last ten years, and as a result the scarce supply of housing in Durham is becoming more and more expensive. Compounding this problem is the reality that newcomers to Durham make on average about $10,000 more per year than current Durham residents, which means that our new residents are in a better position to outbid current residents in this seller’s market for housing. Taken together, the result is more and more gentrification in the residential neighborhoods that surround downtown Durham, and the resulting displacement is tearing apart the very fabric of our city.
There are lots of answers to addressing this problem, and the city of Durham is trying lots of them. First and foremost, we should build more housing in Durham, that is affordable to low-income families, and the $95 million housing bond will do exactly that. But gentle increases in residential density can also be helpful in counteracting the supply/demand imbalance in Durham. We must be vigilant to make sure that this is achieved in a way that is sensitive to the context of our existing neighborhoods and is not harmful to our environment. These types of changes also work to reduce sprawl and make it easier for new residents to walk, bike and/or take public transit rather than driving cars, and as a result they help Durham advance our sustainability goals as well.
But as we make it easier for a homeowner to subdivide their home into a duplex or build an accessory dwelling unit (ADU) in their backyard, we also have to ensure that low-income homeowners have access to the capital necessary to do so. That’s why the bond referendum has millions of dollars to make it easier for low-income homeowners to build ADUs. This kind of gently increased residential density in the urban tier won’t solve our housing supply problem, but it can help.
13) As of 2017, nearly half of Durham residents living in poverty were black. The city’s overall economy has improved markedly over the last two decades. What are your ideas for making its renaissance more equitable?
The city of Durham can and must do more to make sure that our growing prosperity is shared by all of Durham’s people, and there are a number of measures that I’ve already discussed above that can successfully break down the wealth gap that exists in our city. I am proud of the system of outreach, job training and job placement the city is building in partnership with the Durham Housing Authority to identify residents of our public housing communities to train and employ in the rebuilding of their own communities in connection with the $95 million affordable housing bond (for more details, please see my answer to question 10 above). I think this could be a powerful model for how we can directly connect our low-income neighbors with training and job placement in relation to other types of city-related construction projects. In addition, the city’s new Built2Last equitable and inclusive economic development strategy (discussed in my answer to question 2 above) has as one of its strategies the creation and nurturing of a powerful ecosystem of new minority- and women-owned businesses that can compete and win city contracts. As the city supports and nurtures these businesses, they will be powerful engines for wealth creation in their communities. And studies have shown us that minority- and women-owned businesses are far more likely to have diverse workforces and diverse supply chains. Finally, we must continue to expand the city’s existing programs for outreach, job training and job placement so that more of our residents can access the job market and secure living wages jobs.
14) Because of state law, municipalities have a number of restrictions placed on them by the legislature: they can’t, for instance, be a sanctuary city, impose a citywide minimum wage, enact an antidiscrimination ordinance that includes LGBTQ residents, or enforce inclusionary zoning. Under what circumstances should elected officials push back against the legislature?
As the litany of policy areas listed in the question suggests, state preemption is an overpowering force here in North Carolina that strangles the ability of local governments to meet the needs of our residents. That’s why it’s been important that we find what Mayor Schewel calls “Durham workarounds” to these limitations. One of those is the Faith ID, which is a partnership between the Durham Police Department and advocates in the Hispanic and Latino community to create a form of identification that Durham residents could provide to law enforcement to confirm their identity. Another example is the Longtime Homeowner Grant Program described in detail in my answer to question 4 above. This program was created in response to the inability of local governments to expand existing state property tax relief programs, or to charge different property tax rates to differently situated property owners.
In both cases, we partnered with community advocates to work together to create a “Durham workaround” to problems that state preemption prevents us from addressing directly. And we should continue to do the same work on other issues whenever we can. Such work can be especially powerful if we can move as part of a collective group of other like-minded local governments here in North Carolina. That’s why I’m proud to be part of the coordinating committee for NC Local Progress, a network of progressive local elected officials from all across North Carolina. If we act together, we can achieve a lot more than if we act alone.
15) If there are other issues you want to discuss, please do so here.
Global climate change is real, and is affecting our community in ways large and small. Durham needs to do our part to save our planet and our future by making new green investments in solar energy, energy conservation, and electric vehicles, just to name a few. That’s why I’m proud that the Durham City Council voted unanimously in April 2019 to adopt a resolution committing the city of Durham to a goal of 80% renewable energy by 2030 and a goal of 100% renewable energy by 2050. We are eagerly awaiting the implementation plan for reaching these goals later this year or early next year from our general services department. And I look forward to partnering with other local governments across North Carolina and around the country to advocate for a broader use of renewable energy in our regional and national electricity production system. This is how local governments can rise to the existential challenge of global climate change in a way that is impactful and consistent with our values as a community.